Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG
In the Russia-Ukraine war, drones have leveled the playing field between economically unmatched adversaries and have provided unprecedented capacity to monitor enemy troop and equipment movements. In domestic law enforcement, they are already being used for crime scene reconnaissance, for tracking suspects and for finding missing persons.
Their greatest potential, however, lies in detecting and responding to a crime in progress before a victim or witness reports it. This is a line that police agencies have been reluctant to cross.
A quadcopter drone is a battery-powered, unmanned aircraft, held aloft by four helicopter-like propellers. They usually carry cameras capable of recording in detail objects below them or as much as 2,000 feet away. At the start of the drones-for-policing era, an officer would carry one of the devices in his squad car and launch and pilot it himself at the site where it was needed – where a missing person was last seen, say, or at a public event at risk of a terror attack. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations required drone operators to keep drones in their line of sight to avoid collisions with other aircraft. The drone and its pilot had to be near each other.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Spectator
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.