On the fly? Washington D.C. will start deploying police drones

The Washington Post reports that the Metropolitan Police Department of the US capital will start dispatching drones along with officers to respond to some calls.

Barricade situations, serving high-risk warrants, looking for missing persons, and protecting large-scale public gatherings are some of the events that will make use of these real-life robocops.

So far, the D.C. police drone fleet is made up of five Parrot Anafi drones. This is quite an investment, with each one costs about 15,000 US dollars.

Pictured: The Parrot Anafi drone during a British Army demonstration.

“The bottom line is that [drones] will help the community and our officers as we are working to make violent crime go down in the District”, mayor Muriel Bowser declared, as quoted by The Washington Post.

The mayor of the US capital added that “they’ll help us solve more crimes and allow us to use our finite resources more efficiently”.

According to NBC News, Chief of Police Pamela Smith remarked that the drones won’t be used for patrol operations.

“We will not be using artificial intelligence, and nor will we be using facial recognition with the drones yet”, Smith commented to the press.

According to NBC News, mayor Bowser has approved using an increase in the D.C. budget to fund for 200 new CC TV cameras and 50 more license-plate readers for the US capital.

However, not everyone is excited about the idea of having police drones flying around. Quite a few critics label the idea as some sort of dystopian nightmare.

“We’re not saying that law enforcement should not use technology, we just [believe] that technology should be regulated and have a transparent process,” said Monica Hopkins, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the US capital, to The Washington Post.

Washington, D.C. joins around 1,500 police departments across the United States that are using drone technology in some capacity. Who knows, the drones could soon be coming to a city near you.

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