Craig Bowen 
After years of writing severely approximately law enforcement officials using immoderate pressure and police departments abusing the surveillance era, I couldn’t be happier to relay a story in which cops used drones to assist them in avoiding taking a life.
It started when a lady, 57, left Cocoa Beach, Florida, drove all of the ways to Stafford County, Virginia, pulled right into a Walmart car parking zone, subsidized her sedan up towards a sixteen-wheeler cab with a drowsing trucker interior, and took out a silver revolver. “She saved speakme to herself, yelling profanities and attractive us to shoot her, time and again and over again,” a neighborhood police officer later informed The Washington Post.
It becomes an apparent try at “suicide via cop.”
Desperate human beings like the Florida girl, who become reportedly all the way down to her final $14, determine to initiate their very own death by waving a gun or knife at a police officer, understanding regulation enforcement is skilled to shoot if they feel their life is threatened. Cops who shoot in such situations had been manipulated into doing so, but that doesn’t spare them from feelings of trauma or guilt for taking a human existence. Some don’t forget doing so as the worst second of their careers or maybe their lives.
Fortunately, the Florida woman becomes not killed:
Rather than rush into a state of affairs where they might have to fire, Stafford officials became to technology: Police pilots flew two drones to screen the lady from a safe distance and avoid putting officials in an immediate war of words. The airborne cameras gave authorities a near-up view of her and what she had in her automobile as she flitted among pacing out of doors and ducking back into the car. Worcester could see the label at the vodka bottle she lifted to clean down drugs. He could inform SWAT officials while she had her finger at the cause of her gun. And he should watch as her agitation ebbed and flowed.
That information helped police to safely and successfully evacuate the trucker from his cab, and eventually, to get an armored automobile close sufficient to fill the girl’s car with pepper spray, enabling officers to seize, disarm, and arrest her. The approach becomes innovative in its details and regular with the premises that police-reform advocates assert to lessen the wide variety of unjust or pointless killings. Among them: that whether someone lives or dies at the hand of a police officer frequently turns not on the final second of an come across, but whether officers are educated in de-escalation and taught to avoid getting themselves into conditions wherein the use of deadly force looks as if their best choice.
In some instances, it’s far the best alternative.
In this case, few could’ve puzzled using deadly force had police officers approached, reacted to the weapon, and shot to kill—but there has been, in truth, a better manner. And it’s clean to think about different killings that would’ve been prevented with the same method. Think of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-vintage boy who becomes retaining a pellet gun in a Cleveland park whilst nearby law enforcement officials pulled up properly next to him and shot nearly right now. If those cops had the identical tools at their disposal and the equal tactical inclinations, Rice would likely nonetheless be alive nowadays.
Of route, a tool’s proliferation can result in new sorts of abuses if right limits are not imposed. Police drones can be so beneficial in instances like the one in Virginia “precisely because they are so suitable at gathering information on people’s conduct,” Alec Ward writes at Reason. “The deputies in Stafford County evidently felt comfy trying de-escalation due to the fact, using drones, they could watch the female so intently they felt they could basically examine her mind. That’s an amazing capability that would be misused in all sorts of much less benign contexts.”
He doesn’t need to ban police drones.
“But the general public have to not take it on religion that police will use drones simplest in benevolent approaches,” he effectively advises. “Luckily, there is a reasonably easy manner out of the conundrum: preemptive restriction. If the residents of Stafford County need their police officers to apply drones to assist incorporate risky armed humans. Still, no longer, say, to put into effect velocity limits or seek private lands for marijuana, they can push their elected lawmakers to put in writing such recommendations into relevant laws.”
Meanwhile, the public ought to apprehend that era is converting police work in methods that might be analogous to modifications that the army has already skilled. Traditionally, law enforcement officials are praised most vociferously for exhibitions of physical courage. Now that drones and other technology are to be had, however, lots of situations, together with standoffs, can unfold in approaches that reduce the want for braveness, the danger to police, and the wide variety of situations in which lethal pressure is used. The public can inspire police officers to take advantage of higher processes using praising innovative techniques that spare a life as enthusiastically as acts of physical heroism. In that spirit, 3 cheers for the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office.
