Thwap

Image via flickr user Marion Doss

The Washington Post has a story today detailing the first use of a Unmanned Arial Vehicle by a domestic law enforcement agency in the United States.

As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department’s aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.

So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been using larger drones for patrolling the US/Mexico border for the past couple of years, despite there being cheaper and better alternatives to doing the job. However, until now, no local law enforcement agency had used a drone for surveillance in such a fashion.

Drones carry large risks to planes and helicopters using the same airspace. The drone operator only have a small sliver of visibility available to them through a camera and drones of this type are so small pilots cannot see them in time to avoid crashing into them.

And then, there are all of the privacy concerns associated with the law enforcement community’s use of drones to monitor people that the Washington Post article describes in great detail. Drones have the potential to become roving, following surveillance system that takes the CCTV cameras that have become so popular in our cities onto the next level.