Via WTOP: Gov.: Drones over Va. ‘great’; cites battlefield success
Police drones flying over Virginia would be "great" and "the right thing to do" for the same reasons they are so effective in a battlefield environment, the state’s chief executive said Tuesday.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, says he is open to any technology that makes law enforcement more productive. The use of drones, which was recently endorsed by the police chiefs of Fairfax County and D.C., would make better use of valuable police resources.
Here’s the thing: I fully understand that police work can be very dangerous, but it is not the battlefield. On the battlefield the goal is the break the enemy by use of overwhelming violence and often the innocents die in the process (this is certainly the case with our ongoing drone warfare along the AfPak border). Law enforcement is about maintaining public order by apprehending persons suspected of crimes and holding them so that their guilt of innocence can be determined in a court of law. These are not comparable and the fact that persons of power think that they are in disturbing.
Indeed, as Radley Balko so often chronicles, we already have too much militarization of the police going on in the United States as it is.
