North Dakota Police Are Now Allowed to Fly Drones — Carrying Bean Bag Cannons, Tasers and Tear Gas — apparently because Drone Manufactures Need Profits — My Observation about Frittering Freedom away

© 2015 Peter Free

 

27 August 2015

 

 

What an increasingly wacko country we live in

 

Crime ridden (sarcasm) North Dakota — 49th in violent crime rate by state in 2006 — has just authorized arming police drones.

 

Because — well, you know — the drone guys need to make money:

 

 

It is now legal for law enforcement in North Dakota to fly drones armed with everything from Tasers to tear gas thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist.

 

With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, no one noticed that the state became the first in the union to allow police to equip drones with “less than lethal” weapons. House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a lobbyist representing law enforcement—tight with a booming drone industry—got his hands on it.

 

The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.

 

Yet the sheriff’s department is hiding a full accounting of how many drone missions they’ve flown since 2012. Records requests by The Daily Beast were initially denied by the sheriff because they would “cost a fortune,” and were only handed over after an appeal to the state’s attorney general’s office.

 

Drones in North Dakota are a profitable enterprise in a state hit hard by the oil bust.

 

Justin Glawe, First State Legalizes Taser Drones for Cops, Thanks to a Lobbyist, The Daily Beast (26 August 2015) (extracts)

 

 

North Dakota represents Freedom’s now dead sentinel canary

 

A blend of fascistic totalitarianism is taking over the United States. Comparatively crime-free North Dakota’s too easy acquiescence to its armed drone bill is just one of many examples:

 

From Alan Pyke:

 

 

Law enforcement operations are already monitoring civil rights activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, using a combination of undercover officers, social media snooping, and cell phone monitoring technology called Stingray.

 

An FBI-provided aerial surveillance plane was also on hand during the unrest in Baltimore following the killing of Freddie Gray by police. Should drones equipped with remote-controlled Tasers and tear gas come into wider use, it seems likely they’d be incorporated into crowd control and demonstration monitoring efforts.

 

In such uses, officers far from the scene of unrest could make bloodless [cowardly] decisions about how to deploy drone weaponry, potentially escalating tense situations.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union argues that police drones are a new kind of threat to that compromise between security and liberty. The group supports laws to restrict law enforcement’s use of them, and makes a compelling case that absent such restraints the technology is fundamentally at odds with the Bill of Rights.

 

© 2015 Alan Pyke, North Dakota Allows Cops To Arm Their Drones With Tasers And Tear Gas, Think Progress (26 August 2015) (extracts)

 

 

The moral? — Not only do we have the NSA tracking our movements and collecting everything that we write and say . . .

 

We now have the nation’s police equipping themselves as if Americans are all members of ISIL and wreaking havoc on “good” people far and wide.

 

Is everyone Stateside irretrievably nuts?

 

We are witnessing Free Democracy’s thoroughly embarrassing, pusillanimous collapse.

 

Soon — when we no longer have Liberty to waste and deflate — we can tell our great-grandchildren the epic story of how we frittered it all away. At the behest of greedy plutocrats and self-interested (often cowardly) public servants.

 

Comparatively crime-free North Dakota at the forefront in the Drone Battle against All Things Evil?

 

That, in itself, should take our breath away.

 

Booker T. ‘n George Washington — Malcolm and Brother King — Tom(s) Paine ‘n Jefferson — y’all help me, please.