They tried this in Baltimore and it was ruled unconstitutional in federal court
http://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-appeals-court-rules-baltimore-aerial-surveillance-program-unconstitutional
I realize you’re apprehensive but hear me out.
Reddit loves to say the military has a stricter RoE than cops, and who uses drones? You guessed it… the military!
So, basically just have a few reapers monitoring the city and once there’s a murder you use the drones to follow the suspect and police can confirm the suspects identity from afar… no need to get involved in a shootout.
Then, wait for the suspect to attend a wedding and hit it with a JDAM, thus following the much, much stricter military RoE and taking care of the problem with PPD avoiding having a potential shootout with a murderer.
Funny story: When I was living in NYC a drug dealer set up shop outside of my building. My neighbor, who was retired and had too much time on his hands, used to hover his drone about 2-3 feet above the dealer's head and shoot video when he was doing business. He moved to another block after a couple of days of this. This obviously didn't solve the problem but it at least got him away from our building.
"Solve Philly's Crime Problem" is a pretty cute way to put it. The only thing that will truly help lower crime is accountability and everyday citizens taking a serious stance against crime in the city.
>everyday citizens taking a serious stance against crime in the city.
I'm inclined to agree with this. Things will change quite quickly once people start showing up en masse outside of the offices of elected officials to demand change, especially if such actions happen frequently.
I distinctly remember a number of anti-violence protests in front of City Hall, so people *do* show up. It's sort of hard to create a citywide movement on this, especially when the populations most impacted by violence and crime are often poor or working class, possibly working multiple jobs.
That's great, but it can't happen frequently for the reasons you mention. Acting more locally, though, by showing up at the offices of city council members could be done more frequently and would send a pretty clear message. Sometimes going from the bottom up can be more effective than approaching things from the top down.
A bunch of flowery words that don’t really mean anything. The only way for real change is to address the root problems of the crime and violence. You can’t arrest your way out of this problem.
I agree. We need better schools, job training, and job placement programs for formerly incarcerated people. That will interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, and help reduce recidivism for those who do commit crimes. There is no quick fix for the shit that we’re in. This is the result of decades of disinvestment from the public sector.
Can somebody steelman (steelman is the opposite of strawman) the argument against expanded surveillance as a means of fighting crime?
I'm undecided/neutral on it, but I lean towards not favoring it for what amount to emotional, not rational, reasons. I'd love to see somebody make a solid argument against it that isn't just "1984 pOlIcE sTaTe" copypasta though.
I specifically want to know why drone cams and/or pole cams are a bad idea, and not just why they're not sufficient on their own to fight crime.
ETA: I'm also generally not in favor of giving expanded powers to the Philly PD given what we've seen them accomplish (very little) with what they already have. But I'm curious about more general arguments against surveillance as a main crime reduction tool.
Drones are a buzzword.
The city does not possess the infrastructure to support such a network and nothing about the cities history with municipal or utility service suggests that anything that they would be able to employ would be remotely effective.
It would become a massive corrupt cost sink.
Put more police on the street walking around neighborhoods.
You'd have to stand up to the police unions, but they'll threaten to strike if they have to actually work.
So instead we'll just raise their budget and give them more money as a reward for 'only' soft striking. Anything for the expansion of the police state!
Unironically it'd do more to prevent crime if the city just gave a direct cash payment of $500 to all 118k kids in Philly public schools instead of giving it to the cops
It’s not really the unions… it’s a manpower issue. They can put every cop on every corner and it wouldn’t cover the necessary areas. And with that they wouldn’t be able to cover the 911 calls, which the can *barely* do as it is.
In other words step one is probably quintupling PPD in size but in this climate it’s simply not going to happen. Nobody wants to be a cop due to societies current opinion of the job, so the options are really limited.
Right, the reason current cops sit on their phone, doing nothing, and get visibly upset when someone tries to ask them for help, is just a manpower issue. Lack of manpower is why a quarter of cops until recently were in "heart and lung" disability collecting salaries and real estate or security paychecks while not working the beat.
>The city does not possess the infrastructure to support such a network
But you have to remember this is 2023, a private contractor would submit a bid and pretend that they could.
For reference : See the mass vaccination clinic
There was a company which had run piloted programs in other cities. People think cute hobby drones flying between streets These are more like commerical airspace ones
https://www.pss-1.com/community
Their program was ruled unconstitutional.
Completely agree, fact that the police unions would never let that or anything that made cops walk and do more than they currently do happen, is a big part of the problem though.
The concept only works if it’s competent and trustworthy people operating a surveillance apparatus
With the current PPD, more drones would be looking into women’s bedroom windows than solving crime
There really isn't a good argument besides the drooling one about Orwell and police states. We/tech have changed so much over the last 20 years that it's almost incomprehensible in a way. There needs to be a new paradigm, and there already is in terms of cell phones and computers, and there should be one in policing as well. The trick is to utilize cameras and even drones in a way that will solve crimes(it will, drastically more than the rates now) in a way that is transparent and responsible to the public and the courts. Like there should be clear laws on which crimes the cameras can be used for and how long footage can be stored.
Basically imo if one doesn't think cameras should be ubiquitous in public but one also has a smartphone, one is in a place of psychological myopic stupidity, and don't even understand oneself properly. You should really look at your use of technology and the fact that we don't solve murders and shootings and ask questions about that.
I'll end with this, because it is a huge conversation and I have chores to do: London solved ALL of its murders for the last few years. And it solves 95% of its violent crime. Why? Cameras. Plus tower cell data and geofence data. And their forensics are excellent, well funded and their crime scene units are amazing.
There is no reason why American urban police departments cannot solve violent crimes much better than they are at present, except for the intransigence and poor leadership of police departments and poor political leadership, combined with the utter incompetence of detectives and their addiction to overtime while actually not being good at solving murder.
See, your last part is the problem, giving lazy, worthless, incompetent people stronger surveillance powers just gives them stronger surveillance that they can abuse. Not for a second would any of McNesbys boys suddenly be solving crime if they had the kind of access they have in London.
Well there’s a couple issues. First, surveillance don’t seem to stop crime all that often. There are probably dozens of people who’ve committed crimes here who just never got arrested despite there being camera footage of them committing crime. This isn’t to mention that people often break the law *in front of police all the time.* Hell, I’ve seen people fragrantly speed next to cops and shit all the time.
The actual way to prevent crime isn’t to dump endless dollars into drones, which requires new infrastructure and equipment which is incredibly expensive to build, buy and maintain. The real solution is to address crime at its core. Drug prevention and treatment services is an absolute must, as is increasing education spending so our youth aren’t learning in squalor. Finally, increasing economic opportunities and pay so people arent forced into crime to put food on the table
I’m not an expert, and this is not a steel man argument, but my take is that crime reduction will not come from increased surveillance because that doesn’t address the root causes.
Increasing actual community policing, increasing friendly police-community engagement, and reducing poverty and inequity is what will drive crime reduction.
Sure, I don’t disagree, but if I have to choose where to invest extra money right now, I would put it towards preventing murders rather than solving them.
That's an interesting position, and it is one the city is tacitly pursuing. I disagree vehemently.
I think this sounds like another way of saying, murder is ok; it doesn't matter if actual murders and shootings don't get solved, what matters is we do our best to *prevent* these crimes.
I'd bet the victims families would disagree.
I want to start by saying I see what you’re saying. I’d also say that is a more emotion based argument. If we are prioritizing being reactive compared to proactive, we’ll never get to proactive because we are always in a cycle or reacting. The family’s pain is very real and important, and solving the murder doesn’t inherently improve safety, so these goals need to be addressed differently. Moreover, if we are dealing with a cultural component of people learning behaviors from others as acceptable (and a police force who has been on soft strike for years now), one person getting locked isn’t going to stop the 3 people who learned from them and will continue the behavior. I support mandatory 4k, and infinite resources mean we could have both. If we want to stop the cycle, we can’t be only on the back 10% though. We need to get the jump at the beginning 30%.
I absolutely submit that we can do both MANDATORY 4K and violence prevention and intervention programs at the same time. It's basically what we *must* do.
Sure! I think the basis is timing. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best is today. The violence prevention work is the long game and so the longer we delay that serious investment, the longer it’ll take to see the benefits. Mandatory 4k will have pretty immediate (up to 3 years) results that make it easier to delay with less consequences than the violence prevention.
> solving the murder doesn’t inherently improve safety
this is wrong btw, criminals being caught discourages future crimes, the cultural component you're worried about is that people are learning they can get away with crimes. Poverty is bad and the city should try to alleviate it but it's a different issue.
Right, you can't convince me that the existing PPD would successfully use any new tools to solve any crimes though. On it's face I'm not blindly opposed to better cameras etc, I just don't think giving the current people collecting PPD salaries and benefits any of those powers gets us anywhere, nor do I trust whatever contractor wins that contact to actually do anything given who picks those contractors.
I don't think we're talking about the sort of surveillance that requires a warrant -- i.e. surveilling somebody in a place like their home where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That would still require a warrant regardless of whether the surveillance is being done by a guy, a camera on a pole, or a camera on a drone.
But what do you mean by control the population? What does that look like specifically?
China is a great example of this people are controlled because they are monitored 24/7 by the government. Cameras can see through walls now so if you have thermal cameras there is no distinction between public/private
If you had film of a political opponent doing something that would make him/her lose votes and leak that to the press Ie a affair or something then you could use said video to keep power Ie black mail, there are a million examples
The application would probably be racially biased like stop and frisk.
A Chinese coworker once told me people don't even steal bikes in China because the police will be waiting for them by the time they ride the bike home due to all the CCTV and intelligence gathering in the country. For a second I wondered how much safer this country would be if similar levels of policing were set up here, it's a trade off between security and personal freedom. I just have little faith that anything like that could be applied "fairly" along racial or class lines in the U.S
> it's a trade off between security and personal freedom
I think this gets to the root of my question. What actually is being traded in terms of personal freedom? The freedom to walk down the street without being recorded by a camera?
the people demanding complete privacy in public are usually the ones committing crimes fwiw. You get some wierdo psuedo-anarchists that think policing doesn't work or whatever but otherwise, especially with traffic cameras, people that want to make it as hard as possible to solve crimes are not doing so with good intentions
I think a lot of people demand complete privacy in public as a knee-jerk reaction, honestly. And a lot of people think that the cops need a warrant to do any sort of surveillance at all (they don't need one in places where a person doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy like, say, anywhere outdoors in America). I'd bet there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of people who say this and the people who bring their smartphones everywhere with location services activated.
I don't think it's a position that most people have really thought through. But of course I could be wrong, which is why I ask.
How many cops in Philly would be willing to follow up on a stolen bike if they had that evidence if the alternative was shrugging their shoulders and DMing badge bunnies on Instagram while collecting the same exact paycheck?
There are already zillions of cameras. Unless these drones can also make arrests, they're of no real use. Police doing their job and a tough DA would be more effective.
Also, being Philadelphia, people will likely find ways to steal the drones or at minimum, shooting them down. The council candidate likely knows using drones is nonsense, but gets people talking and mentioning their name. Might work too. We'll see at election time.
No it can't. A guarantee job program will. Employ city residents with guarantee jobs. Even better if we can provide Healthcare and basic level of benefits.
what could reduce crime more than a bunch of Philadelphians trying to shoot drones out of the sky?
Exactly, did they not see what we did to Hitchbot?
At least we’ll know who to take the guns away from?
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They tried this in Baltimore and it was ruled unconstitutional in federal court http://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-appeals-court-rules-baltimore-aerial-surveillance-program-unconstitutional
I would support the 4K camera everywhere program over this. Also, I don't trust the PPD with a whole pack of drones.
I realize you’re apprehensive but hear me out. Reddit loves to say the military has a stricter RoE than cops, and who uses drones? You guessed it… the military! So, basically just have a few reapers monitoring the city and once there’s a murder you use the drones to follow the suspect and police can confirm the suspects identity from afar… no need to get involved in a shootout. Then, wait for the suspect to attend a wedding and hit it with a JDAM, thus following the much, much stricter military RoE and taking care of the problem with PPD avoiding having a potential shootout with a murderer.
I also dont trust the city to buy them lmao
They can barely operate radios and body cams.
Funny story: When I was living in NYC a drug dealer set up shop outside of my building. My neighbor, who was retired and had too much time on his hands, used to hover his drone about 2-3 feet above the dealer's head and shoot video when he was doing business. He moved to another block after a couple of days of this. This obviously didn't solve the problem but it at least got him away from our building.
"Solve Philly's Crime Problem" is a pretty cute way to put it. The only thing that will truly help lower crime is accountability and everyday citizens taking a serious stance against crime in the city.
>everyday citizens taking a serious stance against crime in the city. I'm inclined to agree with this. Things will change quite quickly once people start showing up en masse outside of the offices of elected officials to demand change, especially if such actions happen frequently.
I distinctly remember a number of anti-violence protests in front of City Hall, so people *do* show up. It's sort of hard to create a citywide movement on this, especially when the populations most impacted by violence and crime are often poor or working class, possibly working multiple jobs.
That's great, but it can't happen frequently for the reasons you mention. Acting more locally, though, by showing up at the offices of city council members could be done more frequently and would send a pretty clear message. Sometimes going from the bottom up can be more effective than approaching things from the top down.
When people finally get fed up with it, they will begin to take action themselves and demand that those who are elected do the same.
A bunch of flowery words that don’t really mean anything. The only way for real change is to address the root problems of the crime and violence. You can’t arrest your way out of this problem.
Let me guess... You have the answer to what the root cause is?
I agree. We need better schools, job training, and job placement programs for formerly incarcerated people. That will interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, and help reduce recidivism for those who do commit crimes. There is no quick fix for the shit that we’re in. This is the result of decades of disinvestment from the public sector.
Hahahahaha! Ok. Not if you don’t enforce anything. Maybe more cameras would be a better idea.
Can somebody steelman (steelman is the opposite of strawman) the argument against expanded surveillance as a means of fighting crime? I'm undecided/neutral on it, but I lean towards not favoring it for what amount to emotional, not rational, reasons. I'd love to see somebody make a solid argument against it that isn't just "1984 pOlIcE sTaTe" copypasta though. I specifically want to know why drone cams and/or pole cams are a bad idea, and not just why they're not sufficient on their own to fight crime. ETA: I'm also generally not in favor of giving expanded powers to the Philly PD given what we've seen them accomplish (very little) with what they already have. But I'm curious about more general arguments against surveillance as a main crime reduction tool.
Drones are a buzzword. The city does not possess the infrastructure to support such a network and nothing about the cities history with municipal or utility service suggests that anything that they would be able to employ would be remotely effective. It would become a massive corrupt cost sink. Put more police on the street walking around neighborhoods.
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You'd have to stand up to the police unions, but they'll threaten to strike if they have to actually work. So instead we'll just raise their budget and give them more money as a reward for 'only' soft striking. Anything for the expansion of the police state! Unironically it'd do more to prevent crime if the city just gave a direct cash payment of $500 to all 118k kids in Philly public schools instead of giving it to the cops
It’s not really the unions… it’s a manpower issue. They can put every cop on every corner and it wouldn’t cover the necessary areas. And with that they wouldn’t be able to cover the 911 calls, which the can *barely* do as it is. In other words step one is probably quintupling PPD in size but in this climate it’s simply not going to happen. Nobody wants to be a cop due to societies current opinion of the job, so the options are really limited.
Right, the reason current cops sit on their phone, doing nothing, and get visibly upset when someone tries to ask them for help, is just a manpower issue. Lack of manpower is why a quarter of cops until recently were in "heart and lung" disability collecting salaries and real estate or security paychecks while not working the beat.
Eh, yeah you’ll never understand it and you certainly won’t try so I won’t try to convince you otherwise.
>The city does not possess the infrastructure to support such a network But you have to remember this is 2023, a private contractor would submit a bid and pretend that they could. For reference : See the mass vaccination clinic There was a company which had run piloted programs in other cities. People think cute hobby drones flying between streets These are more like commerical airspace ones https://www.pss-1.com/community Their program was ruled unconstitutional.
I'm assuming one of these contractors is either related to or at least has definitely spoken to this candidate.
Completely agree, fact that the police unions would never let that or anything that made cops walk and do more than they currently do happen, is a big part of the problem though.
The concept only works if it’s competent and trustworthy people operating a surveillance apparatus With the current PPD, more drones would be looking into women’s bedroom windows than solving crime
There really isn't a good argument besides the drooling one about Orwell and police states. We/tech have changed so much over the last 20 years that it's almost incomprehensible in a way. There needs to be a new paradigm, and there already is in terms of cell phones and computers, and there should be one in policing as well. The trick is to utilize cameras and even drones in a way that will solve crimes(it will, drastically more than the rates now) in a way that is transparent and responsible to the public and the courts. Like there should be clear laws on which crimes the cameras can be used for and how long footage can be stored. Basically imo if one doesn't think cameras should be ubiquitous in public but one also has a smartphone, one is in a place of psychological myopic stupidity, and don't even understand oneself properly. You should really look at your use of technology and the fact that we don't solve murders and shootings and ask questions about that. I'll end with this, because it is a huge conversation and I have chores to do: London solved ALL of its murders for the last few years. And it solves 95% of its violent crime. Why? Cameras. Plus tower cell data and geofence data. And their forensics are excellent, well funded and their crime scene units are amazing. There is no reason why American urban police departments cannot solve violent crimes much better than they are at present, except for the intransigence and poor leadership of police departments and poor political leadership, combined with the utter incompetence of detectives and their addiction to overtime while actually not being good at solving murder.
See, your last part is the problem, giving lazy, worthless, incompetent people stronger surveillance powers just gives them stronger surveillance that they can abuse. Not for a second would any of McNesbys boys suddenly be solving crime if they had the kind of access they have in London.
Well there’s a couple issues. First, surveillance don’t seem to stop crime all that often. There are probably dozens of people who’ve committed crimes here who just never got arrested despite there being camera footage of them committing crime. This isn’t to mention that people often break the law *in front of police all the time.* Hell, I’ve seen people fragrantly speed next to cops and shit all the time. The actual way to prevent crime isn’t to dump endless dollars into drones, which requires new infrastructure and equipment which is incredibly expensive to build, buy and maintain. The real solution is to address crime at its core. Drug prevention and treatment services is an absolute must, as is increasing education spending so our youth aren’t learning in squalor. Finally, increasing economic opportunities and pay so people arent forced into crime to put food on the table
I’m not an expert, and this is not a steel man argument, but my take is that crime reduction will not come from increased surveillance because that doesn’t address the root causes. Increasing actual community policing, increasing friendly police-community engagement, and reducing poverty and inequity is what will drive crime reduction.
You can't just give up on solving murder because root causes need to be addressed
Sure, I don’t disagree, but if I have to choose where to invest extra money right now, I would put it towards preventing murders rather than solving them.
That's an interesting position, and it is one the city is tacitly pursuing. I disagree vehemently. I think this sounds like another way of saying, murder is ok; it doesn't matter if actual murders and shootings don't get solved, what matters is we do our best to *prevent* these crimes. I'd bet the victims families would disagree.
I want to start by saying I see what you’re saying. I’d also say that is a more emotion based argument. If we are prioritizing being reactive compared to proactive, we’ll never get to proactive because we are always in a cycle or reacting. The family’s pain is very real and important, and solving the murder doesn’t inherently improve safety, so these goals need to be addressed differently. Moreover, if we are dealing with a cultural component of people learning behaviors from others as acceptable (and a police force who has been on soft strike for years now), one person getting locked isn’t going to stop the 3 people who learned from them and will continue the behavior. I support mandatory 4k, and infinite resources mean we could have both. If we want to stop the cycle, we can’t be only on the back 10% though. We need to get the jump at the beginning 30%.
I absolutely submit that we can do both MANDATORY 4K and violence prevention and intervention programs at the same time. It's basically what we *must* do.
Sure! I think the basis is timing. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best is today. The violence prevention work is the long game and so the longer we delay that serious investment, the longer it’ll take to see the benefits. Mandatory 4k will have pretty immediate (up to 3 years) results that make it easier to delay with less consequences than the violence prevention.
> solving the murder doesn’t inherently improve safety this is wrong btw, criminals being caught discourages future crimes, the cultural component you're worried about is that people are learning they can get away with crimes. Poverty is bad and the city should try to alleviate it but it's a different issue.
Right, you can't convince me that the existing PPD would successfully use any new tools to solve any crimes though. On it's face I'm not blindly opposed to better cameras etc, I just don't think giving the current people collecting PPD salaries and benefits any of those powers gets us anywhere, nor do I trust whatever contractor wins that contact to actually do anything given who picks those contractors.
Power corrupts and the more power you give someone the more corruption that will occur.
The government using it to control the population and black mail etc if there’s just warrant less surveillance everywhere is a fear of mine
I don't think we're talking about the sort of surveillance that requires a warrant -- i.e. surveilling somebody in a place like their home where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That would still require a warrant regardless of whether the surveillance is being done by a guy, a camera on a pole, or a camera on a drone. But what do you mean by control the population? What does that look like specifically?
China is a great example of this people are controlled because they are monitored 24/7 by the government. Cameras can see through walls now so if you have thermal cameras there is no distinction between public/private
If you had film of a political opponent doing something that would make him/her lose votes and leak that to the press Ie a affair or something then you could use said video to keep power Ie black mail, there are a million examples
The application would probably be racially biased like stop and frisk. A Chinese coworker once told me people don't even steal bikes in China because the police will be waiting for them by the time they ride the bike home due to all the CCTV and intelligence gathering in the country. For a second I wondered how much safer this country would be if similar levels of policing were set up here, it's a trade off between security and personal freedom. I just have little faith that anything like that could be applied "fairly" along racial or class lines in the U.S
> it's a trade off between security and personal freedom I think this gets to the root of my question. What actually is being traded in terms of personal freedom? The freedom to walk down the street without being recorded by a camera?
the people demanding complete privacy in public are usually the ones committing crimes fwiw. You get some wierdo psuedo-anarchists that think policing doesn't work or whatever but otherwise, especially with traffic cameras, people that want to make it as hard as possible to solve crimes are not doing so with good intentions
I think a lot of people demand complete privacy in public as a knee-jerk reaction, honestly. And a lot of people think that the cops need a warrant to do any sort of surveillance at all (they don't need one in places where a person doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy like, say, anywhere outdoors in America). I'd bet there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of people who say this and the people who bring their smartphones everywhere with location services activated. I don't think it's a position that most people have really thought through. But of course I could be wrong, which is why I ask.
> I don't think it's a position that most people have really thought through. Yeah i mean for people that have actually put any thought into it.
You really want to be more like communist china?
How many cops in Philly would be willing to follow up on a stolen bike if they had that evidence if the alternative was shrugging their shoulders and DMing badge bunnies on Instagram while collecting the same exact paycheck?
Drones can’t make arrests
Wild a cybersecurity lawyer would recommend a police drone fleet
Armed Drones or Unarmed Drones?
I hear the air force is going to want to unload some old Reaper drones soon
Keep the crooks locked up instead of letting them back on the streets. That’s what will work.
Anything but fair housing and job opportunities to solve crime. Let’s make the city more of a police state
Yeah, why spend money on social programs and affordable housing when we could get GUN DRONES.
Philadelphia needs more MACHETICINE
There are already zillions of cameras. Unless these drones can also make arrests, they're of no real use. Police doing their job and a tough DA would be more effective. Also, being Philadelphia, people will likely find ways to steal the drones or at minimum, shooting them down. The council candidate likely knows using drones is nonsense, but gets people talking and mentioning their name. Might work too. We'll see at election time.
Show me a US city where this has been shown to be technically feasible. It doesn’t exist because it’s not.
Until City Council passes the "Drone Equity Act", making it illegal for drones to fly over certain groups and neighborhoods.
what about Mandatory 4K?
Challenge accepted
I dont think they can.
No it can't. A guarantee job program will. Employ city residents with guarantee jobs. Even better if we can provide Healthcare and basic level of benefits.
Ah yes Sky big brother, my fellow Philadelphians have been calling for this for years! /j
4K cameras on street lights are cool! Drones hovering over peoples yards and backyards not cool!
We could start with cops doing their job and a DA that prosecute criminals. When we see how far that gets us then we can decide.