Moose said: I'm sure there are a lot of police departments that would love to get their hands on one. I imagine in the future... a call comes into police headquarters about a situation and there are no officers available at that moment to respond. The desk officer then programs the location into the onboard GPS and the drone lifts off and heads to the scene and immediately begins to feed video back to headquarters and to video screens in patrol cars. There could be a built-in PA system where the desk officer can broadcast a message to the effect that police are on their way. I believe they have already been used in some countries to monitor and photgraph large groups of people engaged in protests. Click to expand...

Nifty to be sure, and I can see it giving situational awareness to an incident commander, but imagine in the future the building inspector or tax assessor has one of these and steers it above people's back yards looking for violations and things that could raise their property taxes. Cut your tree down? Did you get a permit to remove it? Did you hire a licensed contractor ('cause the tree guys gave to the councilmen's campaigns and now the ordinances say you're not allowed to do it yourself)? With how towns are these days, they'd consider it a means of collecting more revenue and it would be encouraged. One worse than that - the doozlebirds on the subdivision board get one because the geezer with the clipboard who drove around in his Cadillac writing people up for having boats in their yard or antennas on their house died. Their use is not regulated and that pretty much means anyone can do whatever they'd like with them until a judge says they can't. I'm not sure I weigh in on the side of using these things.I'm pro-law enforcement and would prefer one of these things in a hazardous environment over putting officers or firefighters into harm's way, but for any other time, our legislators need to look at this issue and people's privacy. No way I think we should be using these to justify less cops on the street or boosting revenue because of poor municipal planning/budgeting (think red light cameras, more or less the same issue). I used to be an early adopter of technology, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that technology is not our friend.