clipped from www.reuters.com
Spy-in-the-sky drone sets sights on Miami

He acknowledged strong interest from law enforcement agencies in getting UAVs up and running, however, and said the smaller aircraft particularly were likely to have a “huge economic impact” over the next 10 years.

Getting clearance for police and other civilian agencies to fly can’t come soon enough for Billy Robinson, chief executive of Cyber Defense Systems Inc, a small start-up company in St. Petersburg, Florida. His company makes an 8-pound (3.6 kg) kite-sized UAV that was flown for a time by police in Palm Bay, Florida, and in other towns, before the FAA stepped in.

“We’ve had interest from dozens of law enforcement agencies,” said Robinson. “They (the FAA) are preventing a bunch of small companies such as ours from becoming profitable,” he said.

Some privacy advocates, however, say rules and ordinances need to be drafted to protect civil liberties during surveillance operations.
  blog it
What ever happened to good, old-fashioned police work? I’m kinda left with the feeling that we are being treated like insurgents on our own turf. While the use of “tactical” teams has increased exponentially over the past few decades, the extent and seriousness of crime has not.

Yet the police in many jurisdictions scare the living jeebus out of its citizenry and continue to press for more of everything: firepower, armor, military-surplus vehicles. The problem with drones is simply that they would be largely ineffective when you weigh in the costs of operating and using such technology. Yet in order to justify the expense of obtaining such equipment, police departments will need to use these things in ways they weren’t purchased for.
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