Background on drones

[Just some general information on drones used by police agencies throughout the world that might be of use to anyone concerned about the city of Sacramento's possible and potential use of them]

UK Police Spy Drones

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jvWgeVUqlII

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Video of US Military's Predator Drone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh8Cjnzen8

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Local 2 Investigates Police Secrecy Behind Unmanned Aircraft Test
By Stephen Dean
POSTED: 9:03 am CST November 21, 2007

WALLER COUNTY, Texas -- Houston police started testing unmanned aircraft and the event was shrouded in secrecy, but it was captured on tape by Local 2 Investigates.Neighbors in rural Waller County said they thought a top-secret military venture was under way among the farmland and ranches, some 70 miles northwest of Houston. KPRC Local 2 Investigates had four hidden cameras aimed at a row of mysterious black trucks. Satellite dishes and a swirling radar added to the neighbors' suspense.Then, cameras were rolling as an unmanned aircraft was launched into the sky and operated by remote control. ...

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Miami Police Enlists Drone
By Sharon Weinberger EmailNovember 28, 2007 | 12:50:29 PMCategories: Drones

Police in Texas want to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot speeders, and now Miami cops are also looking at drones for SWAT Teams. A local TV station reports that law enforcement there are looking at Honeywell's ducted-fan Micro Air Vehicle:
The capability of the unit is phenomenal," said Miami-Dade Detective Juan Villalba.
The unmanned aircraft will be used during SWAT team and tactical operations, especially when officers need video of a heavily armed suspect.

The Miami-Dade police department has not yet taken possession on its drone, but the Houston police department has and is already conducting tests.

Miami-Dade hopes to use grant money to pay for the MAV. Officials said the units are pricey. Depending on the complexity of the system, they can cost several thousand dollars to more than a million.

Apparently police in Miami and Houston are first in line for drones because they've both received FAA clearance; a big hurdle for operating UAVs in domestic airspace.

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French Reveal Plans for Taser Flying Saucer
By Sharon Weinberger EmailNovember 27, 2007 | 8:59:12 AMCategories: Bizarro, Drones, Lasers and Ray Guns, Less-lethal

A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like. Antoine di Zazzo, identified by AFP as "one of the biggest Taser representatives" outside the United States, said his company is "developing a mini-flying saucer like drone which could also fire Taser stun rounds on criminal suspects or rioting crowds. He expects it to be launched next year and to be sold internationally by Taser."

TASER could soon be big in France, the AFP reports. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "no-nonsense law and order tactics are one reason why the engineer businessman is confident of huge demand for the gun, despite controversy over its use in North America and being declared a form of torture by a UN committee."

What I don't get is that AFP put the flying saucer thing at the end of the freakin' story about TASER! What the heck!? Are stun-gun equipped flying saucers just sort of ho-hum in France? This should have been a huge headline with pictures of children running for their lives, as the evil alien-looking TASER saucers attack.

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Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Page A03

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "
That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.