As Dallas seeks to become the city of the future, the City has apparently considered — and in some cases implemented — drones and robots in lethal and surveillance capacities.
Alongside the members of the Dallas Police Department, a squad of drones patrols the skies. The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) program, launched in January of this year, consists of 18 aerial drones manufactured by the Chinese company DJI.
At the time, DPD Maj. Mark Villarreal explained that the flying robots would be used for “disaster response, missing persons, fugitive apprehension, building searches, investigating dangerous and armed subjects,” and other purposes.
Sgt. Ross Stinson added that although the drones are not currently enabled to carry equipment of any sort, the department would be open to using them that way in the future.
“Having the ability to deliver life-saving equipment and critical resources is something that I believe will be a valuable capability. … The first steps of this program are about implementing the technology into these dynamic situations as efficiently as possible,” Stinson noted.
No mention was made at the time of the potential weaponization of drones in the future.
When asked by The Dallas Express, DPD public information officer Kristin Lowman claimed, “Our drone unit does not use weaponized drones, nor do they have the capability. There has been no discussion, and there are no plans to use them in this capacity.”
However, the DPD’s General Orders do in fact permit the use of weaponized drones. The policy explicitly states that “Deployment of any type of projectile, chemical agent, or electrical current weapon from a City of Dallas UAS is PROHIBITED unless authorized by the Chief of Police.”
While the City of Dallas has not yet deployed weaponized aerial drones, Dallas is the only city in the U.S. where police have killed someone using a weaponized robot.
In 2016, DPD deployed a robot equipped with explosives to kill a shooter who had killed five police officers and wounded seven others in downtown Dallas.
“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” former police chief David Brown explained.
As the world continues to change and the criminal element implements 21st-century technology, Dallas and cities across America may find themselves debating these issues more frequently at City Hall. Recently, the San Francisco Police Department announced a weaponized drone policy and reversed it after an outcry.
Additionally, police implementation of drones has raised privacy and public safety concerns, especially after more than 600 hours of aerial surveillance footage taken by the DPD from helicopters leaked in 2021.
The footage contained recordings of crowds of people at the state fair in Fair Park as well as scenes from protests that occurred in the city. Additional analysis of the leak revealed that “Large sections of the video shows random surveillance of Dallas neighborhoods, with highly detailed and zoomed-in images of people in their front yards, standing by their cars and sunbathing.”
Aerial drones were used by Fort Worth in 2020 to warn those in homeless encampments to abide by government-mandated COVID-19 restrictions. Similar tactics continue to be widely used in China.
The Dallas Express will be running a series of stories covering the growth and implementation of drones both in the military and municipal capacities in the state of Texas.