From Capitol Hill to online blogs of all political persuasions, it seems that the whole country has caught drone fever. Those flying robots, often armed with cameras and sometimes with missiles and munitions, are increasingly swarming American skies, launched by certain local police and sheriffs departments.
Last week the City Council of Monroe, a small city in North Carolina, approved its police departments request to purchase a mini drone, equipped with a rotating infrared camera, for a cool $44,000. That sum was acquired through asset forfeiture from drug raids. City officials commented that they expect their fancy new drone to be deployed during future drug raids.
The police departments eyes mustve lit up at that suggestion. The more assets they can seize from local drug users and peddlers the pawns in Americas drug war the more money the police department will have to trick out its cars, write bonus checks to its employees and roam its skies with unseen drones.
Asset forfeiture has long been the driving financial motive of this countrys crusade against drugs. Police departments and officers are incentivized to invade their politically powerless constituents homes and cars without a warrant, searching for even the scantest traces of illegal drugs. Any private property that the police deem as having assisted their mostly impoverished victims in committing a drug crime, be it distribution or mere possession, is up for grabs by that same police department. Police departments seize property, which often includes entire houses, land plots and cars, without paying for any of it, and then auction it off to pad their budgets.
Asset forfeiture in and of itself soundly violates both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments provisions against illegal search and seizure and the taking of private property. Asset forfeiture resulting in drones in the sky doubly violates the intent of prohibiting illegal search and seizure. But thats the precise threat that Americans now face from the dangerous combination of a still-raging drug war and a police state ethos conducive to excessive security measures.
The border communities of Texas, where the transnational drug war is being fought most intensely, are particularly at risk. The police and sheriffs offices of those communities often work together to prevent (and in some cases, corruptly assist) cross-border drug smuggling. When the Mission Police Department assisted in the capture of the notorious Gulf Cartels boss, they were given $1.18 million of the $50 million the federal government seized from his estate. In September, they spent nearly half of that money on a network of 32 surveillance cameras, outfitted with automated license plate readers that run the license plates of every car cruising the mean streets of Mission.
That same month, the Webb County Sheriffs Office was given a federal bonus check of $800,000, drawn from seized assets, as a reward for their assistance in busting a Mexican drug cartel. They are now drawing up plans to purchase a Shadowhawk drone helicopter with that money and theres a Shadowhawk already roaming the skies of Montgomery County, north of Houston.
The Drug War has always been intended to pad the wallets of the people waging it. So its unsurprising, and historically consistent, that federal and local police profit off of the continued ferocity of their battles against dangerous drug cartels and otherwise innocent domestic drug criminals through widespread asset seizures that victimize both groups. Drones have the potential to help law enforcement wage their Drug War more efficiently and stealthily than ever before, thereby guaranteeing that the flow of drug money to law enforcement, which in turn can be used to militarize police units with tools like drones, remains as constant as the flow of American drug prisoners laboring in bondage.
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Jonathan Green is a sophomore majoring in philosophy and American studies. He can be reached at Jonathan.Green@tufts.edu.
