For those of us concerned about the expanded use and abuse of taser technology, we have not seen anything yet. A French company is developing a flying drone that can shoot tasers at people in large crowds.
What is most interesting about this proposal is that it would seem to finally abandon any notion of individual evaluation of a suspect’s health, age etc in the use of this technology. Officers have been criticized recently for using tasers on pregnant women and the elderly despite the risk to health. An airborne drone would be in a far too removed position to allow individualized judgments.
For the full story, click here
Thanks for our friend Commoner for this story.
“pain rays”, tasers, etc.
In some sense governments are beginning to the view the populace as a unruly dynamic force that needs to be totally monitored, totally known in all its activities, and totally controllable.
This has been developing at least as far back as the Kennedy area (and actually it goes back to the turn of the twentieth century): viz, the managerial state. It is now gathering steam and alas for all of us seems unstoppable.
In some sense, urban insurgencies are the ultimate test of the emerging era’s powers of control. If one can bring to order a situation like currently exists in Iraq, then one has discovered the means to control almost any human population.
Traditionally the police powers of the state were not efficient since they were always operated in an astounding void of information.
That is being rectified rapidly.
But to the main point of the story: tasering is increasingly being resorted to in totally inappropriate situations and the abandonment, in the French situation, of any pretense toward discrimination, is part and parcel of the general slide toward the elimination of “disruption”
in all it forms. Managerial government at its best.