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Taser flying drones will be pre-installed on school ceilings so that an officer can fire one within seconds of the reported shooting, piloting it through special vents in locked classrooms, stunning the shooter with striking arrows and shouting commands such as ” Stay down or you’ll be hit again. “
At least that was the proposal that police giant Axon defended last week after the Uwalde school massacre. But since then, the company has halted the project following the mass resignation of its own advisers, who described it as a mad anti-utopian fantasy that could militarize schools and hurt children.
They worried that the shock drones would stun innocent students or be harassed by hackers, vandals or police. Even if deployed appropriately, they may not be enough to destroy an armed man. And the problem in Uvalde, some noted, is not a lack of firepower: nineteen officers waited outside the classroom door for 47 minutes, mistakenly believing that the children inside were no longer in danger.
“It’s so obviously a bad idea to use them in the context of schools. I mean, it’s absurd, “said Ryan Kahlo, one of nine members of Axon’s artificial intelligence ethics advisory board who resigned to protest the company’s harassment. “You can’t deal with these horrific national tragedies … by throwing an electric shocker at a drone.
Critics said the idea shed light on the security theater, which routinely colors the nation’s response to mass shootings, promising an unfounded sense of security rather than real security for a tragedy that occurs in the United States much more often than anywhere else. the world. .
Instead of focusing on weapons, they say, companies have forced lawmakers to focus elsewhere, selling armored backpacks, school surveillance software, face recognition scanners and other systems they say are reactive, problematic and ineffective. stopping future massacres.
The small school police in Uwalde took over, after which they failed to enter
Axon, which makes various electroshock devices under the general heading “energy weapons”, declined to make interviews available. Rick Smith, its founder and leader, said in a statement Sunday that the project’s response “has given us a deeper assessment of the complex and important considerations” associated with strike drones in schools, adding: “I recognize that our passion for finding new solutions to stop the mass shootings made us act quickly to share our ideas. “
Although he had previously suggested that the system could be operational in two years, he said in a statement that the idea was still “far away” and that the company still had to investigate whether such drones were “even viable”.
Smith added that it was “unfortunate” that board members resigned before the company “had a chance to answer its technical questions” and that it would continue to “seek different points of view” to advise them on other technological ideas. .
But in a statement Monday, retired board members said the drone had “no real chance of solving the mass shooting problem that Axon is now prescribing it for, only diverting public attention from real decisions.”
“Before announcing Axon, we asked the company to withdraw,” members said. “But the company has moved forward in a way that has impressed many of us as trading the tragedy of the Uwalde and Buffalo shootings. … [It] is more than any of us can bear. “
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Axon has become one of the largest police contract companies in the United States, thanks to the sale of body-worn cameras and Taser weapons that fire electroshock thorns that can stun a person.
Axon advertised the Tasers as “less deadly”, although a USA Today investigation last year said more than 500 people had died shortly after being shocked. Police officers who reached for a gun -shaped weapons also mistakenly removed their pistols, including in the fatal shooting of Downthe Wright last year.
The company convened its AI ethics board in 2018 as it considered and ultimately refused to allow face recognition on its body’s cameras, which critics fear could lead to dangerous misidentifications or automated surveillance. protests or other public events. “We don’t want to create an Orwellian state just to make money,” Smith told The Washington Post in an interview.
The board is not binding and the company is free to ignore it. But its independent combination of paid technical and legal experts felt it had had some productive discussions over the years with Axon as the company pursued license plate scanners and other surveillance tools, said Kahlo, a professor at the University of Washington who studies technology and law. .
About a year ago, Axon asked the board if strike drones could be ethically deployed in a scenario where officers needed remote strike capabilities and feared for their lives. After discussions, the board said in a statement that the company would have to take precautions to make the idea even “remotely plausible.”
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The board voted last month that the company should not go ahead with the idea, saying armed drones could increase the frequency of police recourse to force “in over-controlled communities and color communities.” Members were preparing a full report, scheduled for release this fall, on whether the project should be released to the police market at all.
Members were then surprised when Smith announced on Thursday that the company was “officially starting” the development of a shock drone, which could be used in a much broader role, to “stop” school shootings, with promises of a “threat of incapacity” in less than 60 seconds. “
In a video announcement that included footage of a slow-moving drone firing an arrow, Smith said the company had already built test systems and had begun the design phase for a system he said would take about two years to build. In the concept images released by the company, the quadcopter is shown with four cameras, a firing barrel, a speaker and a “laser for precision aiming”.
“I am just waiting for the politicians to solve the problem. So we will resolve it, “Smith said. “We will do that.”
Smith has been promoting the idea for years, even including it in the graphic novel The End of Murder, which shows a drone hitting a gunman raging through a day center. And in a question-and-answer session on Reddit the day after the announcement, Smith said he knew the idea might sound “crazy,” but that he offered some advantages over “today’s decision” to respond to shootings: “a local man with a gun.” “
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The shock drones, he said, will be installed in ceiling-mounted “launch stations”, such as smoke detectors, and will be shielded to prevent “children from throwing things at” them. Schools, he said, could install “simple, inexpensive vents” above doors to allow drones to fly into locked rooms, although he also acknowledged that the idea could cause “some fire code problems” due to smoke ventilation.
Drones can fire a payload of up to four impact probes at more than 40 feet, he said, and deliver direct current to disable an attacker long enough for people nearby to kill them or take their weapons. The drones would be small and difficult to fire, he wrote, and “once the arrows run out, we could hit the drone on someone to disperse them physically.”
Schools or police agencies, he said, will pay an estimated fee of about $ 1,000 a year for the drone, and the company will only sell them in markets where “no abuse will be used.”
In 2018, the Federal Aviation Administration banned everyone from flying a drone with a dangerous weapon attached. But Smith said such “legal restrictions” could be resolved over time; He noted that weapons and body cameras were illegal in some states before Axon launched them.
“The company has a long history of working in situations where the law didn’t support our technology – and then it did when people understood what we were trying to do,” he wrote.
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At the Reddit session, Smith was asked how he would deal with the repulsion of parents who do not want to fly shock machines near their children. “Many parents would probably find this situation more convenient than an armed guard stationed at the school,” he said.
But Reddit’s response was scorching. Some commentators worry that the drones will be misused to punish students, fight battles or police protests, or that they will have unintended consequences, with more people being shot after the gunman was shocked.
Others have questioned whether Axon is taking advantage of the emotion of the moment to attract investors or sell a product. They also said the proposal was a sad comment on America’s weak response to the national crisis.
“The fact that we think of drones in schools, whether the motivation is capitalism, parental instinct or both, means that our society is already quite sick,” wrote one commentator. Another wrote: “We certainly like to deal with the symptoms instead of the root causes, don’t we?
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