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Welcome to the RoboCop Era

By Jim Swift

In what is apparently a first, the Dallas police department used a bomb-toting kamikaze drone robot to kill Micah Xavier Johnson, the suspect in the killing of five police officers working parade detail during a Black Lives Matter protest.

The era of proactive robotic assisted policing is here.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“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,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a news conference. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.”

Robots have long been used by SWAT teams to investigate suspicious packages, supposed bombs, and for other purposes when the danger posed to humans is considered to be too great. Their use has been mainly defensive, but not anymore.

Now, however, we have our first known drone killing on U.S. soil.

Senator Rand Paul, in his filibuster over the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director, warned of this:

I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination. It is something that should not and cannot be tolerated in our country.

Paul’s filibuster yielded a response from the FBI regarding its use of drones, and a clarification from Attorney General Holder. Over the course of his 13 hour filibuster, Senator Paul posed a number of hypotheticals, some of which resulted in mockery:

“When the president responds that, I haven’t killed any Americans yet at home and that I don’t intend to do so, but I might, it’s incredibly alarming, and really goes against his oath of office,” Paul said. Paul mused for hours about what kinds of circumstances might prompt the White House to unleash drones on Americans and what kinds of Americans might be targeted. “It’s one thing if you want to try her for treason, but are you just going to drop a drone Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a Hellfire missile on those at Kent State?” Rand asked.

It’s not unrealistic to imagine a dystopian future with armed drones flying around to protect against hijacked planes, especially since on 9/11, some Air Force planes were unarmed. But that a president would blow up a cafe full of coffee drinkers or septuagenarian dissidents like Jane Fonda is quite another.

Drones, used by the military for years, are now becoming more popular for domestic use in the United States, and regulating their use has not been without controversy. Whether Amazon should be able to use drones to deliver packages, or if tourists can use them near sensitive places like airports or the White House has been a popular topic of discussion among regulators and law enforcement officials.

While privacy is a hot topic of debate, as camera-toting drones spying on sunbathing teens might replace the Peeping Toms of yesteryear, there’s also the issue of weaponization. It’s not terribly hard to outfit a quadcopter with a hand gun or explosives. Drone enthusiasts and gun hobbyists have posted many videos exploring the possibilities online. And as we saw this week, the government has now put this curiousity into practice.

Leading up to his filibuster, Paul said in a release:

The U.S. Attorney General’s refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening — it is an affront the Constitutional due process rights of all Americans.

For all of Paul’s posturing in 2013, he’s right in that there are lots of unanswered questions regarding when we should allow the government to use drones to kill on U.S. soil.

Such an instance just happened: a tailor-made moment for Senator Paul to delve back into an important topic he went so far as to filibuster a nominee over.

Granted, it wasn’t the CIA firing a hellfire missile at college protesters or taking Spencer’s Coffee in Bowling Green, Kentucky and all its patrons off of the face of the earth… But it was a drone, killing a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, as ordered by the government.

Shortly after his 2013 filibuster, Paul told Neil Cavuto on Fox Business Channel:

I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat, [or] an act of crime going on,” Paul said, referring to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.

Left-leaning blog Raw Story editorialized that Paul’s comment was a reversal, something he disputed in a statement:

My comments last night left the mistaken impression that my position on drones had changed. Let me be clear: it has not. Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations. They only may only be considered in extraordinary, lethal situations where there is an ongoing, imminent threat. I described that scenario previously during my Senate filibuster. Additionally, surveillance drones should only be used with warrants and specific targets. Fighting terrorism and capturing terrorists must be done while preserving our constitutional protections. This was demonstrated last week in Boston. As we all seek to prevent future tragedies, we must continue to bear this in mind.

When asked for comment by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Paul’s Senate office did not respond. Not likely to be a one-off scenario, the method used to kill Micah Xavier Johnson is up for debate, and Rand Paul has been awfully quiet.

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