I think most people understand that drones are a powerful and effective tool for police departments in the never-ending fight against crime. Drone can be utilized as first responders, such as in 911 calls in situations where cops can’t get in. Drones can help police assess a situation before they arrive. Drones equipped with thermal sensors can enable cops to find a suspect hiding in an apartment or in the woods. Drones with cameras can acquire evidence used in indictments and trials. Drones can overwatch large events, such as sideshows and including downtown protests that often turn violent. Drones can seek out suspects, even indoors. Drones can follow fleeing perps in their vehicles, without posing harm to cops or innocent bystanders. With the advent of AI, drones will become increasingly vital to law enforcement.
So when the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted last Tuesday “to launch a program that will send drones from rooftops to the scenes of crimes, fires and other incidents,” it’s little wonder that the $600,000 program passed 4-0, with one abstention: Nikki Fortunato Bas, who said “that some of her constituents had expressed concerns related to surveillance and privacy.”
You remember Nikki Bas, I’m sure. During her years on the Oakland City Council, she was one of the most vicious police defunders. Perhaps her most infamous vote was in June, 2021, when she and Carroll Fife “spearheaded the push to defund the Oakland Police Department” that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “stripped more than $17M from [the OPD] budget.”
Then, just two months later, in September, 2021, she and Fife kneecapped OPD again, when they were the only two council members to vote against adding two new police academies, even after Oakland’s notorious Summer of Murder that year.
Elected politicians often abstain from taking votes they don’t want on the public record, in order to preclude pushback in future elections. Bas “abstained” from the drone vote last week because (a) she knows that the majority of her constituents favor more effective policing, including drones, and she doesn’t want to antagonize them, and (b) because her sponsors—the unions that finance her political career—also are against effective law enforcement. Those unions are dominated by racialist progressives who don’t care about crime; their only concern is for their members, who are largely people of color, to get high salaries and benefits, and for the companies they own to get lucrative city and county contracts. Nikki Bas was installed in office, and is kept there, to ensure that those two conditions are fulfilled.
As for Bas’s rationalization that “some of her constituents had expressed concerns” about drones, well, of course they did. In Alameda County and Oakland, “some” people are always going to gripe about anything and everything. Bas and Fife use this excuse to justify their worst decisions, as if to suggest they’re only obeying the vox populi. The truth is that the voice they’re listening to is that of their union paymasters.
I grant that “some people” do fear the use of drones as leading to a loss of privacy, but I don’t buy that. Yes, if you’re a crook trying to escape from the cops, a drone may well curtail your freedom, but you should have thought of that before you broke the law. As for the rest of us who obey the law, we’re not worried about drones, and we welcome them into OPD’s toolkit to keep us safe.
Steve Heimoff