Police Drones and ethics

Since 2017, the police have increasingly deployed drones for maintaining public order and safety (e.g. demonstrations), for emergency response (e.g. traffic accidents), and for forensic investigations (e.g. searches for missing persons). Now, the Dutch national police is planning to use drones more often in the upcoming years. Their goal is to equip every regional unit with a drone. The units must decide for themselves when, and for what purpose, they will use their drone.

Officers will be trained in flying the drones, and in the ethical considerations that must be made when they use them. The national police is therefore developing an ethical assessment framework for the use of drones. In it, they want to include the perspectives of citizens.

This is why Waag Futurelab and Het Nieuwe Trivium organised discussion tables, where we used concrete examples to investigate what citizens think of drone deployment by the police, and when their opinion changed. What values underlie their opinions?

These discussion tables provided input for an ethical framework for the police, when using drones in neighborhoods, cities and rural areas. The results of our research were incorporated into an overview of arguments and considerations that police officers will will take into account when deploying drones.

This project was a collaboration between Waag and Het Nieuwe Trivium, an organisation of philosophical practitioners. Waag supported Het Nieuwe Trivium in preparing, holding and analysing the focus group discussions.