UNMANNING THE POLICE MANHUNT: VERTICAL SECURITY AS PACIFICATION 1

This article provides a critique of military aerial drones being “repurposed” as domestic security technologies. Mapping this process in regards to domestic policing agencies in the United States, the case of police drones speaks directly to the importation of actual military and colonial architectures into the routine spaces of the “homeland”, disclosing insidious entwinements of war and police, metropole and colony, accumulation and securitization. The “boomeranging” of military UAVs is but one contemporary example how war power and police power have long been allied and it is the logic of security and the practice of pacification that animates both. The police drone is but one of the most nascent technologies that extends or reproduces the police’s own design on the pacification of territory. Therefore, we must be careful not to fetishize the domestic police drone by framing this development as emblematic of a radical break from traditional policing mandates – the case of police drones is interesting less because it speaks about the militarization of the police, which it certainly does, but more about the ways in which it accentuates the mutual mandates and joint rationalities of war abroad and policing at home. Finally, the paper considers how the animus of police drones is productive of a particular form of organized suspicion, namely, the manhunt. Here, the “unmanning” of police power extends the police capability to not only see or know its dominion, but to quite literally track, pursue, and ultimately capture human prey.

persistently manufacturing "adjacent markets," or any civilian market where military technologies can be peddled (Lake, 2011). A defense executive has stated that the industry goal for military ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] technologies is "to push it down to the state and local governments to see if there is a mission to support" (cited in Lake, 2011). Importantly, the "mission support" mentioned by the above executive is the "public safety market," as a different defense executive states: "a number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection" (cited in Lake, 2011). The military drone is at the forefront of the so-called green-to-blue pipeline, or the movement from military to domestic security applications.
Prior to 2012 there had been one major obstacle to domesticating drones, namely, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations blocking widespread access to national airspace by both public and private institutions. In February 2012 this obstacle, if not completely demolished, was reworked into a much less significant impediment with passage of H.R. 658, a law requiring the FAA to expedite the process of handing out Certificate of Authorizations (COAs) to government agencies such as the police and border patrol and also private enterprises so that they can operate micro-drones. It has been estimated that by 2018, there could be 30, 000 drones flying in US skies -a mixture of military, public safety, and private drones (Smithson, 2012). The passing of the bill was largely due to sustained pressure by drone stakeholders, primarily Congress's Unmanned Systems Caucus, the Association of Unmanned Vehicles International (AUVSI) and its corporate members, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), various lawmakers, and domestic policing agencies. These stakeholders argued that the lack of access to US airspace was a hindrance to both capital accumulation and much needed security measures. As a spokesperson for the AUVSI has stated, "The potential civil market for these systems could dwarf the military market in the coming years if we can get access to the airspace." Michael Huerta, an FAA administrator, has stated: "What we're hearing from the Congress and the industry is, 'This technology is evolving quickly and we don't want the FAA to be too cautious so as to hold up technological innovation" (quoted in Lowy, 2012).
Unsurprisingly, "public safety" agencies across the US have embraced this move to "re-purpose" and "re-deploy" military-style UAVs, specifically micro-drones weighing from 4-25 pounds and from 2-8 feet in length. A Texas official has stated, "Public-safety agencies are beginning to see this as an invaluable tool for them, just as the car was an improvement over the horse and the single-shot pistol was improved upon by the sixshooter" (Clarridge, 2012). To police drone enthusiasts, UAV systems evoke a "technological sublime" (Nye, 1994), or a certain reverence, awe, and arousal concerning great engineering feats and technologies. In this case, drones are a technological sublime that points to the dream of securing the insecurity of domestic order. Outfitted with potent cameras and potentially night vision, facial recognition, thermal imaging and even lethal and non-lethal weaponry, drones are said to be a dreamlike, "silver-bullet" scopic commodity animating the fantasy of security. Police micro-UAVs have been imagined for a plethora of circumstances: natural disaster assistance, search and rescue, special events and other large gatherings such as protests, traffic congestion and enforcement, high speed pursuits, locating fleeing/hiding suspects, hostage rescue and barricaded subjects, drug interdiction, and in surveillance/intelligence operations. Indeed, the police applications of this appear endless, with innovation a likely outcome of their adoption in everyday police practices. As one spokesperson for a local government that purchased a drone remarked, "As we get into this we'll be able to find more uses for it" (Butts, 2012).
Perhaps the most well-known case of domestic UAVs is the implementation of drones by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the aerial monitoring of US border regions with Mexico and Canada (Becker, 2012;Rockwell, 2011). Currently, the CBP has 9 drones with plans for more in the future (Dinan, 2012). But drones are also emerging beyond the seams of US borderscapes as increasing numbers of US police departments are seeking military-style aerial drones as key domestic policing technologies. To list only a few examples, drones have been acquired by FAA authorizations or have been applied for by policing agencies in Seattle, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, California, North Dakota, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas. For instance, Miami-Dade police received a grant from the Department of Justice in order to acquire 2 Honeywell T-Hawk drones, at $50,000 each, that can fly and hover at altitudes up to 9000 feet. The local government of Canyon County, Idaho purchased a Draganfkyer X6 with DHS grants (Butts 2012). Like other similar drones, the Draganflyer X6 can stream video to officers on the ground and also comes equipped with thermal imaging technology. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has four Wasp III drones that reportedly are available on a case-by-case basis to any policing agency in the state (Newton, 2011). In October of 2011 the Sheriff's Department in Montgomery County, Texas, also with assistance from DHS grants, unveiled a 7-foot long drone called the "Shadowhawk". This particular drone, from Texas-based Vanguard Industries, is equipped with cameras and heat sensor and night vision technology and the platform can be armed with "non-lethal" and "lethal" weaponry. As of May 2012, it was reported that the Shadowhawk had yet to be deployed, but officials stated that they were waiting for the "right incident" to "present itself" (Flake, 2012). It is not an understatement to say that both the idea and the reality of police drones have become normalized in policing circles. As one New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson puts it, drones just "aren't that exotic anymore" (CBS, 2012).
Despite all of these developments, the opening of the police drone market has been met with critiques from liberals and conservatives alike, ranging from concerns about safety concerns such as mid-air collisions and loss of signal scenarios, even though the issue of privacy, unsurprisingly and problematically, has dominated popular critiques (see Henry, this volume). For the security industry these issues are to be solved through "public relations". Speaking at a Counter Terror Expo, a government official stated that "We have a very tall challenge to change public perception. Otherwise, we'll be stopped cold in our tracks if we don't do this thoughtfully. We have to bring the public along every step of the way" so that they realize "we will not be watching backyards" (Stone, 2012). Indeed, going so far as to hire a public relations firm to "bombard the American public with positive images and messages" (Morley, 2012), the AUVSI has admitted that one of the big challenges for the emergence of domestic UAVs is winning "hearts and minds". An AUVSI spokesperson has stated that "We're going to do a much better job of educating people about unmanned aviation, the good and the bad. We're working on drafting the right message and how to get it out there. You have to keep repeating the good words. People who don't know what they're talking about say these are spy planes or killer drones. They're not" (Morley, 2012). But it is important to note that the majority of military UAVs are primarily equipped for aerial surveillance and intelligencegathering, and are not equipped with lethal systems and are not nearly the size of the Predator and Reaper "hunter-killer" drones that have received most attention -hence there are more commonalities between military drones and police drones than this spokesperson suggests. Indeed, one suggested solution to successfully normalize drones in national airspace is to cease calling the technology "drones", but rather "remotely piloted vehicles" (Morley, 2012) because the word "drone" is so associated with targeted assassinations, kill lists, and dead civilians.
Clearly, the rise of police drones reveals a bundle of issues concerning technologies of violence, questions of security and the powers of marketing. How might we understand the police drone, without falling back on liberal worries about 'safety concerns' or loss privacy? How might we situate the drone within the wider frame of the critique of security and the logic of pacification?

Security Fetishism & Insecurity as Opportunity
Animated by the fetish of security (Neocleous 2008), the rise of US police drones exemplify how logics of (in)security circulate and proliferate so creating new configurations of state power and accumulation. Although police officials justify drones by claiming they are cheaper than helicopters and better protect officers from "harm's way", discourses of security remain the most forceful argument, as police officials routinely exclaim drones offer an extra layer of "public safety". Prior to the passing of H.R. 658, New York Democrat Charles Schumer stated that the domestication of UAVs is ultimately a matter of "national security": The FAA has been very hesitant to give authorization to these UAVs due to limited air space and restrictions that they have. I certainly can appreciate those concerns; but when we're talking about Customs and Border Protection or the FBI, what have you, we are talking about missions of national security. And certainly there's nothing more important than that (quoted in Barry 2012; emphasis mine).
Unmanned police power then can firmly be situated in what Feldman (2004) dubs "securocratic wars of public safety" where national security and public safety concerns converge and become inseparable. As "the supreme concept of bourgeois society", as Marx once put it (cited in Neocleous, 2008: 30), and a "general economy of power" as Foucault (2007: 10-11) suggested, security exercises an insidious mutability and malleability, and both writers also recognized the securing of insecurity as always unfinished and perpetual. Consequently, the "war on terrorism" slides into those other perpetual security projects, such as the "war on crime" and "war on drugs", while homeland security, public safety, and national security become interchangeable -hence the normalized overlapping techniques of military and police power in which drones are but one example.
Both imperial and domestic police UAVs are first and foremost security commodities invested in and bounded by the prerogatives of security and accumulation, accentuating how security becomes commodified in neoliberal "risk markets" (Rigakos, 2002). If the commodity form is said to address or alleviate some form of human need, and the security commodity specifically that of insecurity, then the police drone addresses the local security state's need, or desire or dream, of pacifying territory and populations (Neocleous, 2011). Police agencies turn to security industries in order to better enhance their security objectives while security industries aggressively market military products to "public safety" institutions in order to secure accumulation. That is, the emergence of police drones speak to the ways the security state and security industries are virtually indistinguishable, as attested to above with the entanglement of the AUVSI, DHS, Congressional Unmanned Caucus, policing agencies, and the FAA's relinquishing of the control of airspace due to the intertwined imperatives of security and accumulation.
This entails not so much the retreat or "hollowing-out" of the state or a privatization of the state, but a security industry intimately intertwined with the state (see Neocleous, 2008). The state appears as "pimp" (Zedner, 2006) to an increasingly powerful security industry, with local police forces the main client. And yet there is no clear separation between the security provided by the pimp and the commodity sold by the prostitute. Much like the "child protection industry" (Katz, 2001), drone industries, and security corporations in general, do not produce and market security commodities such as UAVs because they are particularly interested in surveillance and security per se, but first and foremost because they are interested in accumulation (Neocleous, 2008). Yet they also recognize that to secure accumulation, a healthy security state must be forged and nourished.
As attempts to domesticate drones suggest, the logic of security presupposes a social order or even local context that is haunted by the spectre of insecurity. That is, police drone stakeholders are reliant on the presence of what could be thought of as "opportunities of insecurity" that are often tragic, transgressive, or perceived as "disorderly" to help justify the continual reproduction, circulation, and intensification of the security-accumulation assemblage. Here it is useful to think of this in terms of the "disaster capitalism" outlined by Naomi Klein (2007), in which human and environmental devastation is seen as an occasion for state power and capitalist accumulation to expand. As Klein shows, "homeland security" itself is largely an economy where unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism insidiously converge after "9/11" (386). This point on disaster capitalism in reference to police drones is poignantly demonstrated by the following graphic by Lucintel, a market research group: As the column above demonstrates, diverse and random events, most of them tragic or transgressive in that lives have been injured and/or order breached, are framed as not upsetting or disconcerting in terms of human suffering or harm, but as the necessary conditions for "growth" of the UAV civil market. Reworked as "requirements" and "opportunities," these various events ranging from forest fires to automobile accidents, from criminalized activity to an influx in foot or vehicular traffic, are understood as the required conditions of possibility for the domestic drone market. And as the middle column shows, these opportunities to capitalize on tragedy and transgression are structured by the uncertain and unpredictable, the ambiguous and illegible, as they play out on a local scale. In addition, the column on the right points to how the intertwined logics of security and insecurity, order and disorder, animates the whole process, as the pursuit of security is understood as perpetual and can never be achieved. The spectre of blindness and ignorance haunts or animates security to develop and deploy greater capabilities to "see" and "order".
Police drones are but one useful case study demonstrating how the security state and security industries are reliant upon, and actively propagate and mobilize fear, suspicion, and anxiety around "public safety" issues to simultaneously justify hardened security measures and secure accumulation. Of course, this is nothing new per se, but is just one example of the ways in which demands for security are at once demands for accumulation (Katz, 2001;Rigakos, 2002;Spitzer, 1987). Indeed, security capitalizes on devastation and insecurity by converting them into a plethora of opportunities for state power, social order and capitalist accumulation to be bolstered and reproduced (Cowen and Siciliano, 2011;Feldman, 2011). Thus Cowen and Siciliano speak of a "securitized social reproduction" whereby individual bodies, groups, asymmetrical social relations, and the larger order of capitalist accumulation are secured through classed and racialized practices of targeted policing. This process, I suggest, needs to be understood as central to the process of pacification. The remainder of this article thinks through the cultural and political dynamics configuring the domestic deployment of police drones in this light. I suggest that aerial police drones are nothing less than a human hunting technology in the service of pacification.

Pacification, Scopic Verticality and the Manhunt
Police drones are often described as part of a long history of police "militarization" where both martial vocabularies and military practices and technologies (Kraska, 2001) abound within modern policing's "technostructure" (Haggerty and Ericson, 2001). Yet as tempting as the militarization discourse is we must resist seeing the boomeranging of military drones to the policing of domestic populations as solely an issue where martial logics and technologies straightforwardly convert police power into war power. The militarization discourse often lends itself to a problematic "blurring" trope where the military invades and corrupts, "militarizes", the previously noble police profession. As Guillermina Seri (2012) argues, "There is a distinct police role in facilitating authoritarianism and state violence" (119), and this is precisely what is missed in discussions of the militarization of the police. The police and military might operate with "different notions of risk" such as arrest/prosecution as opposed to simply kill (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011: 151), yet insisting on this divide obscures the fact that war and police have long been sutured together in the name of security. That is, the boomeranging of military UAVs is but one contemporary example how war power and police power have long been allied, and it is the logic of security and the practice of pacification that animates both (Neocleous, 2011;Neocleous, this volume).
Most often pacification is evoked in regards to military strategy and tactics, primarily in reference to counter-insurgency efforts to "win hearts and minds" in the US/Vietnam war -although it has a much longer colonial history (Neocleous, 2011). But as others have pointed out, the "external pacification" of distant territories and peoples has historically developed alongside the "internal pacification" of domestic territories and populations (see Kuzmarov, 2012;McCoy, 2009), the former primarily being consigned to the military whereas the latter a policing project. In his ethnography of the LAPD, Herbert (1997) identifies police surveillance as one important means by which the police routinely aim for "internal pacification." In this regard internal pacification can be understood as a "process fabricating a 'peace and security' within the social order to match the 'peace and security' imposed on colonial subjects" while "ordering the social relations of power around a particular regime of accumulation" (Neocleous, 2011). Security is pacification (Neocleous, 2011). As a critical concept, pacification therefore also forces us to ask questions about who is being pacified, why this is so, and for what particular objectives, while simultaneously presupposing subjects that resist efforts at their pacification (Rigakos, 2011).
In other words, the usefulness in thinking the politics of security in terms of pacification is that the military and police are located on a continuum of state power, aiming to order disorder with quite similar practices and hardware, as opposed to two separate spheres with different operating logics (see Rigakos, 2011). In this light, we must be careful not to fetishize the domestic police drone by framing this development as emblematic of a radical break from traditional policing mandates -the case of police drones is interesting less because it speaks about the militarization of the police, which it certainly does, but more about the ways in which it accentuates the mutual mandates and joint rationalities of war and police. Put in a slightly different way, the police drone is but one of the newest technologies that extends or reproduces the police's own design on the pacification of its territory. Indeed, the military and police are united in their mandate to pacify their respective territories and populations (Herbert, 1997). For certain, surveillance and intelligence-gathering, and the continual threat of violence, structure the organizational animus of not only militaries but also domestic policing -an animus moved by the "demand for order" (Silver, 1976). But such "order" is not only reproduced but also actively fabricated by police power (Neocleous, 2000). Much like the police helicopters armed with powerful high-resolution cameras, flying above city streets, sidewalks, alleyways, parks, homes and lawns, unmanned vertical policing extends the police dream of pacification through air power, or a scopic verticality.
Importantly, as a technology of pacification the drone must be understood, in its logic and design, as a technology of police and not merely military power. The police drone, on this view, is not a feature of police "militarization", but a technology already structured by police logic -and here I am referring to the broad notion of the "social police" that predates yet still structures the uniformed institution now thought of as "the police" (Neocleous, 2000; see also Foucault 2007). That is, air power has long been a form of police power in that the inauguration of modern air power, the 1920's and 1930's, was defined by the police concept (Neocleous, 2013a). Put another way: although most histories of air power trace its origins to military power, often speaking of WWII as the crucial historical moment, Neocleous (2013a) demonstrates how air power was originally conceived by its earliest proponents in Britain and the US as an explicit police technology to be used to govern in the most general sense the colonized and other "dangerous classes". More specifically, he shows how in the 1920s many of the debates taking place in metropoles concerning colonial populations framed air power as a police technology deployed to pacify indigenous peoples and fabricate order by crushing rebellions and policing minor resistances, separating the indigenous from traditional means of production, conducting aerial surveillance including land surveys and censuses, and in winning hearts and mind through moral effect. Of course, air power as police power was not only discussed -but actually exercised by metropoles in the "securing" of a slew of colonized territories. Perhaps most relevant to note for our discussion of police drones in the US is the 1921 "Battle of Blair Mountain", when West Virginian coal miners were aerially bombed by the private militia of mine owners, to say nothing of the military planes that were also used to conduct reconnaissance. Most recently, the 1985 bombing from a police helicopter of the headquarters of the activist organization MOVE helps in further demonstrating that air power has in fact long been a form of police power. The drone belongs to this history.
UAVs are said to better assist police with their goal of rendering illegible geographies legible from above. "An illegible society", Scott writes, "is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare" (Scott 1998: 78). As Ericson and Haggerty (1997) have shown, the domestic policing of insecurity, just like the military sibling, involves the collecting of information regarding a population and territory with aims of constructing "a more accurate map of the territory and a more reasonable profile of the…people who inhabit it" (135). As an "extra patrolman in the sky" (Miller, 2011) that is mobile and flexible, the police UAV extends the police mandate of ordering terrestrial space by technologically mediating the territorial through the aerial -"vigilant visualities" (Amoore, 2007) take flight within a politics of verticality (Weizman, 2007). The drone patrol lends itself to visually ordering what appears disordered if observed solely from eye-level, or ground-level -the terrestrial patrol is always limited by its locality. In this sense the drone is like the police helicopter. Of police helicopters, Adey (2010) writes that "Verticality implies security from the insecurities below" (58; emphasis in original), and this logic certainly structures the drone stare. One police official has stated drones provide "a good opportunity to have an eye up there" and that the technology provides "a surveilling eye to help us to do the things we need to do, honestly, to keep people safe" (quoted in Benjamin, 2012). In this sense, police drones are said to provide earth-bound police officers with a superior aerial vantage point in order to negotiate risks, threats, and disorders through the aerial distancing of subject and object. UAVs, enthusiasts therefore claim, provide much-needed public safety interventions by producing better state knowledge. This reproduces the commonsensical refrain that the state is "the knowing subject" (Neocleous, 2003), even though what is often taken as seeing better or morelegibility -is actually itself always a partial view, or a simplification and miniaturization that excludes other forms of knowledge (Scott, 1998). As Feldman (1997) states: "The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention" (Feldman 1997: 29).
It is not simply a detached aerial view of an entire city that is imagined by police, but also the ability to intervene on a local level. Much like air power in combat, the police pursuit of mastering the atmosphere converges with a desire for an "unblinking eye -an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt" (Adey et al, 2011: 179). No matter how high the UAV soars in order for the police to gain an ocular superiority, it is important to remember that since the aerial view is always tethered to the ground it is never merely ocular. Rather, it is a "vision that is practiced and touched" (Adey, 2010: 109). This touch, I suggest, is realized in the culmination of a particular form of organized suspicion, namely, the manhunt. Chamayou (2011) has recently argued that the aerial drone is the contemporary emblem of the militarized manhunt. Hence the foundational structure of the "war on terror" is not a Clauswitzian duel between states, but the asymmetrical hunt for human prey. Here we could mention the quite literal hunts for Bin Laden and other suspected insurgents, Saddam Hussein after the 2003 invasion, and of course the "targeted killings" of suspected enemies on a drone "kill list", including US citizens. Key to the chase is the process of identification leading the hunter to the location of the hunted for either capture or killing, but primarily for the latter. The hunt has been a central component of pacification and accumulation (Neocleous, this volume), and as already stated, the drone is the quintessential emblem of this new "manhunt doctrine" of contemporary warfare (Chamayou, 2011). The drone, …is the mechanical, flying and robotic heir of the dog of war. It creates to perfection the ideal of asymmetry: to be able to kill without being able to be killed; to be able to see without being seen. To become absolutely invulnerable while the other is placed in a state of absolute vulnerability. 'Predator', 'Global Hawk', 'Reaper' -birds of prey and angels of death, drones bear their names well (Chamayou, 2011).
The drone, then, is a technology of manhunting, and this is true whether the drone in question is solely capable of surveillance or one of the "hunter-killer" drones equipped with Hellfire missiles. The drone is oriented to both the "capture" of state-produced images and the capture of those marked as Other. Historically though, the statesanctioned manhunt has configured the animus of domestic policing more so than it has organized military violence abroad (see Chamayou, 2011;Neocleous, 2013b). That is, the state's deployment of the manhunt has historically belonged more to police than the military. Therefore, keeping with the argument made in the previous section that air power has long been police power, we can say that the unmanned military hunts so clearly important to the war on terror belong not only to the logic of war, but to the logic of police.
On this note, we might find it helpful to understand drones as not only a hunting technology in the service of external pacification, but a relation of domination animating the very heart of police power (Chamayou, 2012;Neocleous, 2013). A consideration of manhunting as an actual relation between dominant and dominated is to take seriously "technologies of predation indispensable for the establishment and reproduction of relationships of domination" (Chamayou, 2012: 1). As the "state's arm of pursuit, entrusted by it with tracking, arresting, and imprisoning", Chamayou (2012) writes, policing is a hunting institution claiming a "monopoly on legitimate tracking" and capture (89). Policing as a human hunting institution is grounded in the historical and routine workings of the police -patrolling, investigating, tracking, capturing, and even killing (Chamayou, 2012;Neocleous, this volume). Although the practice of the police manhunt is often associated with high-profile, media-driven pursuits, most recently observed with the organized hunts for ex-LAPD cop Christopher Dorner and the two Chechen-born brother suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, we should resist seeing the hunt as only or even primarily as a form of spectacle. That is, policing as fundamentally the practice of hunting human prey is best attested to by the routine, normalized, and hence often invisible, operation of police power. As one writer for a police magazine affirms, "Law enforcement exists to keep society safe from criminals, which means apprehending and arresting those who would do harm. Police manhunts for wanted criminals are daily occurrences throughout America and Canada. Most manhunts are routine police work and garner little public attention" (O'Brien 2009; emphasis mine). Because the manhunt is a practice of the powerful hunting the relatively powerless, the police hunt for human prey, like all forms of manhunting, performs a far-reaching asymmetry in terms of the resources and means of tracking (Chamayou, 2012), and this is epitomized by vertical security technologies such as the police helicopter and now the police drone.
Police drones extend the traditional police hunt in powerful ways by augmenting the grounded patrol agent with a vertical optic of advanced tracking technology. An unmanned systems editor for Janes Defence Weekly has stated that drones "could be used for anything you currently use a police helicopter for, so to follow a car chase, or to find a suspect who is hiding or for search and rescue missions. The cameras they carry can be very sophisticated, they can lock onto a car and follow it, without having someone constantly monitoring the pictures. They can then be transmitted back to police HQ" (Elgot, 2012). One Miami-Herald journalist, perhaps unwittingly but nevertheless tellingly, articulates police drones as manhunting technology when he writes that the local police drone has the capability of "training powerful lenses on its prey" (Rabin, 2011).
The website for Vanguard Industries offers a short video promoting their Shadowhawk to "public safety" agencies that positions the viewer to see from the aerial view as the unmanned system engages in mock scenarios of the police hunt. In one scenario, titled "Tactical Night Time Ops: Officer Directed to Suspect", the viewer observes thermal imaging technology illuminating a human body hiding in what appears to be a wooded area. Over the radio we hear the suspect referred to as a target, as the drone operator guides a terrestrial officer to the precise location of the hunted. We then see the officer, silhouette illuminated with his weapon drawn, approaching the suspect as the human prey kneels as the officer arrests -a hunt and then a capture. Interestingly, a Monmouth University survey (2012) found that 67% of US citizens supported the use of police drones to track down "runaway criminals" and 64% supported drones policing "illegal immigration".
To further push this argument we only need to consider that the move to weaponize police drones has already begun before the exclusively surveillance variety has become common in US skies. This is not all that surprising if we recall the bombings of Blair Mountain and MOVE headquarters, and more directly, the fact that military drones developed first as surveillance technologies and only later germinated into the hunterkiller drone. For example, the police version of the Shadowhawk can be armed with a taser and a stun baton. As one journalist reports: "The most relevant weapon for chasing fugitives might be the beanbag launcher. Its ammunition, though, isn't called a beanbag; it's a 'stun baton'". A Vanguard official stated: "You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft. A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect" (Moore, 2011) -here the coercive violence underpinning routine policing is buttressed by the capability to not only track but to literally capture with a potential debilitating blow to the hunted suspect. In a report on military UAV applications for domestic policing, two military researchers discuss a military training exercise experimenting with a "UAV non-lethal payload" that "is directly relevant to civilian police missions." Here they discuss that with little training, an individual agent was successful in dropping "smoke canisters, steel spikes for destroying tires, and propaganda leaflets, all with incredible precision" (Murphy and Cycon, no date provided). Although commonly mentioned police drone "payloads" are "less than lethal" such as tasers, tear gas, high-pitch sound weapons, and rubber bullets, it is not hard to imagine police drones with firearm capabilities -as the non-police version of the Shadowhawk is equipped with a 12-gauge shotgun and grenade launcher that has been deployed to hunt Somali "pirates" in the Gulf of Aden. Interestingly, this move to weaponize police drones coincides with the US military's increasing emphasis on weaponizing its own micro-UAVs -as exemplified with AeroVironment's Switchblade. In South Carolina, two agencies joined forces to create a surveillance drone that allegedly can also be weaponized, according to the Sheriff: "We do have the capability of putting a weapon on there if we needed to…We could put one on there. Hopefully we would never have to use it" (Talarico, 2011). In the candid language of a professional hunter of humans, the Sheriff stated, "This is an example of where jurisdictional boundaries are broken down for a criminal…Quite simply put, they can't run" (Talarico, 2011). Manhunts always risk a certain embarrassment for the state as they expose the state's failure of non-capture (Chamayou, 2012), and here we can see how police drones are imagined as one possibility of reducing this potential public humiliation.
Although drones are only just now emerging as domestic policing technology and therefore unmanned manhunts exist, as of now anyway, primarily in a police imaginary, there are already concrete examples of unmanned manhunts. In what is probably the first time a police drone actively assisted in the arrest of a suspect, in 2009 the Texas Department of Public Safety used the Wasp III to assist a SWAT team in executing a search warrant on a home that they believed had weapons and drugs inside and eventually the pursued man was arrested (Newton, 2011). In 2010 an unmanned hunt took place in Britain when a vehicle was allegedly stolen and one of the two suspects successfully outran police, who claimed to lose sight of the suspect in a thick fog. Merseyside police then deployed a small drone with body heat detection: "Using its thermal imaging equipment the device quickly located its target in bushes beside the canal through his body heat and relayed live pictures to a police van nearby. Foot patrols then went and arrested him" (Hull, 2010). The anti-social behavior taskforce official stated: "These arrests demonstrate the value of having something like the UAV." But the aerial hunt of domestic suspects is not monopolized by the police themselves, as attested to by the fact that in 2011 a US Predator drone assisted North Dakota police in the surveillance and arrest of cattle ranchers (Bennett, 2011). While looking for several missing cows on a 3, 000 acre farm, the county Sheriff was chased off the property by three men with rifles. The next day a Predator drone from the local air force base was called in, along with a SWAT team and bomb squad and additional officers from nearby departments. Flying 2 miles overhead, the Predator's powerful surveillance system was able to locate the ranchers and discern that they were unarmed -the 3 men were then arrested in a police raid (Bennett, 2011). Although this specific case of using military drones domestically was challenged in court, a judge controversially ruled in favor of the state (Koebler, 2012). Furthermore, following media reporting of this event, state authorities admitted that not only do Predator drones frequently assist this particular police department but that Predators are used in domestic investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) (Bennett, 2011). As the LA Times reports, "Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite "interior law enforcement support" as part of their mission" (Bennett, 2011). Similarly, it has been reported that military drone operators in Nevada have trained by practicing their aerial tracking techniques on civilian vehicles driving on US roadways. Upon observing this firsthand, a journalist inquired: ""Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?" A training exercise only, said the Air Force officer (Mazzetti, 2012).
This movement towards the unmanned hunt is also illustrated by what police say they are going to use them for. In Maryland, a police department stated in official FAA documents that a drone would be deployed to aerially monitor "people of interest (watching open drug market transactions before initiating an arrest)" as well as "aerial observation of houses when serving warrants", the searching for marijuana fields, and search and rescue missions. Similarly, an Arkansas department has stated in FAA documents that their drone is equipped with powerful infrared and zoom cameras that can pan and tilt in order to "track objects of interest even when the helicopter's nose is pointed away from the object." Montgomery County police's Shadowhawk will be used to "enhance and support tactical operations", such as "SWAT and narcotics operations will utilize camera and FLIR systems to provide real time area surveillance of the target during high risk operations." Alabama police purchased a drone "In response to the need for situational awareness and intelligence" that will be deployed "in response to a specific dedicated law enforcement mission in a defined area" such as "covert surveillance of drug transactions" along with "pre-operational planning and surveillance, maintaining operational security, and obtaining evidentiary video". In Ogden City, Utah, a small city with just over 82,000 residents, local authorities asked the FAA to approve, although ultimately denied, the use of a "nocturnal surveillance airship" that would provide "law enforcement of high crime areas" with hopes of identifying "suspicious activity." 3 As these examples clearly demonstrate, the police themselves articulate the police drone as first and foremost tracking and pursuit technology -not a technology only for an abstract aerial view, but a grounded, normalized police practice of targeting. This clearly provides the police a powerful new tool to track and capture whoever it deems suspicious, yet the drone imaginary outlined above -"criminals", "fugitives", drugs, "high crime areas", "suspicious activity" -predict that policing's unmanned manhunt is predisposed to tracking and capturing the poor and downtrodden.
Unmanned hunting never exists outside of the political, economic, and cultural configurations that form subjects as objects. "Seeing more only means having more suspects", as Knechtel puts it (2006: 21). In other words, drone systems are incapable of an impartial objectivity, but rather perform a "techno-cultural production of targets" (Gregory 2011, 173) where institutional mandates, cultural logics, political rationalities, and technological limits circumscribe the very rules of delivering state surveillance and violence. Today the drone is the quintessential visual prosthetic that forges political subjects asymmetrically through the narrow optics of tracking and targeting measurements and the contextual deficiencies of political economy and cultural inscriptions. Unmanning the police manhunt is loaded with violence regardless of individual drone capability as they only exist in relation to the broader organizational animus of state power.
The founding act of police was the hunting of the poor, vagrants, beggars and the colonized (Chamayou, 2012;Neocleous, 2013b; see also Sheldon, 2008). This history still weighs on the present, and the drone needs to be situated within this history, a history which is, in effect, the history of pacification. Let me finish with a recent experience to highlight this point.
While I was amongst a group of police officers one day, an officer brought up how he had recently watched on CNN a police helicopter hunt down a fleeing suspect. This quickly morphed into a brief comment on police helicopters, specifically how the LAPD air units notoriously instill fear into residents. Yet this quickly then morphed into how, as one officer stated, in the near future aerial drones would be the preferred choice for providing vertical security. Another officer, echoing media reports, expressed how micropolice drones would be able to fit in the trunk of a patrol car and deployed at the officers whim. On this, one officer joked how he would like to someday intentionally crash his hypothetical drone into what is essentially the "ghetto" part of the city in order to literally wipe them "off the map", while the other officers laughed at the thought.
As this example suggests, and as Chamayou (2012) argues, the hunt has long induced great pleasure in those doing the hunting while the hunted prey exists and moves through space in a constant state of anxiety, largely due to the "radical dissymmetry" in the technologies of tracking. For those living under the drone stare in warzones abroad, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Occupied Territories, fear and nightmares define their experience. Although it is too early to completely understand the specific ways police drones might also induce fear and terror into citizens of the Global North, the alarm and dread produced by police helicopters in the vertical patrolling of urban space is a useful parallel that points to the affective trepidation potentially provoked in a near future with ubiquitous unmanned policing. In many ways, even those bourgeois communities and citizens usually eclipsed from the police gaze will come under the stare of unmanned policing, to the extent that air power obliterates any useful distinctions between suspect and bystander, target and non-target. As one LA journalist wrote in 1992, "Hearing LAPD helicopters circle overhead is a nightly phenomenon over much of the Los Angeles basin, even in middle-class neighborhoods like my own…the helicopters contribute to the perception that something is very wrong with this city". He continues: Their circular flight patterns have a way of making people feel as if they're smack in the center of a crime drama. They get under people's skin in a way that the soaring crime statistics can't…every time the helicopters hover and circle overhead I'm reminded of my anxieties. I was insecure before the Los Angeles riots. Now the sight and sound of helicopters above compounds the tension (Strausser, 1992).
If this is the case for this seemingly privileged journalist, it is certainly true that the captives of wage labor, the dispossessed, perpetually hunted poor will burden the brunt of any aerially-induced terror and fear. The aerially-induced anxiety of the police helicopter hunt is best depicted in the rapper Ice Cube's song, "Ghetto Bird", where he writes "Why, oh why must you swoop through the hood like everybody from the hood is up to no good" and "Run, run, run from the ghetto bird Run". This is not meant to jeopardize the suffering of those who are "living and dying under drones" by the hunter-killer Predators and Reapers by turning their suffering into "our own". But it is to suggest that domestic policing's unmanned manhunt is also circumscribed by not dissimilar relations of domination that is generative of its own peculiar patterns of physical and psychic insecurity.
I am arguing, then, that the police drone underlines the power relations between those that are dominated and those that do the dominating, the hunted and the hunters. Within this relation stand the everyday hunters that are the police. The rise of police drones makes more perceptible this radical asymmetry between the techniques of the hunters and the hunted, or brings this relation of domination to the forefront, in similar but in even more dramatic fashion than the SWAT team or armored vehicle. As a nascent verticality organizing state suspicion, tracking, and capture, the unmanning of the police manhunt is but the newest symbolic marker of the pacification project that the poor and oppressed have been living and dying with all along. But the very notion of pacification always presupposes populations that resist and is therefore never a completed, fulfilled project (Rigakos, 2011).