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Here are some tips to minimize your stress and anxiety during your contact with the police and at the same time give you some insight into the concerns and procedures of the officers.

Barry Friedman (excerpted): “There was a group of us that were just concerned that as well as we could design this, and if designed well, as much as we believed it was something the world could benefit from, we couldn’t trust the overall variance in policing to make this a commercially viable product.”

Brancaccio: Now, the ideas seemed to fall out of the headlines last year. Do you have any indication it might be gaining traction here in 2023?

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Temple-Raston: Now, I should say here that Friedman is also the faculty director of the Policing Project at NYU Law. So he’s studied this a lot. And he said that the board just ended up thinking that the entire concept of weaponized drones was a little too dystopian.

Dina Temple-Raston: Well, at the root of it is they weren’t sure that officers could be trusted to use a Taser drone properly. There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. And the concern was that there wouldn’t be enough of a check. Here’s the former chair of that ethics board, Barry Friedman.

A few years ago, a law enforcement tech company called Axon asked its own artificial intelligence ethics board for input on the project. The board spent a year studying a prototype program and decided putting a taser on a drone was not a good idea. Some weeks later, after the mass shooting at the school in Uvalde, Texas, Axon decided to keep what some call the “shock drone” alive.

David Brancaccio: You got ahold of a document, an internal report from this Axon ethics board. Why was this board so concerned in this report, so concerned about this Taser drone operation?

With Axon’s public safety convention — dubbed Tasercon — going on this week, Marketplace’s David Brancaccio checked in with investigative journalist Dina Temple-Raston, host of the podcast “Click Here” about the world of tech security. She obtained new details about the original ethics reports.

Temple-Raston: It has. I mean, this is something that Axon CEO Rick Smith first brought up in the aftermath of Uvalde. And we spoke to another AI ethics board member about this — she’s a community organizer in Chicago, and her name is Mecole Jordan-McBride. And she said that when you looked at it closely, even the idea of putting drones in schools just didn’t make sense. Here’s what she said.

Temple-Raston: And the surveillance question is something that kept coming up as the board talked about this as well. These drones would require a host of cameras and other surveillance tools that a lot of people say don’t belong in schools and are an incredible invasion of privacy.

Mecole Jordan-McBride (excerpted): “So now we’re talking about literally putting a drone in every single school across America. I thought about the amount of money that would be, I thought about the over-surveillance of that.”

The police officer does not wish to detain you any longer than necessary. Once the officer is able to determine that you are not the individual that he or she is looking for, the officer will often apologize for the inconvenience and then quickly leave to resume the search.

Innocent individuals are often offended or angered, or both, because an officer has detained them for questioning. Although the delay might be inconvenient for you, the officer believes there is a reason (reasonable suspicion) to stop you and ask questions. Most of these stops are not officer-initiated.

There’s a real debate over the ethics of putting tasers on small, maneuverable, flying objects to be able to subdue dangerous people — and then trying to use these drones to protect schools.

NOTE: The Texas A&M University-Central Texas Department of Public Safety does not condone police misconduct of any type. In our experience, we have learned that those negative feelings are often a result of not knowing the reason(s) an officer has made certain requests or acted in a certain manner. Unfortunately, demands on a patrol officer do not always permit time for explanations at the time you are stopped. Hopefully, the information presented here will give you an understanding of police procedures and let you know what to expect from a police officer if you are stopped.

Dina Temple-Raston: Well, Axon hosted a conference in Las Vegas this week, they call it something called Tasercon. And the CEO helped lead a presentation on drones during this conference. And he said that Axon had partnered with a number of drone companies. And then separately, they’ve announced that they’ve been engaging teachers and school administrators on the idea. Now we should mention that Axon didn’t agree to an interview with us. But they did say in a statement that “school drones” is still just an idea and not a product yet, and that it’s a ways away. But based on the company’s announcements and public posture the idea of Taser drones certainly isn’t dead yet.