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Police in Poland use drones in aerial busts of law-breaking drivers

Motorists around the world have been forced to adapt their ill-advised bending of rules of the road to the spreading presence of tech’s cop proxies – whether cameras capturing red light burners, or fixed radar boxes photographing the plates of speeding cars. Drones have also been added to that police enforcement mix, as law-breaking drivers in Poland have now painfully discovered.

Video from police drones in Poland adds insult to busted driver injury

If handing out fistfuls of moving violations with the help of drones wasn’t bad enough, police in Poland recently uploaded a YouTube video of drivers ratted out by the craft being pulled over to boot. In it, a drone was positioned over a stretch of road whose solid dividing lines clearly prohibit passing. Any such illegal act of impatience was viewed on the controller by cops tucked behind trees a bit farther on. As errant motorists approached, officers in high-viz vests high-tailed from their hiding spot to flag the guilty to the side of the road. With the drone hovering too far back and high to see or hear, apprehended drivers were left stumped about how they’d been found out.

To make things worse, the officers seeming to step out of nowhere with ticket books in hand appear to be rather pleased with their vehicular crime fighting ruse. Take special note of the perceptible swagger of the cops who bag two motorized birds with one drone stone: the car that sought to pass illegally, and the other that refused to cede passage.

In text accompanying the video, the Fuzzski explains their drone use to clean up messy habits of local drivers.

Police officers from the SPEED WRD KWP group in Olsztyn during a July operation using a police uncrewed aerial vehicle recording, among others: failure to comply with road signs, use of a telephone while driving, incorrect securing of a transported load, riding a motorcycle on one wheel, incorrect passing, and failure to comply with the illicit passing attempt.

That had to fill the local ticket quotas in Olsztyn for a while.

Deployment of drones by police in Poland to catch squirrelly drivers is only the most recent way forces around the world have been using the craft in enforcement. Cops in the UK began using drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras to bust law-breaking motorists in 2019. Authorities in Australia added road surveillance to the other ways they’d been using drones for policing, specifically to crack down on illegal street racing that had become a summer fad among misguided youths.

Police in the US have also been free to pilot drones to enforce road laws since a Federal Aviation Administration decision in 2016 okayed that. However, requirements that those be restricted to visual line of sight have limited the range of driver-spying American cops – making fixed position traps like traffic light cameras or radar stakeouts more common.

But as Olsztyn coppers might ask, what’s the point of busting reckless drivers from a distance when getting right in their faces via drone is so much fun?

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Avatar for Bruce Crumley Bruce Crumley

Bruce Crumley is journalist and writer who has worked for Fortune, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, The Guardian, AFP, and was Paris correspondent and bureau chief for Time magazine specializing in political and terrorism reporting. He splits his time between Paris and Biarritz, and is the author of novel Maika‘i Stink Eye.