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Drones Cost $28,000 Per Arrest, On Average

Posted by Soulskill on from the tag-and-release-even-more-expensive dept.

mpicpp sends this report from CNN: They are sleek, mostly silent converted weapons of war: Drones used by the Border Patrol to scan the skies in the empty deserts of the Southwest to spot illegal immigrants and then, if things work out, have agents arrest them. That's the idea, and the agents who use them say the drones give them a vantage point they never had before. Flying at 18,000 feet, the drones view the landscape below, lock onto potential suspects crossing the Arizona desert, and agents on the ground move into make the arrests. But it's outrageously expensive: $28,000 for a single arrest.

5 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is that really a lot? by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    well considering that minimum wage for yearly is something around $22,283 then yeah 28k is a bit expensive. let's say that the employer costs are double what the employee gets.

    yes, you could hire guys with motorbikes and have them drive around 6 months to catch one guy per one hired guy EASY.

    it's friggin expensive thats what it is. besides, borders aren't that hard to keep. for some reason russia-finnish border keeps people from getting over it illegally very, very tight - and it's wilderness for most part. though russians are very very keen to keep Russians from coming over..

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Wrong kind of metric... by fraxinus-tree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The metric "$ per suspect catched" is pretty much meaningless. If they have 1 suspect for the whole year and do arrest him, the cost per arrest will be their yearly budget - and guess what? The border still needs to be guarded. The important numbers would be the the cost increase/decrease vs drone-less operation and the percent of trespassers missed.

  3. Yeah, but... by StikyPad · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Can you really put a price on oppression? Not everything has to be about the bottom line.

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    https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  4. But drones are so kewl by wcrowe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At first glance I was prepared to say, "Expensive compared to what?" I was initially prepared to support the drone program. But when I read TFA and got some details, I think it would be fair to say that this drone program is something of a failure.

    The border is always in the same place, and therefore the same areas are being patrolled. You don't need a drone to do that. Couldn't you practically accomplish the same thing with observation blimps at a much lower cost? Sure, it doesn't quite have the same "cool" factor, but I would wager it could get the job done.

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    Proverbs 21:19
  5. If we are going to do numbers that way..... by kosh271 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Should we start analyzing the US military's cost per kill of enemy combatants last year?