California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations.
A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks. From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department’s special fireworks task force patrolled the streets with unmarked cars and drones, focusing on neighborhoods where they’ve had prior complaints. Task force officers and the drones took photos of the illegal activity, and within 30 days the property owner where the fireworks were used could receive a fine in the mail.
Next year’s move is to mount the illegal fireworks to your own drone and hunt theirs out of the sky.
This new series of Battlebots sounds pretty entertaining.
This is nice in theory since everybody hates those assholes at 1am lighting off fireworks still. But, using a drone to find people in the dark, identify them, and fine them, there is so much worse shit this will be used for. And we won’t be happy when the fascists come knocking bcz of this technology. We reap what we sow i guess.
Facial recognition technology being used for surveillance is awful, I agree, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here? It seems like they’re just pointing a camera at fireworks, and identifying the property they came from.
Cops with camera drones are also a problem, but it’s not like they’d need anything special you can’t already get off the shelf to do this.
I miss the days when the obnoxious fireworks were illegal in my state :sigh:
This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There’s no limit to how many fines you can be issued.
“If we see multiple fireworks being used at a single property, we can stack the violations based upon how many fireworks they’re using,” SFD Fire Marshal Jason Lee told KCRA. “So, it could be thousands of dollars per location.”
Hell yeah. Keep me awake till 3 am with your constant “boom boom boom”, that’s gonna cost ya. The only thing that would make this story better is if after a certain threshold, they bring in armed Predator drones.
If I’m coming off a bit cranky, it’s because I’ve barely slept in 4 days.
There was a drone (prop plane type, not quadcopter) flying over neighborhoods for a while on the 4th, wouldn’t surprise me if it was from the city to catch people. This being in Ohio.
Like, i get it; first few 4th of julys after I turned 18 i bought fireworks too, and it was fun. At a certain point the novelty wore off and it was stupid and dangerous, and i was literally blowing hundreds of dollars for no real reason.
How about huge dunes for tax dollars going to violations of the constituents 4th amendment rights?
If you’re setting off fireworks, you have no expectation of privacy.
It’s shouting “look at me!” for miles around.
Seriously. I hate when people who have no idea how the law works start throwing around the Constitution. Like how is it “unreasonable search and seizure” for the government to use cameras to see who’s setting off literal sky-high explosives in their backyard? That definitely falls under the realm of ‘reasonable’ govt actions lol
Plus it’s outside where there already is t an expectation of privacy? It’s always been legal in the US to take photos from the street/sky for evidence
Which part of “persons, houses, papers, and effects”, any even any kind of private property, is the air above your house?
I get that wild fires are a concern, but seriously, CA. Lighten up
Try living with AQI above 200 for a while. Your attitude might change when it becomes hard to breathe .
I don’t live in CA.
Sorry. I’m not a moron
Enjoy your fascism, though
“I’m not a moron“
You may want to have that checked.
Yup, stopping people from burning down large portions of the state is definitely fascism.
They’re kidnapping people off the streets and throwing them into concentration camps but that’s what you call fascism?
I stubbed my toe earlier. Damn fascists.
Part of why I hate MAGAts/conservitards is when they say incredibly stupid shit like this. 6 million californians voted for the orange fascist in 2024. Literally only 19 states have populations bigger than 6 million. You hate CA, a place where there are more republicans than there are people in the entire state of South Carolina or Alabama or Louisiana, I could go on…
