Drones as “Atmospheric Policing”: From US Border Enforcement to the LAPD

The use of drones to supplement and operationalize US border enforcement and municipal policing disturbs the supposed boundary between military and civilian or battleground and home front. Situating drones in an expanded field of a war power–police power nexus draws together histories of so-called small wars, insurgencies, civil rebellions, labor strikes, prison uprisings, and practices of resistance at various scales that have responded and continue to respond to colonial occupation and racial capitalism. Once we situate drones as a technology of atmospheric policing, we develop a better understanding of the ways these assemblages converge with other forms of atmospheric violence, including the toxic colonial present of warfare.