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I chair the tech and garden committees at the PTA at my kids' elementary school in Brooklyn, a small, Title 1 (the majority of the families are poor) school with limited resources. A couple months ago the PTA gave money for expensive self-watering planter boxes, flowers, hoses, and other gardening implements to improve the austere, institutional exterior, which resembles a prison. As we discovered this morning, some of the flowers, boxes, and hoses were stolen over Memorial Day weekend.
Since planter boxes must be outside, and the thief must be in the neighborhood to know the boxes are there, it occurred to me that they must be visible from the air and perhaps a camera drone with decent range could be used to recover the stolen property and put a stop to thefts that will surely continue if we merely replace what was lost.
Ideally I imagine flying it from the flat roof of my 4-story apartment building to search in a .5 mile to 1 mile radius, with roughly 30 minutes of flying time and a "go home" feature if it loses contact with the controller or runs too low on battery.
Are there drone aficionados in the SN community who can speak to the feasibility of such a project and/or can recommend models to buy?
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:07PM
The planter troughs are unusual, and visibly distinctive from the brands that Lowes and Home Depot, the two home supply stores in the area, carry. They also have the water meter that protrudes from the top [edgesuite.net] of the box so you can see how much water is in the reservoir and if it needs re-filling. They're also planted with 4 blue pansies (the school colors are yellow and blue) that haven't been in Lowes or Home Depot for 6 weeks (and the gardening committee wishes they had, in order to replace the original single plants that presumably the same thief had dug out of the troughs and stolen from the school 3 weeks ago). So, if we see a planter like ours, with the water meter, planted with 4 blue pansies with red mulch, hanging on somebody's fire escape or back patio, I think it merits a knock on the door from the cops. Especially since we're talking about a schmuck who's stealing from a school where poor kids go. Does it constitute an open-and-shut case? No, but then we're more interested in deterring repeat theft than in necessarily getting the planter trough itself back, and a visit from the police might do that.
No, it doesn't. Let's say that the stolen item was an electric blue Ducati. It gets stolen from you, and you walk down the alleys in your neighborhood and see it sitting on someone else's back patio. Does the thief get a get-out-of-jail-free card because it's sitting on his property? Can he invalidate your claim of theft because you saw it sitting on his property? Of course not. You call the police, tell them you saw it sitting on your neighbor's patio, and they serve the guy with a search warrant and arrest him if they find the bike. Let's take it a step further and say that you can see the bike sitting inside his house through his sliding glass doors. Can you still report its location to the police in response to your original complaint? Of course you can.
There are no alleyways in this part of Brooklyn, or we certainly could walk down them. On my block, I can go to the roof of my building, which is slightly taller than most, and see down into all the neighbors' back yards. Can I be arrested or sued for doing that? No, of course not. And if I do that and see that the guy on the corner has what looks like the stolen property, can I report it to the police? Of course I can.
Using a drone is the same thing, looking at the exterior of a house at something that is plainly viewable, except that it's using propellers to gain that elevation in the x-axis instead of huffing up 4 flights of stairs.
Washington DC delenda est.