How is buying a million dollar drone, hiring an operator, and paying for fuel a better option than putting a cop out?
Cops aren't cheap, there is a serious outlay between recruitment fees, training fees, equipment fees, health insurance, pension allocations, salary and management overhead. Then there's the ancillary costs, they gotta have equipment outside of their service weapon and uniform like the cruiser, the radar gun, etc...
Not only that, but that 5% you say, which I think is closer to 30%, will abuse this technology and fuck with us. Give an inch and they take a mile. No thanks.
If I think the corruption rate is <5% and you think it's ~30% we'll most likely never come to a consensus on the place of law enforcement in our society, so be it. But fwiw, if we had 30% corruption I think we would have a society that functions more on the level like that of mexico.
But also, I'm curious to what you define "fuck with us" as. Do you mean the operators would just hover around looking for people skinny dipping in pools, or if they found a pot field they would shake the grower down instead of busting it, cops with petty vendettas following ex wives? I just can't see precluding technology from law enforcement over some ambiguous sense of dread.
Cops don't sit around waiting for that one piece of tech that makes them think "finally, with this (drones, wire taps, heat scanners, etc...), I can start being evil, which is why I joined law enforcement so long ago to begin with." The cops who were going to do crooked shit did it before drones, and the ones that were clean will stay clean despite drones.