Seems like a pretty good use case for lasers as you can generally hit only what your aiming out, and you don't have any explosive and/or metal shrapnel falling back down into populated areas.
Blasting the drone out of the sky is probably not the best option. Drones are becoming more popular for legitimate uses like photography, farming, and maybe deliveries in the future. Without knowing what the drone is carrying, it would be hard to determine which ones should be shot down and which are serving some legitimate purpose.
For that reason, I think the ideal solution would involve capturing the drone somehow, maybe with a net of some kind. Innocent drones could be marked with contact information, allowing them to be returned to their owner in the event that they are mistakenly captured.
As an added benefit, harmlessly capturing the drone would provide more useful evidence for the police investigating drug crimes.
>and you don't have any explosive and/or metal shrapnel falling back down into populated areas.
... if and only if the laser completely obliterates the target, which requires a fair bit more power and precision than a disabling shot.
I was mainly speaking to the anti-aircraft weapon's addition shrapnel, rather than the drone itself. It's pretty hard to shoot down a drone without, ah, having the drone fall down. You can try some sort of hack, or radio blackout, but those are pretty easy to defeat.
But most modern AA weapons have tremendous velocities and are often explosive. Even after losses due to air resistance, AA shrapnel can come with with lethal velocities. I was told by somebody I trust that the Baghdad suffered more damage in financial terms from AA fallout than the actual US air strikes in the first US/Iraq war.
For that reason, I think the ideal solution would involve capturing the drone somehow, maybe with a net of some kind. Innocent drones could be marked with contact information, allowing them to be returned to their owner in the event that they are mistakenly captured.
As an added benefit, harmlessly capturing the drone would provide more useful evidence for the police investigating drug crimes.