Police to Use Drones Over Labor Day Weekend to Monitor Parties
Outdoor parties in New York City this weekend could attract an unseen visitor in the form of a surveillance drone, city officials have announced, spurring angry responses from privacy advocates.
“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in the backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up, to go check on the party, to make sure if the call is founded or not,” Kaz Daughtry, assistant NYPD commissioner, said, according to The New York Times.
“And we will be able to determine how many resources we need to send to that location for this weekend,” Daughtry said, according to the New York Post.
The announcement came amid a discussion of security for the 56th annual West Indian American Day parade and J’Ouvert festival.
Last year, there were three shootings at festival-related gatherings in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn. Police seized 27 guns during the events, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, according to The Washington Post.
The New York Times noted the events draw about 2 million people.
“Now for anyone who thinks they’re gonna come into this community this weekend with bad intentions, we all here stand together and we say not this weekend, nor any other weekends. Our police officers will be diligent, visible, and some won’t be visible,” Chell said according to the New York Post.
Privacy advocates are outraged.
“This is really alarming,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told The Washington Post. “A plan to send drones into people’s backyards just for having a barbecue should have never gotten off the ground. This is incredibly invasive and downright creepy.”
“Deploying surveillance drones over New Yorkers gathering with their friends and families to celebrate J’Ouvert is racialized discrimination, and it doesn’t make us safer,” said Daniel Schwarz of the New York Civil Liberties Union, according to the Times.
“As the NYPD keeps deploying these dystopian technologies, we must push for stricter guardrails — especially given the department’s lengthy history of surveilling and policing black and brown communities.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he embraces the new step.
“We have to push back on the sci-fi aspects of drones. No one’s going to be monitoring what you’re talking about, your conversation,” he said, according to the Times.
“What we’re doing over this weekend, there are a number of calls of loud music, disruptive behavior. Instead of the police having to respond and look at those, they’re going to utilize drones from a safe distance up, not down, flying into someone’s backyard to see what someone has on the grill,” Adams said on New York City’s website.
“We want to utilize this technology to complement our crisis management team, complement our police personnel and respond appropriately and be able to respond in record time.”
However, Cahn told the Times he was not convinced.
“This is ripe for abuse,” he said. “The mayor keeps doing this. Whenever there’s something that might generate a bad headline, he looks for some technological gimmick that can fix it.
“Camera systems sometimes can be helpful in investigating crimes, but they’re really ineffective as a deterrent.
“We continue to have police peddling the myth that their technology somehow will magically keep us safe, when in fact, it’s long-term structural investments in public safety that are proven to be effective.”
Chell said drones can be deployed effectively.
“We can get the drones there quicker than a police car. They could spot out what the situation is from overhead and give us a heads-up of what we’re looking at,” he told WPIX-TV.
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