“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party to make sure if the call is founded or not,” Daughtry told reporters. “And we’ll be able to determine how many resources we need to send to that location for this weekend.”
The drones deployed Thursday night through Monday will be able to broadcast computer-generated voice messages or live messages from an NYPD commander, Daughtry said. He added that a police drone was used to help clear out thousands from Manhattan’s Washington Square Park after the city’s Gay Pride parade in June.
But the NYPD’s plan to use drones to monitor backyard parties at private residences has drawn backlash from residents and civil-rights advocates who say that law enforcement’s drone usage this weekend is potentially violating existing laws for police surveillance.
In 2020, New York passed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which requires the NYPD to publish any new way that it plans to use new surveillance technology, including drones, 90 days ahead of time so the public has a chance to comment on the change. A 2021 document published by the NYPD on how it uses drones states that the unmanned aircraft would be used in instances such as “search and rescue operations, documentation of collisions and crime scenes, evidence searches at large inaccessible scenes.” Nowhere in the NYPD document does it say that drones can be used to monitor large backyard parties.
“This is really alarming,” Albert Fox Cahn, the 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.”
Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Associated Press that the announcement from the NYPD “flies in the face of the POST Act.”
“Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario,” he said.
The planned use of police drones at Labor Day weekend parties in New York comes as Mayor Eric Adams (D) has stressed in recent months how law enforcement and other agencies in the city should continue to embrace the “endless” potential of drones. Adams, a former police captain, has touted Israel’s high-tech security drones as a blueprint for New York to follow after the mayor visited Tel Aviv.
“We’re paving the way for the future use of drones here in our everyday lives, not just in emergency situations,” Adams said in July as he unveiled updated guidelines to “allow responsible drone usage” among private drone operators in the city.
At no point during the July event did Adams, New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban or Bob Barrows, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives, mention an update regarding the NYPD’s drone surveillance at private residences, according to a transcript posted by the mayor’s office. The guidelines published in July do not address if the NYPD has any policies in regard to drone surveillance.
A spokesman with the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning. An NYPD spokesman on Friday referred The Post to the statements made at Thursday’s news conference.
New York is among the many U.S. cities that are deploying drones to aid police and help make their jobs more efficient. About 1,400 police departments across the country are using drones in some fashion, according to a July report from the American Civil Liberties Union. While federal rules state that police departments are generally limited to flying drones within the operator’s line of sight, the ACLU noted that law enforcement’s use of surveillances drones is “poised to explode, along with other police uses of the technology.”
Law enforcement has also had to grapple with growing concerns about privacy that come with increased drone surveillance and potential complications they could create for officers on the job.
The announcement in New York came as part of a security briefing that mainly focused on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival marking the end of slavery. The festival, which has thousands of people lining the streets of Brooklyn, has had a heavy police presence in recent years. There were three shootings at festival gatherings in the Flatbush and Crown Heights neighborhoods in 2022 and 27 guns were seized by police, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said at the news conference.
Daughtry said the police had success with aerial surveillance in June after a drone broadcast a message to about 4,000 people in Washington Square Park to celebrate Pride.
“Believe it or not, people actually turned down their radios, looked up, heard the announcement, and the park cleared in about 10 minutes,” he told reporters.
Chell downplayed the concerns surrounding people’s privacy with drones responding to large, private parties over the holiday weekend.
“For anyone who thinks they’re going to come into this community this weekend with bad intentions, we all here stand together and we say not this weekend, nor any other weekends,” Chell said. “Our police officers will be diligent, visible and some won’t be visible.”
Cahn, the privacy advocate in New York, disagreed with that assessment, telling The Post that the planned drone surveillance of large gatherings, including private ones, is a step too far. That isn’t stopping Cahn from attending what are expected to be a couple big parties in Brooklyn over the weekend, but the NYPD’s initiative for drones to potentially crash gatherings filled with burgers and beer has made him question how private anyone’s home will be moving forward.
“It’s really horrifying that we’re at the point where we have to worry about how we’ll be misunderstood in our own backyard,” he said.
Danielle Abril contributed to this report.
