A hot potato: See! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s an airplane! It’s… a police drone spying on our backyard grill? For New York City residents celebrating Labor Day this weekend, this could be a very real scenario.
New York police have announced plans to send drones into the sky this bank holiday weekend to monitor backyard parties that could get out of control.
“If a caller indicates there is a large crowd or a large party in a backyard, we will use our assets to check on the party.” said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry at a recent press conference.
Of course, the admission caught the attention of privacy and civil liberties advocates, who questioned whether the ministry’s plans violate existing surveillance laws in the region.
“Using drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario,” said Daniel Schwarz, technology and privacy strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. It was a worrying announcement, Schwarz added, that contradicted public oversight of surveillance technology (POST) act.
In its Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Policy: Impact and Use Policy as of 2021, the New York City Police Department stated that drones without a search warrant would not be used in areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, except in urgent circumstances. Are backyard parties really that urgent?
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (TO STOP), expressed similar views. “One of the biggest concerns in the rush to roll out new forms of aerial surveillance is how little protection we have from seeing these cameras pointed at our backyards or even our bedrooms,” Cahn noted.
As the Associated Press points out, the use of drones by New York City police has grown exponentially this year. City data shows that drones will only be used four times in 2022 for public safety or emergencies. They have been used 124 times so far this year and that number is sure to increase over the upcoming bank holiday weekend.
The problem isn’t limited to New York City, either. According to a July 2023 report ACLUMore than 1,400 law enforcement agencies in the United States are already using drones. Most are not permitted to operate drones outside of their line of sight, although some authorities have applied for and been granted special permits allowing them to conduct drone flights as first responders.
Photo credit: Adika Budiman, Mario Cuadros