The NYPD Is Sending Drones to the Sites of 9-1-1 Calls

Yahoo

22-03-2025

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is now sending drones out on 9-1-1 calls to do the business that their Candy Crush-addicted human officers are too busy to tackle — and surveilling everyone in sight while they do it.
As the cybersecurity news site The Record reports, these "drones as first responders" — or DFRs, as the NYPD calls them — can fly up to 45 miles per hour, filming everything on the block with telephoto cameras that can, per manufacturer Skydio, identify faces and license plates from nearly a mile away.
Launched last year as part of embattled mayor Eric Adams' quest to shove technology into everything regardless of public opinion, these drones were initially only going to respond to "select priority public safety calls," according to a press release issued last November that formally announced the program.
As The Record notes, however, the NYPD's definition of "select priority" seems awfully vague — and it doesn't actually report how many drones are deployed on police calls, either.
Prior to the program's official launch, the department revealed that they planned to use drones to monitor house parties that receive noise complaints over Labor Day Weekend in 2023, which also coincides with J'Ouvert festivities that take place in New York's Caribbean communities. In fact, that festival was cited specifically by a former NYPD commissioner who called the drones a "wonderful thing."
If shelling out for party-surveilling drones seems to you like a misuse of taxpayer funds, you're not alone. In an interview with The Guardian in 2023, a senior strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union called the NYPD's drone usage "dystopian" and a form of "racialized discrimination."
Now that their use has been expanded to do more than just allowing cops to be remote spectators at peoples' backyard parties, those epithets feel prescient.
Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement can legally surveil anyone's outdoor property without a warrant via drone, the NYPD has followed suit. Per NYPD policy, drones aren't allowed to operate inside a property warrantless, but outside doesn't count, basically.
As constitutional rights lawyer Sidney Thaxter told The Record, that means the NYPD could film someone in their backyard — and because the department's Skydio drones are equipped with telephoto lenses, they could do so from a high enough altitude that anyone who wasn't looking at the sky wouldn't notice the lurking aircraft.
"They can set a drone up in the air far enough away that you can't hear it," Thaxter said, "and they can zoom in and can literally see what's in your hands."
While we don't know exactly how often the NYPD is using their drones, the department has already bragged about deploying them to help them surveil protests and the people demonstrating at them in recent years. After protests erupted across the city in response to the conflict in Gaza, police boasted to the press that they'd used drones 13 times to make a whopping 239 arrests — all in a single week, and all in Brooklyn.
"We got the whole thing on video," assistant NYPD commissioner Kaz Daughtry said, referring to pro-Palestinian protesters who were caught on video throwing eggs and bottles at cops during an October 2021 demonstration in South Brooklyn. "We'll be turning that evidence over to the Brooklyn DA's office to help enhance the arrests."
Amid a larger culture of crackdowns on freedom of speech in New York and around the country, this kind of drone use does indeed feel dystopian — or, as Albert Fox Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project put it to The Record, as if the NYPD was treating "Black Mirror" as an "instruction manual."
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