New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday unveiled a drone committee aimed at bolstering law enforcement operations, aligning with a broader trend among the nation’s largest cities of embracing drone technology.
Adams appointed Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry to lead the committee, which leaders heralded as a task force designed to cement New York City’s “position as a national leader in leveraging cutting-edge technology.” As cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles increasingly turn to drones to enhance public safety, Adams announced New York City’s latest effort would coordinate drone operations across key agencies, including the police, fire, emergency management, parks, buildings, and environmental protection departments.
“New Yorkers deserve to know that when there’s an emergency — whether it’s a terror threat, a protest, or a natural disaster — our administration is using every tool available to keep them safe,” Adams said in a statement. “Drones are the future of public safety, and under Deputy Mayor Daughtry’s leadership, New York City’s first-ever Drone Operations Committee will take this technology to the next level.”
The Drone Operations Committee will serve as an extension of several initiatives already used by law enforcement agencies monitoring over 8 million residents in the city. The New York Police Department’s “Drone as First Responder” initiative, launched last November, allows drones to deploy from police precincts and arrive at scenes within minutes. The police department has rolled out a series of other initiatives using the aerial technology in recent years, including moves to deploy drones instead of police officers during Labor Day weekend in 2023 in response to complaints about large gatherings. This has led to privacy concerns from civil rights groups such as the ACLU.
Los Angeles
Adams’s latest embrace of drones comes as New York City fights to lead the country in using the cutting-edge technology for law enforcement.
However, other major cities are giving him a run for his money.
In Los Angeles, which has nearly 4 million residents, authorities announced last month that they would allow the Los Angeles Police Department to deploy drones on routine emergency calls.
While the department’s nine drones were previously restricted to a narrow set of dangerous or tactical situations, most involving barricaded suspects or explosives, the Los Angeles Police Commission’s new guidelines allow the devices to be used in other situations, including “calls for service,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
“This policy change is aimed at bringing our department in line with our peer agencies across the nation,” LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell wrote in a memo.
Chicago
In the metro Chicago area, where around 9.5 million people live, police agencies are increasingly adopting drone programs comparable to Los Angeles and New York City.
Aurora’s trained drone officers operate within the special response team, with nearly two dozen certified pilots. Like initiatives in other cities, drones have become a tool to locate missing people, gather evidence at crime and crash scenes, monitor large public events, track fleeing suspects, and more. Some drones with thermal imaging technology are especially critical for night-time detection of suspects, as officers can use the devices to help spot and pinpoint subjects undetected by the human eye.
Chicago police departments are also waiting for results from Libertyville, where several former Navy Seals and a business entrepreneur are working on an indoor drone designed to detect and possibly stop a mass shooting on its own before police arrive on the scene.
“The drone is looking for a threat who is carrying a weapon,” Jeff Ross, the CEO of Brecourt Solutions, told ABC Chicago in May. “We pre-position sprinkler systems that respond autonomously. Why don’t we have the modern-day sprinkler system to active shooters in mass shootings?”
While metro districts jump on the innovative technology, Chicago City Council members have warned that the city is far behind in utilizing drone developments. The Chicago Police Department had just five drones in use last September, according to the Chicago Sun Times, compared to New York City’s 55 and Los Angeles County’s 22.
CPD Sgt. Marcus Buenrostro has urged the Windy City to fund more drones, arguing it would alleviate workforce shortages and pointing to national statistics that credited drones with contributing to a 50% decrease in use-of-force lawsuits.
“With our workforce being lower and the struggles with recruiting officers, this is really a force multiplier,” he said. “We’re able to utilize it and cover a lot more area than any patrol car can. We do it with nobody getting injured and no complaints.”
Do drones violate civil rights?
Police have downplayed fears that drones are an invasive force that could be used to spy on citizens.
Chicago-area Oak Brook Police Chief Brian Strock has said using the technology is “absolutely necessary to keep everybody safe,” while officer Omar Ortiz, one of Aurora Police Department’s drone pilots, said it’s “definitely not true” that aircraft are being used to spy.
“Most of the time we are not recording or snapping pictures unless it’s of evidentiary value,” Ortiz said.
Still, civil rights advocates nationwide, including at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have voiced concern about the impositions drones could put on the First Amendment, particularly when used to monitor protests and other legal activities, even as law enforcement has cheered on the development.
“We ought to assess how that’s working before we expand it any further,” said Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “Drones have an enormous capacity to surveil people without their knowledge — to look into buildings, into cars, into apartments — and we ought to move very slowly with that kind of surveillance technology without having in place the appropriate privacy regulations to guard against people’s rights being violated.”
RUSSIA AIMS FOR CAPABILITY TO LAUNCH 2,000 DRONES SIMULTANEOUSLY
Back in 2023, when over 1,400 police departments in the United States were using drones, senior ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley was already warning that police drones are threatening civil liberties.
“There’s a very real prospect that other, more local uses of drones become so common and routine that without strong privacy protections that we end up with the functional equivalent of a mass surveillance regime in the skies,” Stanley wrote. “We don’t have to think current police officials are lying to understand that mission creep is a very real tendency. While controversial new police technologies are often unrolled in limited ways and accompanied by promises of best behavior, they may be overtaken by later adopters who brush aside the limits and promises of the early pioneers.