The New York police department (NYPD) announced it will begin using drones to respond to reports of robberies and alerts from a city-wide gunshot detection system.
The drones will fly to the scene, piloted by an NYPD officer, and record video and audio that will be sent to police officers’ smartphones in real time, according to a press release. The integration of these two surveillance technologies is part of a broader “Drone as First Responder” program that has existed since 2018. The New York city mayor, Eric Adams, and the city’s interim police commissioner, Tom Donlan, announced the expansion on Wednesday afternoon. It will be initially rolled out to five precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. The drones will also be used to collect evidence for investigations, aid in searches for missing people and respond to natural disasters, according to the announcement.
“New York City is flying into the future as we keep New Yorkers safe,” said Adams at a press conference on Wednesday. “These drones will mean more efficient policing and will help increase the safety of our responding NYPD officers and New Yorkers.”
The expansion of the NYPD’s drone program will combine flying cameras with a gun-shot detection technology, Shotspotter, that the city’s own audit has concluded is overwhelmingly inaccurate.
The NYPD’s use of both technologies has long been the subject of concern for civil liberty and privacy experts. Police data shows that the department’s use of drones had more than tripled between 2022 and 2023. Experts argue officers’ use of the technologies has violated the privacy and first amendment rights of Black and brown New York City residents. In 2023, the department used drones to monitor people in their own Brooklyn backyards while they celebrated J’ouvert, a Caribbean festival commemorating the end of slavery. The same year, the department also used drones to surveil pro-Palestinian protests in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The footage captured was used as evidence to charge nearly 160 people, according to Gothamist. Wednesday’s announcement specifically mentions the use of first-responder drones to get “aerial views” to “measure crowd size”.
In the case of Shotspotter, civil liberties experts point to the deficiencies of the technology. The city’s own audit found that in 2022, the gunshot detection technology failed to alert police to 200 confirmed gunshots. In addition, the technology has also had a high false positive rate. Only 20% of alerts received over the course of several months between 2022 and 2023 were confirmed gunshots. The accuracy rate dropped in June 2023, when only 13% of 940 alerts received were actual gunshots.
“These drones would be disturbing enough on their own, but pairing them with a discredited vendor like ShotSpotter is even worse,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of non-profit advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “Recent reviews have found that the vast majority of ShotSpotter alerts are wild goose chases, sending the NYPD to the scenes of crimes that never happened. Sending robots chasing after phantom gunshots that are actually fireworks and car backfires is a privacy nightmare.”
The NYPD has previously defended its use of Shotspotter, despite its rate of inaccuracy, saying it is only one of the tools they use to address crime.
Shotspotter, which has rebranded to SoundThinking, has long courted police departments across the country, pitching its microphone technology as a means to deter gun violence. As federal grants have dried up and some of these contracts have expired, though, many cities and jurisdictions across the country have been rethinking their use of Shotspotter.
The Durham city council in North Carolina voted not to renew its contract with the company, citing concerns that the technology disproportionately sent police to Black and brown neighborhoods. Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, announced he would cancel the city’s Shotspotter contract in February for the same reason. In places where contracts have been renewed, such as Minneapolis, city legislators have been more frequently including clauses that would require an independent audit of the efficacy of the technology.
