NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) — Drones will be responding to 911 calls in five New York City precincts beginning in a few months as part of a program dubbed “drones as first responders,” NYPD brass said at a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Friday.
Landing platforms for the drones will be built on top of three precincts in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx and one in Central Park as part of the program. Police said that these locations were chosen based on recent crime trends, including an uptick in crime at the park.
According to Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry, the NYPD fleet includes 85 drones, and usage in 2023 increased by 420% when compared to 2022.
The NYPD has employed drones in a variety of situations, like to help the Department of Buildings survey buildings and bridges following a 4.8 magnitude earthquake that shook the NYC area in April and to monitor crowd safety at the Electric Zoo music festival on Randall’s Island, police said.
The department also utilized drone footage in criminal cases against 158 people arrested during pro-Palestinian protests in Times Square and Bay Ridge last fall, Daughtry said at a news conference at the time.
According to police leadership, the expansion of DFRs (drones as first responders) will improve officer safety and public safety by more quickly informing police on emergency situations.
“This information will be provided by the DFR, will be shared with responding officers,” Daughtry said. “DFR will enhance officers’ situational awareness as they arrive on the scene and promote officer safety and help deploy resources more effectively.”
To support this, Daughtry invoked a fatal police shooting last December during which police sent drones into a Lower East Side apartment where an armed man, wanted for a shooting, had barricaded himself.
Officials did not clarify for what emergency situations the drones would be employed.
“Drones are not used as weapons, and cannot be equipped with weapons of any kind,” Daughtry confirmed, but he and Chief of Patrol John Chell both emphasized their hopes to get federal approval to take down what they referred to as “hostile drones.”
“We’re looking first and foremost for drone mitigation, to have the ability to take a drone down electronically,” Chell said.
When the DFRs are employed, police will monitor the footage from the NYPD’s Joint Operations Center headquarters and provide information to officers on the scene. Daughtry said that the department’s legal team is also involved.
“When are drones are up our legal team is actually monitoring them, making sure we are not violating anybody’s rights,” Daughtry said.
Civil liberties groups have often slammed the use of drones as a privacy issue, and in response to Friday’s hearing the New York Civil Liberties Union resurfaced an October 2022 report on government drone data across the state.
“Deployment of this highly invasive technology without safeguards and transparency can easily lead to exploitation and broad surveillance of New Yorkers,” the not-for-profit said. “Widespread military-grade surveillance must not become a norm of daily life.”
Drones are not equipped with facial recognition software, Daughtry said, but footage can be run through the department’s facial recognition database back at headquarters.
The department also stated intentions to end the use of drones from Da Jiang Innovations, a Chinese company and top drone manufacturer, in the police fleet.
DJI’s drones are used across the country for emergency response, but are widely criticized in Congress as a security threat. According to a New York Times report published last month, the company was placed on a Department of Defense list of prohibited future purchases for the U.S. armed forces.
“This agency, as well as the police commissioner, shares the same sentiments of this committee that there is some security concerns with the DJI drones, and we’re looking to phase them out of our fleet,” Daughtry said.