The NYPD is sending more drones to 911 calls, but privacy advocates don’t like the view

Imagine you’re relaxing in your backyard. You look up to see a drone flying overhead. Police sent it because a neighbor reported a petty crime down the street from your house. The drone is pointing a camera at the entire block and is recording everything that you and your neighbors are doing. The police will save the footage for at least 30 days.

That scenario has become commonplace for New Yorkers since the city’s police department drastically expanded its use of drones in July by billing them as “first responders.” And while some New Yorkers see the drones and potentially feel violated, many others never realize they were filmed from the sky at all.

City officials say the so-called drones as first responders (DFR) program is making New York safer, but civil liberties and privacy advocates argue that police have not been transparent about operations that allow law enforcement sweeping surveillance capabilities that could easily be abused. 

DFRs can stay aloft for up to 40 minutes and travel for miles with a remote operator controlling their movements, according to Skydio, the manufacturer of one aerial device the New York Police Department (NYPD) uses for the program. 

The aircraft zip across city blocks at speeds as great as 45 mph, Skydio says. They also are equipped with powerful telephoto cameras which allow them to identify people and vehicles from as far away as 0.8 miles.  

The NYPD has largely marketed the drones as a more efficient and safer way to respond to 911 calls and as an important crime-fighting tool.

Critics of the program say police have not been clear enough about how they determine when to use a DFR. There also are concerns over whether and how police integrate drone footage with other surveillance technologies like facial recognition, license plate readers, gunshot detection system records and artificial intelligence.

It’s as if city officials view “Black Mirror,” a dystopian television show, as an “instruction manual instead of a horrifying tale of technology gone awry,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “The cost to New Yorkers’ civil liberties and public finances from all these drones is clear, but the benefits couldn't be any less apparent.”

The end result, privacy and civil liberties advocates say, is a panopticon where New Yorkers who have done nothing wrong are frequently surveilled and recorded — often without knowing it — while their images, activities and locations are connected to other technologies and databases without any public explanation.

When asked to comment for this story, the NYPD sent a series of links to department materials describing the DFR program.

A police inspector general, however, has echoed advocacy groups’ complaints, saying in a December report that the NYPD does not “fully and accurately describe the Department’s unmanned aircraft systems’ practices.” 

Police also failed to disclose “several capabilities” of NYPD drones, which in some cases are outfitted with night vision, thermal imaging, two- and three-dimensional mapping technologies and tools to break glass, the report says. 

The NYPD publishes statistics showing broad categories documenting when drones are used, but does not publicly track what types of calls and events DFRs have responded to. What is clear is that the DFR program has radically increased the number of drone deployments by the NYPD since police began steadily using them last July. (The program was formally announced in November).

Defense lawyers have seen police abuse the DFR program, including by using drone footage in criminal cases without documenting their deployment and without preserving the video used to bring charges, said Jerome Greco, digital forensics director at New York’s Legal Aid Society.

“It's making it difficult for us to know what actually happened in some of these situations,” Greco said. “Even though they didn't document [the drone usage], they're still using it in their filings and criminal cases.”

The NYPD’s published statistics show that officers dispatched drones more than 3,700 times in the second half of last year. About 2,800 of those deployments were DFRs responding to calls for service.

In 2023, before the DFR program launched, the NYPD deployed drones just 564 times over the course of the entire year.

‘Select priority public safety calls’ 

DFRs supply “high-definition audio and video that is accessible, in real time, on officers and supervisors’ department-issued smartphones,” a city press release says. 

The NYPD says DFR footage is stored for 30 days unless it is being used to investigate a crime, has captured an arrest or otherwise hoovered up evidence that can be used in a prosecution. In those cases, the video can be retained for much longer.

“They're using these to see locations that normally the police wouldn't be able to see and that would require a warrant to search,” Greco said. “They claim that they're only viewing areas that are public, but there are real questions about that.” 

While the NYPD says it only deploys drones to “select priority public safety calls,” it has admitted to using them to hover over house parties in response to noise complaints and has suggested they should routinely patrol the city.

The NYPD is using even more drones to help keep New Yorkers safe!

Alongside New York's Finest on the ground, our new "Drone as First Responder" program is aimed at boosting response times and improving efficiency.

Learn more about the program: https://t.co/FLuc2x4jqf pic.twitter.com/dakTJ7mRGp

— NYC Mayor's Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) November 14, 2024

Civil liberties advocates were alarmed, for example, when police officials announced they would be sending drones to fly over backyard barbecues during J'Ouvert, a large festival celebrated by Brooklyn’s Caribbean community.

“It’s been a wonderful thing,” former New York City Police Commissioner Ed Caban said of plans for that 2023 operation, which preceded the launch of the formal DFR program.

“We're using these drones as an extra resource, a force multiplier where instances like J'Ouvert, we have our 311 calls and they're complaining about noise.” 

When announcing the J’Ouvert deployments, officials noted that drones could arrive at incidents within 30 to 40 seconds.

New York is one of nearly 30 cities nationwide using DFRs, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Most are smaller jurisdictions like Burbank, California, Daytona Beach, Florida, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. However, a couple of large cities, Denver and Oklahoma City, are also deploying DFRs, EFF said when it published its findings last summer.

The first city to deploy DFRs, Chula Vista, California, started its program in 2018, but adoption nationwide has  since rapidly accelerated. No other city police department anywhere near the size of New York’s uses DFRs, EFF’s list shows.

Broken rules?

The NYPD’s drone policy leaves a great deal unsaid, but does list a few guardrails.

In most cases, drones cannot be used without a search warrant in places where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, according to the rules. Building interiors meet that standard, but backyards are not private when surveilled from the air, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Law enforcement agencies deploying DFRs are taking advantage of a lack of legal precedent, said Sidney Thaxter, a senior litigator at the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. 

While there is case law saying that people have no reasonable right to privacy in their backyard when being observed by a helicopter, courts have not yet ruled on aerial privacy rights under drones, he said. Drones are far smaller, quieter and less noticeable than helicopters, making the court rulings outdated, Thaxter said. 

“They can set a drone up in the air far enough away that you can't hear it and they can zoom in and can literally see what's in your hands,” Thaxter said. “They can sit there and see people going to the bathroom, relieving themselves outside in their backyard.”

In her December report, NYPD Inspector General Jeanene Barrett noted that it was difficult for her to fully assess the department’s practices. The NYPD only sent her records showing drone deployments made by the Transit Bureau, according to the report.

The rules also say that drones cannot conduct facial recognition analysis, though still photos can be created from recorded video and then used as a “probe image” for such analysis. 

Drones can’t be used as weapons or be “equipped with any weapons,” according to the regulations. Only commanding officers can order a drone to be deployed, and officers flying drones must receive advanced flight training. 

Officers are also supposed to document when a drone has been deployed, said Greco, the digital forensics director at Legal Aid, an organization that represents indigent criminal defendants. A Legal Aid lawyer representing a client prosecuted for a misdemeanor based on drone footage only knew the technology was used because there was a brief reference to it in discovery materials, he said.

An NYPD first-responder drone makes a demonstration flight at the Central Park Precinct building on November 13, 2024. Image: Mayoral Photography Office / Michael Appleton

NYPD regulations also say drones cannot be used for “routine foot patrol” and DFRs can only respond to certain crimes. 

However, department officials suggested breaking that rule in November when Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry told reporters that “when they're not responding to 911 calls, I want the drone team to be on patrol like a regular police car.” 

“I want them to do the same thing, looking for any type of anomalies, looking for any fights … I want them to be on patrol to add an extra layer of eyes up there.”

When asked for an interview about the drone program, Daughtry declined to comment, referring Recorded Future News to a police spokesperson.

It is not clear if or how often DFRs are being used for patrols because department statistics don’t include a category for such deployments. Numbers for the first quarter of 2025 have not yet been released by the NYPD. 

Police officials have historically been defiant when advocacy groups have criticized drone usage. 

“We are no longer going to let the narrative be dictated to us,” then-NYPD chief of patrol John Chell said in an interview at a 2023 event hosted by department DFR supplier Skydio. (Chell has since been promoted to chief of department and is the highest ranking uniformed member of the NYPD, reporting to the police commissioner.)

Calling critics “complainers” and “the fringes,” he said that police would “dictate the narrative. We're playing offense.”

Some civil libertarians have pointed out that former police officials have been hired by drone companies. While not a rules violation, it creates what critics see as a revolving door that helps sell the department on expanding its program. 

In 2021, the NYPD detective responsible for developing the department’s drone program retired from the force to join Skydio, where he offers webinars training law enforcement on the benefits of drones.

A drone consultant working with police departments nationwide defended their use, saying DFRs save law enforcement time and money.

Matt Sloane, founder of the consulting company Skyfire, recalled an incident where one of his staffers oversaw a drone response to a 911 call reporting an unconscious woman in a Little Caesars parking lot.

“We got the drone there in 60 seconds and found out she was not unconscious — she was eating pizza and [the drone] could see the pepperoni on the pizza,” Sloane said. “Nobody had even been dispatched yet because the call had just come in.” 

The drone’s quick assessment of the situation saved the municipality time and money, Sloane said, because police and EMTs could skip a call where they were not needed.

Surveillance city

Many of the companies manufacturing drones offer a suite of related surveillance products that can be routed to artificial intelligence technology.

DFRs manufactured by Skydio are equipped with hardware that is “accompanied by onboard artificial intelligence and autonomy that brings key capabilities and scale to any drone program,” says the company’s partner Axon, a vendor known for police body cameras and other law enforcement technology. 

Skydio says its DFRs can “instantly share data” with Axon’s cloud-based evidence system, which allows law enforcement agencies to store, analyze and share drone footage in a centralized database. 

The NYPD has said little on that front, other than that DFRs respond to ShotSpotter gunshot detection alerts. The drones’ integration with ShotSpotter has disturbed civil libertarians, given that system’s track record for producing inaccurate results and prompting the overpolicing of poor and minority neighborhoods.

The department has rolled out new surveillance technology with much fanfare in the past, but such programs have not always succeeded.

A police robot pilot program debuted in September 2023 with Adams heralding the devices as “below minimum wage” and requiring “no bathroom breaks.” The program fizzled by February 2024, and the NYPD did not renew the vendor’s contract. The robots, meant to enhance subway safety, ended up needing an officer chaperone, weighed 400 pounds and could not move up and down stairways.

In other cases, aerial drones have been used to make arrests in high-profile crimes. NYPD chief of detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters covering the December slaying of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson that officers used drones to find a backpack belonging to Thompson’s alleged killer in Central Park.

"In this case, it really came down to technology — it was the use of drones in Central Park, and really comes down to the video canvas that we did,” Kenny said at the time. “We used every source of video that we could collect. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, from hundreds of sources." 

The department also has frequently used drones to monitor protestors, a fact that underscores the dangers presented by the NYPD’s 30-day retention of footage and ability to generate facial recognition “probe images,” advocates say.

NYPD drones flew above Columbia University during anti-Israel protests decrying genocide in Gaza and were reportedly used again on March 10 to monitor demonstrators protesting the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student who is being threatened with deportation by the Trump administration despite holding a green card and being married to an American citizen. 

Columbia has suspended and expelled several student protestors, leading some to wonder if drones helped make identifications. The university reportedly asked the NYPD to help manage the response to the protests.

In October 2023, the New York Post reported that the NYPD used drones 13 times to make 239 arrests in a single week at Brooklyn protests over the Hamas-Israel conflict.

“We got the whole thing on video,” Daughtry, the senior NYPD official, reportedly said of pro-Palestinian protesters, some of whom threw bottles and eggs at police. “We’ll be turning that evidence over to the Brooklyn DA’s office to help enhance the arrests.” 

In the case of protests, the drone use is intimidating, because demonstrators “see the drone in the sky and they're worried about free speech,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They're worried about being identified, potentially doxxed.”

Civil libertarians also point to a well-known 2020 incident involving alleged police abuse of drones to improperly surveil a Black Lives Matter protester in New York, saying there is no reason to believe such incidents are not commonplace.

The man, who had yelled directly into a police officer’s ears with a megaphone during a protest, was in his apartment when police surrounded it, attempting to arrest him. A drone peered through his windows during the five-hour standoff, the man has said.

“I had a curtain up, and in the middle of this I saw just an eye peeking through,” Derrick Ingram told New York magazine. “It was one of the scariest, creepiest things.” 

“At one point, I thought I was going to die because, honestly, it was like shit from a movie — you know how they have the red laser? I saw that go across my living room, right in front of my face.”