NYPD Drones Soon Will Fly To 911 Calls, Police Brass Say
NEW YORK CITY — Add "drones" to New York City's ranks of first responders.Drones soon will fly to 911 calls alongside NYPD officers in five police precincts, including one covering Central Park, said Kaz Daughtry, the department's chief of operations."The plan to be rolled out in the coming months is to deploy these drones in response to certain 911 calls of service," he said during testimony in Congress this week on unmanned aerial systems.Daughtry only gave broad strokes details about the upcoming pilot program. He said five as-yet-unspecified NYPD precincts — three in Brooklyn, one in The Bronx and, finally, the Central Park precinct — will have their roofs retrofitted to house two drone platforms.The drones' pilots, however, will remotely steer them from the NYPD's Lower Manhattan headquarters and provide live information to responding officers, he said.The first responder program is only the city's latest drone project under Mayor Eric Adams, a self-professed technophile who has brushed off myriad concerns about the technology.NYPD drones fly over the city with little to no regulation, according to a 2022 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union."We can't count on law enforcement agencies to police themselves, and that's especially true when it comes to the use of invasive, military-grade technologies like drones," the study states.The NYPD currently has 85 drones, and their use increased more than 400 percent last year, Daughtry said, contending they can't be used for warrantless surveillance or as weapons.Daughtry, in his testimony before Congress, also acknowledged concerns that data from Da Jiang Innovations drones — which are used by the NYPD — can potentially be turned over to the Chinese government.He said the NYPD will phase out their use of that company's drones.The article NYPD Drones Soon Will Fly To 911 Calls, Police Brass Say appeared first on New York City, NY Patch.
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