Those attending outdoor parties or barbecues in New York City this weekend may find an uninvited guest looming over their festivities: a police drone.

The New York City police department plans to pilot the unmanned aircrafts in response to complaints about large gatherings, including private events, over Labor Day weekend, officials announced Thursday.

“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference.

The plan drew immediate backlash from privacy and civil liberties advocates, raising questions about whether such drone use violated existing laws for police surveillance.

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

  • bigkix@lemm.eeEnglish
    59·
    1 year ago

    I’m not from US - why is it forbidden to have a large group of people in the backyard?
    As for the drones - just wow…

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Any excuse to use surveillance cameras to spy on people will be used. It’s not forbidden to have a party, but the shithead cops want to spy on people anyway just in case they might catch them breaking some laws.

      There is also a nationwide program being implemented to feed the video from private security cameras into police surveillance systems. It’s called FUSUS and they use equipment installed in private networks to upload the private security cameras’ video to the police surveillance systems. Lots of people are signing on to this horrific program - businesses, schools, churches, community centers, etc. The police can use it to track people with video surveillance without a warrant. Security cameras anywhere you go could be potentially tapped into by government authorities to monitor you. It’s already all over the USA and being rolled out in the UK now too.

      Just as it is in the UK with their surveillance cameras everywhere, this is the future that George Orwell tried to warn us about.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      It’s not forbidden. This is a huge overstep by the police but typical of American police, who are allowed to violate our civil rights with impunity.