Over the past two months, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and millions of Americans across the country took to the streets to protest police abuse and systemic racism and put their bodies on the line to proclaim unequivocally that Black Lives Matter.
In addition to long-known deplorable methods of intimidation like use of excessive force and mass arrests of peaceful protestors, our local police departments have obtained and deployed new tools in the battle to suppress our rights to demonstrate: drones.
In December of 2018, following a nationwide trend of law enforcement agencies acquiring these new eyes in the sky, the NYPD announced it had purchased a new fleet of drones. And although a handful of elected officials were given a private demonstration after police had acquired them, there were no public forums to discuss this new investment.
Instead, the NYPD made the decision, and just like that, suddenly police drones were part of our city’s landscape.
Within a few months, the NYPD was flying its new drones over large demonstrations. Through freedom of information requests filed by the Legal Aid Society, we learned that the police had surveilled participants of the 2019 Women's March, the 2019 Puerto Rican Day Parade, and the 2019 Pride March.
It did not stop there. As unrest has grown in the last few months after the police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, we have reason to believe NYPD has used its drones to surveil recent protests calling for justice.
The NYPD is not new to the game of over-surveillance, just ask gay rights, anti-war or racial justice activists going back to the 1900's. A few years ago, it was proven the NYPD infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests, violating a decree from 1985 that said police could only surveil in such a way if they had evidence a religious or political group had committed a crime.
Spoiler alert: the NYPD had no such evidence.
In the fight for police accountability, there is room for the police to disrespect the public's First Amendment rights. Flying drones over people's heads, surveilling and possibly storing video and images from drone cameras – perhaps someday equipped with facial recognition technology – is not about public safety, but rather fear and social control. Law enforcement's own history of violating the public's civil rights are indicative of an agency that believes it is above accountability, and should not be given free reign to police the public like some dystopian sci-fi movie.
In a moment where people across the city, and across the world, are condemning the militarization of the police, and shouting that the police are constantly crossing lines and violating rights, the NYPD employing drones is frankly only serving to reinforce these beliefs.
Last year, we sat down and worked on legislation for the State Senate (S6435B/A9931) that would effectively ban law enforcement use of drones in public, as well as severely restrict any use of government drones without a warrant from a judge. The bill applies to both government agencies and private government contractors. The legislation would ban facial recognition via drones altogether.
To be clear, we believe the police should not have drones at all. The bill would begin to move us away from drones, countering the nationwide trend.
The hypothetical scenarios that police say require them to use drones are not sufficient. The NYPD, for example, used drones exactly zero times for search and rescue in 2019 and once this year, according to their own reports. When they do use the devices, we don't know what the department does with the data it records. Even more disturbing is the fact that NYPD was able to start using these without at the bare minimum, consultation of the public.
We know that surveillance, which drones help facilitate, restricts our First Amendment rights and can send a chilling effect that deters people from taking to the streets and peacefully protesting for what they believe in. This is, allegedly, the heart of what it means to be an American. It is also the right authoritarian governments and agencies want nothing more than to squash.
We cannot let them.
The police and their supporters, of course, would call this "anti-police" but it is not; it is pro-public. It is more patriotic to fight for the right to protest, than to fight for the police’s ability to surveil without public consent. We all know that Black, Brown, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities are most often the targets of surveillance. We must stand with them and fight for their rights.
The drones will not make any of us safer, it will only help the police continue to behave aggressively with impunity.
Though Civil Rights Law 50-A, which was interpreted by City Hall to essentially conceal police misconduct, has been repealed, we have yet to see full transparency from the police department in making police records available to the public.
For years, El Grito, as well as other copwatch groups (organized efforts to legally film police misconduct), used phone cameras to document police brutality. Footage collected by police surveillance is not made available to the public, even in cases when it could exonerate innocent civilians or indict abusive cops. What does this tell us about how the NYPD would use footage obtained through drones? It would be used only for the NYPD’s interests.
This one-way street of surveillance that police have created drives home the need for legislation that will keep the police from making up their own rules at the expense of New Yorkers.
In the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, bills like this one ensure that we don’t find ourselves deeper in a police state. The time has come to push legislation that doesn't only address the most obvious abuses, but also those that threaten our future. The police must not have weapons of surveillance, and it's time for elected officials to stand with the public against escalating police power and abuse.
@DennisFlores is the founder of El Grito, a grassroots organization that was formed to exercise and protect the public’s constitutional right to observe and document police encounters by putting cameras in the hands of the public, and providing evidence to hold police accountable for abuse.
@Jessica Ramos is the State Senator for District 13 in Queens, representing Corona, East Elmhurst & Jackson Heights. She serves as the Chair of the Committee on Labor.
