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.”
Is it illegal to have house parties in NYC? Why is the NYPD busting up keggers like campus police?
It becomes illegal when there are too many people there, or there is violence, underage drinking, drug usage, and if it’s too loud, the attendees are parking in the street blocking traffic, fire risks all sorts of shit
They are not responding to complains, they are searching themselves.
EDIT: my eyes. They are responding. Still very wierd. Crowd itself is not a crime, article 20 of DoHR says so.
Only in the context of like, fire safety. You can’t have more people in a building than it is designed to safely hold.
Of course, cops use this safety regulation as an excuse to control people and be dicks…
How would a drone know? Other than capacity and street violations, there’s nothing that a drone should realistically be able to identify.
no, as grass is legal in nyc now, but if you’re blowing lines and smoking crack, trippin balls, or tweakin, they probably should, you know, for the kids in the neighborhood you nincompoop
Ah, it wouldn’t be the police if they didn’t try to violate people’s rights before lawmakers can tell them no.
They shoud have to fire and not rehire half the police force every time this kind of thing haopens
Oh no, not a large crowd on private property - this deservers police spying! /S
They totally won’t use this to perv on girls sunning themselves on their private property. They have already been busted multiple times perving on girls walking in midtown but they would never do anything like that again and again and again.
So I’ve installed and operated PTZ cameras for multiple television shows and events, sometimes with junior operators - or just production assistants or other crew. These are in places where people know cameras are present. I can guarantee it doesn’t take long for people at the camera control unit to learn they can zoom in on people’s phones on set or follow girls around - and these are all professional people.
Cops with a drone that can zoom in on people unwittingly, in their back yards?! Oh, they are certainly going to do shit like this, or worse - they’ll likely record for themselves.
The US has a whole amendment to its constitution about it, and SCOTUS has been carving out exceptions at an accelerating pace, especially after the PATRIOT act.
But what is telling is how law enforcement can choose to implement technology without oversight or review, and it is up to the public to make an argument.
That said, I look forward to the method we develop to detect and neutralize or capture police drones, so we can ask to see a warrant.
We still think the repeal of prohibition is embarrassing. But no, rather than actually tell us what rights we have, there are a lot of menial carve-outs. Law enforcement is allowed to do whatever they want until someone argues overreach in court at which point a judge might specify a new precedent (which stays in effect until the legislature passes a new law).
So, for instance, for a while if the police wanted to get you, they’d search your phone for anything incriminating, on the presumption that was like finding drug paraphernalia or something on your person. A court had to reconsider that a person’s entire lives are on their phone (including all violations of the CFAA, which everyone does), so peeking into someone’s phone without cause is fishing for crime.
Now, if you’re arrested, a warrant is required to search your phone (but in a lot of districts, they’ll search your phone first and get a warrant later if they find anything a DA might find interesting). A current SCOTUS ruling says we are not required to unlock our phone on command (by password) though if they hack into it, or borrow your biometrics to get in then that’s legit. iPhones 5 and before are easily crackable. After 6 might be secure from police but they routinely purchase state-of-the-art cracking software, and the public only gets to know when it comes out in a court case. So there’s an ongoing arms race between smartphone developers and law enforcement.
Flying the drone might be permissible under the open fields doctrine, but stopping people from assembly on their own private residential properties absolutely spits in the face of the “The right of the people peaceably to assemble” clause of the 1A.
Not open fields, plain view. It’s public airspace and what you can see from public you can record in public.
I doubt that would hold up in a court of law. The ability to record in public hinges on having no “reasonable expectation to privacy” while in public spaces. You DO have a reasonable right to privacy in the backyard of your own property, even if it’s visible from some public airspaces.
