If drones are being deployed to keep people safe from sharks at the city’s beaches, the New York Police Department (NYPD) figures they may prove just as useful in broadcasting audio messages to residents of areas facing emergency situations.
That was the logic evident behind Sunday’s testing of drones in Queens by NYPD to communicate audio public safety alerts to people during severe weather or other emergency scenarios. The immediate catalyst of those experiments was flooding many areas of New York experienced in the past week, and the resulting desire of officials to establish future messaging capabilities to assist residents of afflicted neighborhoods where traditional communications systems end up incapacitated.
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But with that contingency activity taking place within the limits of New York City, the NYPD’s trial drone deployment also involved agonizing a deference to the municipality’s notoriously suffocating flight restrictions – and possibly even subterfuge – largely unthinkable elsewhere in the world.
For starters, NYC’s emergency notification system made note of the NYPD drone tests without actually mentioning the kind of craft involved. Its reference to “remote-piloted public messaging capabilities” was doubtless designed to avoid awakening the pronounced concerns New Yorkers have expressed in the past about police deployment of various tech that detractors say pose privacy and civil liberty threats.
Indeed, under the restrictive measures taken to address those fears, there was some questioning whether Sunday’s NYPD drone trials were entirely legal under the city’s 2021 Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act.
Terms of that policy require the department to seek public comment a full 90 days prior to planned deployment of recently obtained tech whose operation would involve monitoring people. Those limitations, however, are not applicable to older assets the NYPD owns – including the 14 DJI drones it bought in 2018 and presumably flew Sunday.
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Still, given the sensitivities of critics of potential aerial or other tech surveillance, it appears city officials preferred to err to the side of vague caution in notifying the public to the weekend trials in a section of Queens bordering JFK Airport.
NYPD’s own Twitter account, however, was less obtuse in communicating its intention to use drones in similar situations in the future.
The day after the low profile Queens tests, the department said it “will deploy drones to convey critical information & keep you connected with up-to-date info,” during “(w)eather-related emergencies & natural disasters (that) can potentially cause havoc to our critical infrastructure.”
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It remains to be seen whether and when New York’s wider laws banning virtually all drone flights for most other individuals and organizations will be revised – especially following the public hearing held earlier this month about establishing new, presumably liberalized permitting procedures.
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