New York police use drones against spiking subway surfing cases

Police in New York City have added an another use case to their expanding deployment of drones: dissuading people from recurring rooftop “subway surfing” activity that has resulted in deaths and serious injuries this year.

Bored city kids have for centuries been finding ways to use the landscape, infrastructure, and even vehicles they come across in daily life to have fun or entertain themselves. Even the more extreme forms of thrill-seeking like currently surging subway surfing have been around for many decades. But aware of the limited results of traditional prevention methods – which usually boil down to spotting offenders atop trains and chasing them once they come down to escape – New York police are now breaking out their drones for what they hope is both a higher-tech and more effective approach to stopping the activity.

According to a report by New York television station WABC-TV, municipal police began using their drones in October to take video of youths spotted surfing atop subway system trains. But rather than using those captured visuals as evidence in prosecution cases, the cops are putting it to a potentially more effective type of behavior reform effort.

They’re showing it to the understandably horrified parents of the kids filmed running, dancing, and prancing around the tops of speeding trains. Those aren’t the kinds of “Hi, Mom” shots elders are happy to see.

“How many times have you interviewed moms and dads who say, ‘My kid would never do something like that’,” said New York Police Department Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry of the new drone approach to subway surfing prevention. “Guess what: The video doesn’t lie.”

Relying on parents to scare their subway surfing spawn straight using video is certainly worth trying – and possibly even acceptable to the civil liberties and privacy advocates who have protested increased police use of drones in New York. The reason: the illegal activity has become too frequent, and often tragic of an occurrence to quibble over.

At least five young people have died from accidents incurred while subway surfing this year – equaling the total number between 2018 and 2022 – and several others have been gravely injured from falls. According to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, there have been “over 450 instances of people riding outside of trains between January and June in 2023,” and possibly as many as 630. 

Myriad post-COVID-19 changes in attitudes and behavior apparent across society may be behind the rise in New York subway surfing. But the ubiquity of social media consumption among young people is also fueling the activity. According to city officials, over 3,000 videos of the illegal riding were scrubbed from various online platforms during the first eight months of 2023 alone. 

“’Look at me, I’m the coolest kid in New York City,’” Daughtry said in explaining the social media motives behind most infractions. “’I got 170,000 likes on a 30-second subway surfing ride’.”

With reports of subway surfing most frequent once schools let out, New York police drone use in filming offenders is being concentrated in the afternoon. In the dozen cases in which offenders have been nabbed thus far, the lower-tech method of confirming identity has been preferred – trains are stopped, and youths nabbed – with drone footage then shown to parents to administer correctional responses.

Unsurprisingly, police drones have been most active capturing footage in Queens over trains headed to Manhattan – a situation offering the New York skyline as a backdrop in subway surfing videos. After all, practitioners may be crazy, but they certainly aren’t stupid.

Image: Karl Grief/Unsplash