Eric Adams, one of New York City’s reoccurring bad guys, is at it again with his reactionary nonsense. As we’ve talked about before, NYC’s mayor has no problem with racial profiling, bringing back stop-and-frisk, and using hip-hop as evidence of criminal activity.
Now Adams wants to considerably ramp up drone use in New York City. According to AP News, the announcement came on August 31, 2023, just before Labor Day weekend. The NYPD said that they would respond to ‘complaints’ over gatherings and party events by using unmanned drones for surveillance. Some civil rights activists have called this a massive breach of privacy that violates the POST Act.
The POST Act was signed into NYC law back in 2020 and mandates that the NYPD disclose any and all of its surveillance tactics. But, to no one’s surprise, the NYPD isn’t keen on doing so. This isn’t the first time either. New York police have quietly ramped up drone use over the past year or so, with 124 cited cases of drone use in 2023 alone.
A few Twitter users have pointed out that Adams actually cited Israel’s Iron Dome technology as justification for drone use. Using a colonial empire currently waging genocide on Palestinian people is totally the best argument here, obviously.
Many privacy advocates are worried about this because regulations on drone use are pretty scant. This means that law enforcement has near-unlimited discretion in how they use drones to invade your privacy and brutalize marginalized people. Of the regulations, Albert Fox Cahn, who is executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the AP:
“One of the biggest concerns with the rush to roll out new forms of aerial surveillance is how few protections we have against seeing these cameras aimed at our backyards or even our bedrooms,”
So far, Mayor Adams has not spoken further on privacy concerns, nor has he assuaged public worry over drone use. We all know why this is. Adams is one of the city’s worst mayors in history and has a slew of civil rights abuses on his track record. He very clearly does not care about privacy issues or breaches of legislation.
And he’s not alone in this either. As noted by the Los Angeles Times, around 1,400 police departments across America are currently using drones for surveillance. We’ve seen how destructive they can be, such as when predator drones were used to survey George Floyd protests. The line between law enforcement and the military is pretty much non-existent at this point, as cops are using the same wartime weaponry soldiers used in the Iraq War.
There’s no end in sight for this massive breach of human rights. Even with all of the criticism thrown at a guy like Adams, NYC continues to become ever more militarized in its fight against so-called “domestic terrorism.”
(featured image: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
