The NYPD is using drones 3 times more than it did last year
gothamist.com
gothamist.com
Simply, considering the one mention how they used drones to monitor protests, it may be fair to assume that these drones were being used in way or in places where it may well have been illegal for civilians to use such systems (I am not well informed on where civilians can or can not use drones, I just know, anecdotally, that it seems the air space for civilian drones continues to shrink).
That suggests that the police have authority to use air space for their purposes, such as monitoring civilian activity, but civilians do not have a similar, legal, capability to use the same technology to monitor police activity.
Police have always had extra powers. I don't think I can hire a private investigator to go to court, convince a judge, and get a writ, or warrant, or whatever to place a tap on another persons phone, like the police can.
But, even still, its fair to argue that the separation of powers between the state and citizenry should be narrow. Police activity in public is, well, in public, and I think well within the purview of the citizenry to be able to watch and monitor freely. But, in specific regards to these drone uses, and restrictions there on, I don't know if that's a level playing field any more.
Federal drone law says that “no person may operate a small unmanned aircraft over a human being.” But the NYPD has an exemption waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration through August 2025 that allows it to fly drones in populated areas, at night, over 400 feet in the air, among other things.
Hmm, that's directly contrary to one of Peel's founding principles.
> To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
I think that ship sailed a long time ago.
Beyond the wiretapping example you mentioned:
Qualified immunity: cops can do a wide range of things in the line of duty (or even vaguely approximating the line of duty) and not have liability for the consequences of their actions (including like, killing random bystanders).
Firearms: cops can get new machineguns. Cops are explicitly granted exceptions from almost all gun laws (and in some cases, even ex cops).
(Practically speaking) traffic laws: maybe not ubiquitous in every city, but cops can just disregard traffic laws when they want, with impunity.
Lying: a cop can go to great lengths to lie and decieve you while conducting their business, interviewing or interrogation, etc. If you lie to them, it gets you in a really bad spot when it comes time for court. In many jurisdictions (for example my own state), just lying to a cop is technically punishable by thousands of dollars and/or up to a year of jail.
Etc etc etc
European here, but is this really true? Over here it's the cops who usually can't lie and defendants are free to lie when defending themselves.
There are limits on exactly how a cop can lie, though the bar is sort of ambiguous - it can't "shock the conscience".
They also ostensibly can't entrap you.
Those in the US have the right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney. After invoking either or both of those rights, the interrogation must stop [1].
The only limit to deception during interrogation that I am aware of is that some states limit police from lying to minors [2].
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/questioning-after-cl.... [2] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/police-deception-interrogati...
outright lie? no. but that doesn't matter when it's just your word against theirs and they have some outsized influence in the community as a savior figure.
That one though... I'm unaware of.
They do it all the time, and get away with it, and if they are caught, while they could in principal face severe sanction, the most that usually happens is that anyone convicted on the basis of the lies they were caught in, after some bureaucractic delay, gets any unserved portion of thwir sentence avoided and gets fornally cleared, personal consequences for the lying cop are rare.
See also: the city's (ab)use of drones to surveil people in their backyards earlier this year[3].
[1]: https://rlo.acton.org/archives/90693-atms-bank-tellers-and-t...
[2]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov...
[3]: https://apnews.com/article/drones-labor-day-eric-adams-nypd-...
It's only a paradox because people are comparing absolute numbers after a period of time ignoring things like population growth. The average number of tellers per branch went down.
There's also more horses in the us now than in the 1800s (~5mn vs 9mn now) even though cars have completely replaced them as a form of transport.
Why is the number of tellers per branch an important metric?
ATMs just have lower overhead and less chance of being blackmailed into a heist
Drone first responders might be cheap enough and fast enough to get extremely low response times across the city.
I think there are lots of reasonable objections to pervasive surveillance (I don’t want widespread drone patrols), but very rapid response times seem like a way to get many of the benefits with few of the downsides. (Just don’t weaponize them, please…)
Finland has 5.6 million people; Greater NYC has ~23 million people.
Unless life expectancy ticks up, unexpectedly and dramatically, the share of local budgets going to pensions should plateau in the next 5-20 years in most places.
After that - the decline in public services might finally stop.
that or the suspects shoot at the drone, which would be really cyberpunk
We have two universes: 2077 or 1984
Militarized automated drones are being used today, in the wars currently happening.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2278852-drones-may-have...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-wor...
BALTIMORE — The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc,ruled today that the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) aerial surveillance program, which put the daytime movements of virtually all Baltimore residents under surveillance for 12 hours a day over six months, is unconstitutional.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-appeals-court-ru...
The decision is worth a read:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca4/20...
The alternative is an extensive investigation which is difficult to determine the location, if not impossible.
I don't mind these shot spotters being installed vs CCTVs as the microphones are really just tuned for gunshots and can only serve one purpose (in the current form)
> If this result is attributable in part to missing or nonmatched records of investigatory stops that did take place as a direct consequence of a ShotSpotter alert, CPD’s record-keeping practices are obstructing a meaningful analysis of the effectiveness of the technology.
Should have been the end of the article right there, but techdirt decided to write one anyway.
And false positives really aren't that big a deal anyway. You get false police reports, at least with the sensors you can recalibrate and adjust.
If only we took companies out to defend their product at face value we could waste even more time and resources!
So much so that it's "obstructing a meaningful analysis of the effectiveness of the technology". Their words, not mine.
> Everywhere it's installed officers find usefulness in triangulating where shots are popped off.
At best, cops are going on 'feels' here because, presumably, the data aren't sufficient to provide a solid basis for analysis. Or the police are withholding data that proves the system works well, which prima facie seems unlikely.
I don't know what the real numbers are, but from that article it seems noone does...
A proper reporting of numbers would be nice.
I would rather the cameras go to the gunshot noises than stay bolted to a pole outside my house, which is where they are now.
Also, a faster response could result in a better rate of finding crime. "89% of ShotSpotter’s reports led police to find no gun-related crime" does not equal "89% of reports weren't gunshots". It could be that police show up too late.
In a sort of magical way where there is a drone that can easily be dispatched from within it's range that has the intelligence to not only navigate to the scene through a complex city environment but also find and gather evidence. I bet any current drone deployment is likely to be slower than dispatching people patrolling and there will be far fewer of them than regular cops. It's basically fantasy when the Shot Spotter stuff doesn't even seem to work.
Drone navigation has been progressing quite a lot over the past decade, and law enforcement in some places is already using them in an automated way, as the article mentions. Also, the suggestion above was forward looking, it wasn't suggesting that the NYPD should glue these systems together today.
It doesn't tell a gunshot from a dumpster lid slamming shut.
It does produce almost entirely false positives.
It doesn't identify the location of a gunshot to any useful level of precision.
I suppose if you want to start a police state, and make every fourth resident a cop, you might be able to mitigate the 90% false-positive rate, and the horrible location-identification rate, but at that point, do you even need shot-spotter?
Right now, police have data about where loud sounds generally come from, and video from fixed poles where crime happened in previous years. Both of these aren't great data points on their own.
The intersection of that data: [Video around locations where loud noises just happened] is probably much better than disjointed data points of [video of where crime happened in previous years] and [general locations of where loud sounds are happening].
If you built towers for microphone above the cityscape you could get an accurate triangulation, but obviously nobody's doing that.
A sensor 4 blocks away will often record a much louder sound than one half a block away, because of buildings that are variously absorbing or reflecting sound.
That makes triangulation utterly useless.
You can localize to maybe a 20 square block area, but that's not a whole lot for cops to go on.
Mind if I ask how a sound recorded by two different sensors can be identified as the same original sound if the loudness is different? Unless the frequency of loud sounds is less than the time taken by the sounds to reach the sensors, wouldn’t it be hard to pick up two sounds spread apart by say a second but know that they are the same sound?
For example, if I’m on the phone with a friend during a thunderstorm and we are on opposite sides of the city, will we hear and be able to identify the same thunderclap?
Does sound have usable distinguishing features other than just loudness?
Than raw, peak amplitude? yes.
Frequency and amplitude variation over time will be roughly consistent in a linear system (i.e. the sound will get louder and quieter over time). If you have a stable, well-qualified listening system (such as, for example, a set of fixed recording locations in an environment that is acoustically static), you can build a map of how sound sources map to each recorder, and use principles of directed arrays to get very accurate location projections.
To use your example, yes it would be difficult for you and a single friend to confirm that you heard the same sound, but you could come up with a probability that if you heard a sound with the same characteristics with a certain time difference and loudness difference, it is likely to have been from a certain location. If, however, you have 4 friends, it gets much less likely that all 4 heard a different sounds calibrated exactly to seem like they came from a specific source when the data is combined.
Back in the shotspotter example, your microphones are in fixed positions, so you can figure out in advance what the echoes are going to be for any given originating sound, and do a reasonable job of triangulation with 3 sensors. You also have some other givens, eg it's reasonable to assume that the location of any actual gunshot is 1-2 meters above ground level; this means you'll be slightly wrong about rooftop snipers/shootouts but those are vanishingly rare compared to street shootings. I don't think anyone claims the product to be reliable for detecting shootings in building interiors, where you'd be competing with televisions and other false positives.
As I mentioned earlier, a product like this can get away with a relatively low success rate, as long as it's slightly better than the information that comes in from 911 calls and the rate of false positives if either tolerably low or negligently unaccounted for.
I live near a lot of urban gunfire and I can't imagine what they would do unless there is a dead body.
What if the arrival of the police or the sound of sirens dispelled the gunfire early enough to save those bystanders?
What if that body they find isn't quite dead, but bleeding out and they are able to save them?
To the point where suggesting officers should respond incase someone is bleeding out get downvoted.
I guess the compassionate thing is to wait for the body on Monday because "what's the point"
1. Administer first aid
2. Gather witnesses
3. Preserve evidence
4. Coordinate with other units to grid-search for suspicious persons or vehicles
5. In some cases, gather evidence/testimony that enables immediate pursuit
You know… police work.
However, at some point there are too many shots to even show up for, let alone do the more involved tasks you mention, and I think this is the situations some cities using the service found themselves in. At that point, it just becomes a data collection project, with unclear goals.
For what it is worth, I think we have ShotSpotter in my location, but have never seen police physically responding to shots fired. That is not to say it isn't useful in other locations
Having the resources and political will to respond is a separate matter entirely, but that has virtually nothing to do with the importance of treating gunfire as an emergency.
For context, my city has a 20 minute average response time for priority #1 911 calls (violent crime in progress). Response time for priory #2 & #3 calls is around 6 hours ( non-violent crime in progress, in progress disputes, just completed felonies, and stolen cars).
There are 10,000 ShotSpotter events a year.
As much as I wish it weren't the case, I simply dont think looking for casings, getting statements, and or performing a search is likely to be the highest demand for police time.
Respectfully, you don't seem to have any experience with law enforcement or military. 2-5 happen routinely.
>There are 10,000 ShotSpotter events a year.
And that is a separate issue of capacity vs demand. Nevertheless, a system like ShotSpotter, when paired with resources and a triage system, is a very real augmentation to law enforcement capacity.
The problems with SpotShotter are completely separate from this. That's precisely why law enforcement seems to want it so badly.
That is the only point that I was making. I already agreed that they would do the things on your list in an ideal world.
My point was that the data integrity is less of an issue for police than their bandwidth to take action on it. Maybe I wasn't clear enough.
Once you are already in a triage situation,the questions is what you cut to spend more time on shotspotter. I think in my city they will sometimes do a drive the area to see if there is anything obvious. They certainly cant ignore a home invasion to collect casings at the scene or go door to door asking questions.
if you're using this tool to dispatch officers to investigate then it's going to lead to a lot of wasted time
Depends on what you define as "useless".
It was objectively bad at identifying gunshots (the precision and recall were horrendous) and at reducing gun violence.
But it was really good at manufacturing probable cause, because the false positive rate was so high that police could use the sound of a dumpster lid closing as a legal reason to detain and search anyone who they wanted in that general area.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
A drone can see into your windows, but you don’t have the expectation of privacy through your windows in the first place; for instance, you can be charged with indecent exposure for being naked in your own house if the blinds are open.[1]
> You shouldn’t be Identified (asked for an ID) without breaking the law, while a drone can record and facial recognize you without committing any offense.
It’s not generally based on whether you actually broke the law, but whether the police have “reasonable suspicion” that you did. The police can be reasonably suspicious of someone who, it turns out, did not break the law.
Also, once you’re in public, anyone with a phone can record you and upload it to a social media network, most of which probably have more extensive facial recognition databases than the police.
One thing the police do have though, is that the dash cams in their patrol vehicles can scan license plates and alert them if a vehicle was reported stolen or if the registered owner has warrants.
[1] https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/police-provide...
Inconvenient but there's literally no other way for this to go. Laws are our only hope -- technology will continue on its march.
Somewhat rant-y I know, but just kinda a cautionary around the "well we can trust the government to keep laws as initially written and not remove all the parts that are there to protect are rights".
“The right of a citizen to use public spaces without causing the creation of a long term, indexable, searchable, hashable record of their presence shall not be curtailed.”
Side note - I’m not even an American citizen but can evoke the style of the second amendment without much trouble. That’s soft power!
They do indicate where loud noises are happening. That's might not be an actionable place to send an officer 15 minutes from now, which is the status quo, but it might be a great place to have drone video in 60 seconds.
The point of a shot spotter is to tell the PD where the loud noises are happening. Which the shot spotter can't do effectively.
If you wanted to know something was happening, people already phone in when gunshots are heard.
* If all know is that a loud noise happened, in a general area, you don't know much.
* If you know that a loud noise happened, and you see a video of kids lighting off fireworks, you have a pretty good idea that it wasn't gunshots, and that it isn't worth sending humans.
* If you know that a loud noise happened, and you see people with guns or people lying in the street, you may have a good reason to send a human response.
"Findings indicate GDT [gunshot detection technology] generates time savings and increases spatial precision as compared to CFS [9-1-1 calls for service]."
We like it that way, and we're glad the others feel unwelcome here.
The truth is that rural and urban living have different pros and cons and different wants and needs. There's no one ideal way of living.
The cameras would also have the benefit of footage being accessed after the fact in the case of a carjacking or mugging or whatever, even if no shot was fired.
Wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) is an approach to surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence-gathering that employs specialized software and a powerful camera system—usually airborne, and for extended periods of time—to detect and track hundreds of people and vehicles moving out in the open, over a city-sized area, kilometers in diameter. For this reason, WAMI is sometimes referred to as wide-area persistent surveillance (WAPS) or wide-area airborne surveillance (WAAS). [2]
0. https://www.wired.com/story/cities-curb-surveillance-baltimo...
Tech will never solve the root cause of America's crime problem, the societal level hatred for the working poor.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/mass-surve...
LPRs are all over as well, but of course in NYC, cops officers and friends avoiding tolls and tickets have normalized running cars without license plates.
The company realized that consumer focus was wrong (nobody had a good experience with their product with tons of complaints in user forums) and pivoted to govt drones because they got millions in grant funding. I can't imagine these guys ever producing anything even close to the level of quality that DJI does.
Needless to say, their website hasn't really been updated in years. The amount of grift these guys managed to pull off is insane.
[0]Problems run the gamut from excessive bootup times to extraordinarily poor station-keeping/wind fighting ability, low speed, clunky controllers, and more!
They will be used in anything but to fighting crimes.
And sometimes I've seen the drones hovering in the city, just watching, getting a bird's eye view.
I've also seen them track counter protests from the sky. And yes I did of course imagine some sort of radio jamming equipment, but the problem is that police are everywhere and if they see where you're at they will quickly scramble to arrest you.
An optimal solution would be maximum distance, and covertness.
Cameras are recording you every second of every day. All governments are monitoring your internet habits and you almost certainly are not doing enough to counteract them.
All governments even admit to it, there's a major "scandal" where everyone acts surprised like it isn't the 10th time its happened in the last century, maybe even the last decade alone.
All your personal data has been leaked by both bad actors and genuine mistakes. There is no restitution for this. Privacy is dead, and it's been dead for longer than you think it is.
If anything, drones are a step backwards because we can actually see them.
Not sure if that is legal but it was weird as f*.
I expect a massive infusion of drone platforms in police work in coming years. It’s an obvious application.
(I am not a native English speaker)
Video evidence is proof of truth.
Is there a danger of privacy intrusion or misinterpretation of evidence akin to https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html ? Yes. Fortunately, no surveillance is absolute.
Violent crime is rampant in NYC. Just a few examples from this year:
https://abc7ny.com/bodega-shooting-upper-east-side-fatal-rob...
https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/suspect-18-arrested-for-random...
https://nypost.com/2023/09/03/man-shot-dead-during-attempted...
https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00092/nypd-citywide-crim...
Now this is the NYPD's own crime statistics, so if you have a better source for statistics please send it. I'm not sure what other data source there would be. Anyway, aggregate statistics are more valuable for this sort of question than individual incidents.
We have real, system problems with American police forces today. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have police. We should have better trained, properly supervised police forces.