Prying Eyes: Government Drone Data Across New York State

The NYCLU first revealed in 2022 how many of these invasive drones fill the arsenals of police departments and other government entities throughout New York. Now, we have updated our report with the newest data, pursuant to a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The new data reveals:

• A massive expansion of drones by government agencies across New York: there are now 876 active drone registrations by 127 different New York government entities across the state, up from 530 drones by 85 agencies in 2022. This represents a 65 percent increase in only two years.
• Law enforcement agencies operate the vast majority (508) of these drones.
• The New York City Police Department increased its arsenal from 19 active registrations to a whopping 99, an increase of 421 percent.
• Multiple law enforcement agencies have aggressively expanded the ways they use drones. Now, they’re flying them in response to 911 calls and alerts from questionable, error-prone technology like ShotSpotter.
• Several law enforcement agencies that had registered drones in 2022 no longer show up in the new data. This includes the Nassau County Police Department, which had 33 active registrations then, and the Yonkers Police Department, which had just performed an extensive drone trial with Motorola. It is unclear whether those police departments failed to re-register their drones, and we have reached out to the FAA for further information.

The dangers posed by these incredibly powerful spying devices are hard to overstate, and they’re being used with virtually no regulation. It is incumbent on the New York Legislature to tightly regulate the use of drones by law enforcement.

Drones can be used to track a huge number of people or vehicles over a vast area. Some drones are so small or can be operated from such great distances, you likely wouldn’t notice them if they peered into your home’s window, followed you as you walked down the street, visited your doctor’s office, attended a protest, entered your place of worship or had what you thought was a private conversation with your friend.

Drones have also become cheaper and can operate for long periods of time without needing to recharge or leave the air. Some can even fly autonomously.

Drones can also be equipped with biometric surveillance capabilities like facial recognition, gait recognition, emotion recognition, or behavior detection — and even when the data is inaccurate, law enforcement may rely on it to arrest people. They can be outfitted to detect objects, including license plates. They can also use infrared or thermal imaging technology and even microphones sensitive enough to hear personal conversations. Many drones can be equipped with a variety of dangerous items or invasive technologies: for example, some have tools that allow for “unlimited” flight times,  “target tracking” or “follow-me” functions to autonomously track and fly after people or vehicles, additional sensors and speakers, or even crowd-control devices such as pepper spray. We may be heading towards a world in which drones can quickly and easily capture nearly every minute of our lives, storing our personal moments in databases that only the government or private companies have access to.

These capabilities represent unprecedented risks to New Yorkers’ privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, and concerns over their use are not just theoretical. Police aerial surveillance is rife with examples of misuse and abuse.

Despite the legitimate concerns about drones, police departments rarely disclose how or when they use them, what type of information they are collecting, how long the departments store that information, and who has access to it.

Drones have been deployed to police recent political protests. U.S. Customs and Border Protection used drones and other aerial surveillance tools to monitor protests against police violence in 15 different cities, including by deploying a Predator drone –military hardware – in Minneapolis. The ACLU of Northern California uncovered aerial surveillance of racial justice protests all over the state. Police in Massachusetts and Arizona also deployed drones to monitor Black Lives Matter protests. And in 2021, a court ruled that the Baltimore Police Department’s aerial surveillance program – which put the daytime movements of virtually all Baltimore residents under surveillance for 12 hours a day over six months — was unconstitutional.

Departments increasingly combine drones with other invasive technologies. New York City Mayor Eric Adams expanded the NYPD’s drone program by pairing it with the highly flawed ShotSpotter audio recording devices along rooftops. And a police department in Westport, Connecticut deployed drones coupled with thermal imagery and biometric recognition software to track people’s heart rate, sneezing, coughing, and distance from one another. This was a wildly inaccurate, ineffective, and invasive measure in the early days of the COVID response.

While there is no current evidence that drones operating in New York are armed, many of the drones being deployed by police departments in our state have the capacity to be weaponized — and there is currently no law that prevents police departments from doing so.

Some departments in other states have already shown an interest in arming technology with lethal weapons. The Dallas Police Department, for example, repurposed a bomb-disposal robot to kill a suspect, and the Oakland Police Department tried to get the City to let it arm robots with guns.

The data we received from the FAA shows a massive expansion of drones by government agencies across New York State. In 2024, there were 876 active drone registrations by 127 government entities across New York state, compared to 530 drones by 85 agencies in 2022 — an increase of 65 percent.

As we have long warned, this growth will continue. Year after year, Governor Hochul has increased state funding for local law enforcement surveillance technologies, including drones, without limitations or oversight.

Drones are also becoming much cheaper, and companies market them more aggressively. Market consolidation by established vendors, aggressive promotions and free trials, and expanded offers by vendors contracted for other surveillance technologies have all resulted in more police departments acquiring more drones.

In a particularly worrisome development, more and more departments have launched so-called Drones As First Responder (DFR) programs, where police drones fly, often autonomously, in response to 911 calls or other alerts. There is no evidence drones provide meaningful benefits or work well as first responders. Drones are first and foremost a surveillance technology — so using them always raises significant constitutional concerns — but there is also the danger that utilizing drones will shift funding away from in-person, human responders, or other supportive programs that are better equipped to keep people safe.

Already, multiple police departments across New York State have begun such DFR programs, including the NYPD, the Yonkers Police Department, the Schenectady Police Department, the Syracuse Police Department, and the Village of Hempstead Police Department on Long Island. None of these departments have the necessary guardrails in place to safely deploy drones. Nor did any of these departments conduct audits or show any evidence that their respective DFR programs truly deliver on the lofty sales promises and overbroad marketing claims regarding their efficacy and effectiveness.

In the relatively rare instances when drone use policies are published, they are vague and lack sufficient restrictions. Officers appear to be the ones who decide when and where drones are flown. This often leads to mission creep: police will deploy drones for increasingly minor issues, creating dehumanizing interactions, or even harassment of residents.

In the case of the NYPD, drones are not just flown in response to certain 911 calls — they are also flown to investigate highly erroneous ShotSpotter alerts that primarily target communities of color, who have long borne the brunt of over-surveillance and over-policing. And when the drones are idle, they are even flown as part of regular police patrols, blatantly violating the NYPD’s own policy and ushering in a new level of constant, aerial surveillance.

The NYPD has not adjusted its drone policy to account for these new uses. The department also has not accounted for what it will do with the video footage that will incidentally be captured, for example through people’s home windows or when flying over private backyards. The drones are equipped with night vision and thermal imaging cameras and they are designed to be able to open doors and break windows.

DFR programs lead to many more drone flights within residential communities. The NYCLU has heard from numerous New Yorkers who report feeling constantly watched, saying they’re anxious about drones hovering over their backyards and flying by their windows. This is especially true for people living in the vicinity of common drone flight paths, where people see these devices multiple times per day. Constant drone deployment can negatively impact people’s quality of life, trigger trauma responses, and create chilling effects on their free speech. People under regular drone surveillance can also face acutely negative consequences at protests, places of worship, health clinics, or shelters – and the harms from the associated data collection cannot be overstated.

The drone maker Skydio has been instrumental in helping the NYPD create its DFR program. The company helped the NYPD get authorization from the FAA to fly drones “beyond-line-of-sight.” This means drones can be operated remotely, far away from where the drone is flying, and without drone operators being able to see the drone in-person.

Skydio has worked with over 500 public safety agencies nationwide, but its partnership with the NYPD is especially important to the company. Skydio wants to show that if the NYPD can pilot its autonomous drones in New York– with the city’s congested airspace, skyscrapers and other obstacles to free flight – then the company’s drones can be deployed nearly anywhere. Skydio’s own promotional materials refer to the FAA’s approval for New York City as a “revolutionary” blueprint to show how its drones can be deployed across the United States in a “transformational expansion.”

Skydio’s “Command Center” software allows its drones to be integrated with real-time crime center’s like the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, which uses a network of tens of thousands of cameras to surveil New York City. The Command Center software can also be used with other surveillance devices like automated license plate readers and acoustic sensors like ShotSpotter. Skydio promises its drones can respond to information from these surveillance technologies and be deployed “with a single click.”

In the Village of Hempstead, these concerns come to a head. The Hempstead Police Department partnered with Flock Safety to run its DFR program of drones with video analytics capabilities that are directly integrated with the department’s license plate reader program and real-time crime center. Flock is notorious for its highly invasive license plate data collection and excessive data sharing. This fully integrated system threatens to create a state of total surveillance for Village residents — making it easy for the police (or Flock and potentially others for that matter) to monitor nearly every movement.

Without tight restrictions on drone use, access, data sharing, and retention, all of our rights and liberties could be at risk. We must urgently pump the brakes on out-of-control, sci-fi-inspired aerial surveillance and create real guardrails and regulations on this technology. If not, it may catapult us into a dystopian new normal we haven’t asked for.

We can’t count on law enforcement agencies to police themselves, and that’s especially true when it comes to the use of invasive, military-grade technologies like drones. State leaders must put the clamps on police use of these devices.

State leaders should pass legislation that prohibits drone surveillance of protests and other activities protected by the First Amendment, and requires a search warrant before departments use drones in police investigations. They should also prohibit drones from using facial recognition software, weapons, or crowd control devices.

We must subject drones to public oversight. We need rules for the public accessibility, retention, and deletion of drone-collected data, and private drone operating companies should be subject to the same rules as law enforcement.

Legislators must recognize that unregulated use of drones by police poses a unique threat to our rights to protest, privacy, and to be free from invasive and warrantless government surveillance.

How We Received the Data

Inspired by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information request to the FAA for all active registrations by New York government agencies, including law enforcement agencies. We encourage others to replicate these requests in their respective states to get a more complete picture of the widespread use of drones.

You can access and download the 2024 and 2022 data below. We edited the spreadsheets to remove erroneous duplicates from the dataset, mistakenly included private companies, consolidated agencies that were falsely separated, and corrected misspellings.