The Syracuse Police Department’s proposal to deploy autonomous drones to emergency calls all over the city drew the most negative feedback of any proposed surveillance technology since the city began taking public feedback about such technology.
A review of submissions from the city’s public comment period found about 2 in 3 respondents — or 67% — pushed back against the drones. You can read those comments here.
Syracuse lawmakers may vote Monday whether to approve the purchase of software that would pave the way for the drones to be deployed.
Aren Burnside, a doctoral student at Syracuse University, has researched drone technology. Burnside has been working on behalf of the Syracuse Peace Council to educate the community on the risks of police drone expansion in Syracuse. The Peace Council and Burnside are opposed to the city’s drone program.
“Communities can’t have public safety without degrees of privacy,” Burnside said. “A lot of communities, especially communities of color, have not had public safety for years and years and years, because they have had a lack of privacy from institutions like the police.”
The drone program, referred to as a “drone as first responder” program, would allow the department to dispatch autonomous drones to the scene of any 911 call, from high-priority calls like hostage crises, missing persons, and active shooters, to low-priority calls like reports of vandalism, graffiti, and loud noise.
This is the third time the city has put the drone proposal on the Common Council’s agenda. The drone proposal has hit snags since it was first brought forward in November.
Reporting by Central Current found the city had sidestepped its surveillance technology review process before proposing the drone technology. After first saying it would skip the review process, the city changed course — allowing the public and experts to weigh in on the drones. That led to the historically negative feedback the city received about the drones.
In March, Sgt. Jason Wells and Lt. Brian Williams faced questions from councilors about the technology in a Public Safety Committee meeting. Their answers didn’t survive the councilors’ scrutiny, though, as the council withdrew the item from its agenda the following day.
Police have said the drones could limit response times and give officers better insight when they respond to emergency calls.
“I suspect that this is gonna be like the COPS cameras,” said Deputy Chief Richard Shoff. “There’s a lot of apprehension at first, and then before you know it, people are not gonna be worried about the drones. They’re gonna be wondering ‘why don’t they have more?’”
A snapshot of the negative feedback
According to a spreadsheet of feedback published by the city, 95 of the 141 respondents had negative perceptions of the drones.
Twenty-nine residents gave positive feedback, or about 21%. The rest, 12% of respondents, posed a question or gave neutral feedback.
Only 76 respondents of the 124 who gave clear feedback on the drones declared themselves as living in the city. Sixty of those respondents — 79% — had negative feedback for the proposed program.
Many of the negative comments expressed distrust of the police department’s use of its current technologies, and others implored the city to direct funding toward combating poverty and hunger. Some explicitly disapproved of the drones because of a lack of trust, citing the city’s sidestepping of its own procedures when it first looked to deploy its first responder drones.
The responses echo criticism levied by privacy and technology watchdogs.
The American Civil Liberties Union in 2023 issued a report called ‘Eye-in-the-Sky Policing Needs Strict Limits,’ detailing a litany of real and potential privacy incursions by surveillance drones throughout the US.
The Electronic Freedom Frontier in 2024 published a report outlining the pervasive creep of drone as first responder programs into American towns and cities.
Such programs portend privacy violations and chilling effects on first amendment rights, facilitated through technological concepts that are often battle-tested in far off warzones before entering American cities, those organizations have argued.
“Opposed to it. unregulated invasion of privacy. no apparent oversight, as usual, for the continued efforts of the city supporting the SPD for increased surveillance of its citizens,” one negative comment reads.
Several responses marked ‘question/other’ asked for more clarification on the department’s existing policies, and more transparency on the policy governing first responder drones. Others cast doubt on the technology’s efficacy.
“I am worried about potential misuse of drone data and excessive surveillance of people in public spaces. I’m concerned that drone data could be used as a tool to assist ICE & unlawful efforts to detain and deport immigrants,” one respondent wrote. The city categorized that response as “question/other.”
How the drones could be used
A consistent thread across all the comments is a request for more information from the police department about policies governing drone use and evidence to back police’s claims the program will lead to a safer community.
Some of the respondents who weighed in positively about the drones made explicit that they only supported the use of drones on high-priority calls, like shots fired, burglaries and search and rescues.
Initially, that’s how the department pitched its use of the drones. But the police department most recently pitched the drone program as also being used to respond to lower-level calls like noise complaints and vandalism reports.
The Surveillance Technology Working Group, meant to establish recommendations for surveillance technology use, pared down its recommendations after police pushback.
In the working group’s draft recommendations, members outlined a list of potential prohibited uses. These included low-level offenses like vandalism and noise complaints, as well as traffic enforcement.
Lt. Brian Williams responded to the group’s suggestions, writing that he wanted officers to operate drones without restriction during those low-level offenses.
“DFR is most beneficial to these types of calls,” Williams wrote. “Should not be restricted for these.”
‘Everybody’s not going to be 100% on that’
Since the feedback rolled in, Shoff has talked to multiple media outlets and hosted an outreach event attended by 20 to 30 people, the deputy chief said.
Chol Majok, the Common Council’s Public Safety Committee chair, has so far declined to speak to Central Current about the drones since they were re-introduced on the council’s agenda.
In March, Majok told a Central Current reporter that, although the community’s concerns are valid, public safety is more important than privacy. Majok said he was also concerned – both as a resident and a city councilor.
Majok, like Shoff, referenced the city’s COPS cameras in that March interview and the privacy debates around that technology.
“Everybody’s not going to be 100% on that, but we have a job to do, and that is to assure safety, right?” Majok said at the time. “Safety, that’s number one. That’s number one for us.”
Burnside, the doctoral student, argued that the city has not conducted enough public outreach, and is not truly considering its constituents’ concerns. He believes the drones will not reduce crime because they fail to ameliorate underlying conditions that cause crime in Syracuse.
“It’s just checking the box that public feedback was taken into account,” Burnside said, “Because it is not giving people enough time to get the information, or the information is not really accessible enough to people, or given in a way for people to digest it.”
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