A blue wooden sign with golden engraved letters reads "City of Syracuse, Dept. of Police" on a green lawn outside of the police station downtown. A blue sky shines down on the scene.
Syracuse Police headquarters on South State Street in downtown Syracuse. Credit: Julie McMahon | Central Current

City of Syracuse officials and its police department plan to bypass their own surveillance technology review process to implement a “drone as first responder” program. 

Under the program, the police department would use a fleet of drones to respond before officers to 911 calls. 

Technology experts, including some involved in the city’s surveillance oversight process, have warned the program could quickly erode citizens’ civil rights and privacy. Similar drone programs have received scrutiny across the United States. 

City officials claim the drones are an extension of a pre-existing program, making them exempt from a process Mayor Ben Walsh created through an executive order in 2020. However, a senior police department official called the drones part of an entirely new program, contradicting the city’s claim. Technology experts believe the “drone as first responder” program would greatly increase the city’s current drone capabilities. 

Bypassing the process allows the department to escape the judgment of technology experts who could recommend curtailing the drones’ use and future expansion. Other cities have used such drones to monitor homeless encampments, to issue Covid-19 orders and to perform daily patrols. 

“I think it is quite Orwellian,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist for the New York Civil Liberties Union and a member of Syracuse’s Surveillance Technology Working Group. “If you imagine you live close to police headquarters … you would have drones flying over your yard every 30 minutes, every hour, several times a day. I don’t think it’s something that most people would want to have over their backyards.”

The city’s claim hinges on whether its new drones, which would fly autonomously to a location, are similar enough to drones that have already been included in a technology audit — tethered drones which are controlled by a person and can only fly vertically. 

Multiple members of Syracuse’s Surveillance Technology Working Group, an organization created by the mayor’s office to review new surveillance technology, say the first-response drones are different. 

The city’s Common Council voted to approve a $250,000 expenditure that includes the purchase of the first-response drones and software. In interviews with Central Current, some councilors said they believed the money would go toward maintaining the existing tethered  drones.  

Deputy Chief Richard Shoff has touted that the drones could reduce call response times and improve public safety. Schwarz said the NYCLU has received complaints from New York City residents — which already has a “drone as first response” program — who say the drones have a chilling effect on protestors and make people feel unnecessarily surveilled.

While a department spokesperson and a spokesperson for Walsh have maintained the DFR drones are an extension of the department’s current program, Syracuse police Deputy Chief Richard Shoff said the drones would be a separate, new program when initially interviewed by Central Current. 

Multiple members of the city’s Surveillance Technology Working Group agree with Shoff’s characterization of the DFR program — that it is separate and new. 

“The existing drones are tethered, the new ones come off the leash,” said working group member and Syracuse University professor Johannes Himmelreich. “To my mind, the two have as much in common as a car and a cable car.”

The first-response drones are meant to respond to crime scenes before police officers, according to Shoff. 

When the department receives a call, the drones will dispatch themselves and fly to the coordinates of the call. An operator viewing the drone’s footage can then relay information to responding officers, according to Shoff. He argued the drones could increase officers’ situational awareness and improve residents’ quality of life.

“It fits very nicely into the mayor’s image of a smart city,” Chief Joe Cecile said in an interview with television station CNY Central. 

Critics like Schwarz, though, are not convinced that the first-response drones actually accomplish any of these touted improvements.

“A lot of it is really bloated marketing claims, because there’s no evidence that this is in any way providing more safety or better responses in an emergency,” Schwarz said.

Technology experts have been adamant since at least November 2023 that the city’s “drone as first response” program should be reviewed by the Surveillance Technology Working Group. 

The department at the time floated the idea at one of the working group’s meetings . City and department officials were in attendance. Schwarz told them the group should review the department’s existing drone policy and any new drones the department decided to purchase, he said. Schwarz raised questions about the “drone as first responder” program the department intended to launch.

“Since then, I have not heard back about it,” Schwarz said. 

He and Himmelreich found out the department had gone to the council to fund the program when they were contacted by Central Current.

The Surveillance Technology Working Group was created by Walsh through an executive order in 2020 in response to Syracuse protests of George Floyd’s death. The group meets monthly.

The executive order was aimed at increasing accountability around the expanding use of police tools that incorporate surveillance technology. The group recommends policies for oversight of the technology and allows for resident input. City administration officials, employees, community stakeholders and technology ethics experts sit on the group. 

When the working group evaluates a piece of technology, they often make recommendations on the most ethical ways to limit its future expansion. That is always accompanied by a public comment period. 

Walsh’s spokesperson Brooke Schneider said the department did not return to get the working group’s input because the police department already has a drone program. 

“This technology is an extension of a program that was reviewed as part of the surveillance technology audit completed prior to the start of the STWG,” Schneider said in a statement.

The only police drone program documented in the city’s audit of its own technology is a Fotokite drone program. 

Those drones are tethered and only move vertically. They are also controlled by an officer on the scene of a call. 

Kieran Coffey, a spokesperson for the city police department, said the department has been flying other drones for “several years,” however those have not been captured in the audit required by Walsh’s executive order. Coffey has since not responded to questions about the department’s existing drone fleet. 

Schwarz and Himmelreich were surprised to learn of the existence of other police drones. Given that Fotokite drones are the only drones included in the audit, Schwarz believes the new drones need to be reviewed. 

“It’s a fundamental change of what the technology does,” Schwarz said.

The lack of review for the “drone as first responder” program exacerbated an already existing concern for Schwarz. In 2020, the police department outlined public reporting mechanisms about any future drone program. It promised to create a public disclosure and data retention plan. 

Four years later, Schwarz and Himmelreich are not aware of any public disclosure structure or public flight log database – the sort of transparency efforts that other departments have incorporated to build community trust. 

It’s unclear if the department ever followed through on its promises. Coffey did not reply to questions about the 2020 policy. 


“At best, there’s a complete disregard toward developing those privacy plans and policies,” Schwarz said, “and at worst, an active disregard and trying to hide and not stepping up the accountability requirements that their own policy outlines.” 

Syracuse police’s initiative follows a national trend for police departments around the country.

In recent years, police departments around the country have expanded existing fleets of drones, raising eyebrows among some civil rights watchdogs.

The American Civil Liberties Union found that over 1,400 police departments operated drones in a 2023 assessment. After adding a drone program, many police departments have sought to use drones as first responders. The ACLU report recommended against communities implementing new “drone as first responder” programs. 

“It’s important we do not sleepwalk into a world of widespread aerial surveillance,” the ACLU report said.

Departments often claim to emulate the Chula Vista Police Department in California, which became the first department in the nation to implement a “drone as first responder” program in 2018. 

The department received some praise in the ACLU report for its transparency efforts, which include publishing data on each drone flight. The ACLU found some gaps in those efforts, though. About 1 in 10 drone flight reports gave an unspecific reason for their flight: “unknown problem.”

Chula Vista PD’s first-response drones, which have flown tens of thousands of routes since their implementation six years ago, have a mixed perception among residents, according to reporting by the magazine Wired. The magazine reported that a survey by the police department found that some citizens feel the drones increase public safety while others feel unnecessarily surveilled by the first-response drones. 

According to an analysis by Wired, each first-response drone flight potentially exposes “thousands of Chula Vista residents to the gaze of law enforcement over an incident that had nothing to do with them.”

While Chula Vista’s police drones responded to some violent situations, they were routinely dispatched to mundane situations, according to Wired. After analyzing the records of nearly 10,000 drone flights from July 2021 to September 2023, Wired found that drones were often sent to respond to loud music, vandalism, and even to a reported water leak.

This sort of expanded use of first responder drones is a main fear for civil rights advocates, Schwarz said. 

The Oklahoma City police department has already integrated some of its first-response drones into daily patrols. Police in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, used their drones during the pandemic to blare recorded messages at citizens in an effort to maintain social distancing guidelines. 

In 2020, the Chula Vista PD itself deployed its drone fleet, outfitted with speakers, on patrols to monitor homeless encampments and broadcast public service announcements as the Covid-19 pandemic raged. 

The New York Civil Liberties Union wrote in a 2022 report that police departments are buying drones that have “the capacity to be weaponized” – which the report said is not currently prohibited by any New York state law.

Other departments have opted to connect their drones to ShotSpotter, a technology Syracuse police have. Shoff said Syracuse police will not connect the drones to ShotSpotter. 

Schwarz, the working group member, argued the potential expanded uses make the drones more worrisome and ripe for abuse. 

Himmelreich hopes the city allows the working group to review the new drones, as it did with the Fotokite drones.

“From all I know, I expect that this tech will find its way to the STWG. Even if it’s not required, I think it’s a good thing to do,” Himmelreich said. “SPD has nothing to hide and only legitimacy to gain.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...