There are no legal means to take down a drone in NYC. And the implied assumption that the same rules and laws apply to NYPD as the citizens is ridiculous at best.
What are the consequence of taking them down though? If they fly low enough even an arrow could do so. If they’re high enough in the air some sort of firearm could do away with it Im thinking… I guess that would equate to shooting at NYPD propery but would a costly investigation be worth it?
If you're willing to shoot a firearm in the air to take out a drone in a crowded city, you have no business being within arm's reach of any firearm unsupervised, regardless of how old you are.
Im not willing to do so but someone will, and an ingenious person could use a silncer or something that obfuscates their location. While Im impressed with the development of drone tech I don’t think suddently they’re invincible in any way…
Hi! I live in NYC too. Please don’t fire a gun into the air! As much as I dislike NYPD surveillance, it’s better than being killed by a falling bullet!
They don’t need to prove anything. They will know it’s the local hawk guy. That person will then sped all his or her money on lawyers, and then spend a long time in jail.
With this technology flourishing I wouldn’t be surprised seeing more and more hawks as ‘pets’ though. Don’t underestimate the reaction to any abusive tech, the achilles heel may be even easier than that to strike
There's probably no legal way to do that in the US. Bald eagles (and Golden eagles) have special protection under Federal law which essentially makes having anything to do with them a felony unless you are a zoo or are a Native American using the eagle for religious purposes, and even then you need to get a permit.
Legal or not I personally know a number of individuals who would down these without any hesitation. It is on their property and is not a human being: fair game as far as they are concerned.
It is not, in fact, on their property. The airspace belongs to the public. It is ironic that they would deprive others of their property rights in the name of perceived property rights. I would certainly hope for a felony conviction in such a case. I have no sympathy for people who would use weapons to illegally enrich themselves at the expense of others.
And by the way, as has been decided this year (though it might yet be appealed) in the Wyoming border crossing case, even using a ladder to cross through the airspace above private lands is not trespassing.
Who said anything about enrichment? We have a right to privacy and quiet enjoyment. Corporations aren't people, they don't have moral rights. If shooting/netting them down catches on they can't arrest everyone. "Father becomes imprisoned felon for taking down invasive corporate/government drone that spied on their home" will not be a headline that garners sympathy for the drone operator.
Release a bunch of helium balloons, each trailing as much thread as they can lift. Might just tie a bunch and do a barrage balloon thing as a canopy anyway.
If Russia<>Ukraine war taught us anything is that you will rarely see or hear the drone that kills you. And UA isn't usually using any high end gear like western police. The rare videos you see of soldiers shooting rifles at them they almost always miss.
I am disgusted by this and think all levers of society, legal and social, should be used to protest and fight against this panopticon evil.
I also think it's absurd to think, just yet, that NYPD is going to be using kamikaze drone bombs to take out backyard pits. Where's the fun in that? Cops don't get to crack any heads.
The NYPD is a profoundly overfunded police agency[1], as these kinds of technical hijinks indicate. If there are noise complaints, why aren't they knocking on doors?
(It's a rhetorical question: the answer is that the NYPD has abject contempt for the communities it ostensibly serves, and increasingly is made of people who don't even live in the city they police[2].)
It's not really a fair comparison because much of the budget is the cost of labor, but the NYPD's budget is roughly equal to the budget of Ukraine's military (pre-February 2022).
according to https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D..., in 2015, Austria spent €545 per inhabitant on "public order and safety", which includes "Police services; fire-protection services; law courts; prisons; R&D related to public order and safety; public order and safety n.e.c. ". about 9 million people live in Austria, so they spent about €5 million in total.
even if they have the same population, it should cost more to police Austria than NYC because Austria has a larger area, so they need to have more police stations and cars.
Drones are cheap, people are expensive. The current labor shortage isn’t going away, and everyone is going to have to make more use of automation to get by. Lots of police departments are flush in cash and yet still can’t hire enough new police officers (and when/if they compete on salaries, which they can’t because of union rules, it would just be a bidding war for a limited number of people who want to do that kind of job).
All industries are suffering labor shortages. Sure, let’s just raise wages for everyone, but there are still a limited number of people overall. Across the board, in every industry, the only real solution is to raise productivity (from grocery stores using automated checkouts to police using drones), there simply isn’t any other reasonable solution (and nicely, with increased productivity should come higher salaries without causing bidding wars on a limited supply of labor).
Unless you think there is lots of induced supply to be had, paying more won’t do much in increasing supply, you’ll just be taking workers from somewhere else, and if everyone pays more, it will just come out as inflation. Increased productivity gets around that, since fewer workers are needed, they can be paid more, and since they produce more, inflation is less of a concern.
Incidentally, NYPD is pretty well paid, if you think they need to be making tech salaries…well, I’m not sure where to start with that. Someday this might be more of a tech career (think riggers from shadow run).
Maybe spin up more citizen watches? Non-lethal patrols to observe and report?
I feel like automating and centralizing surveillance for troubled police departments is a bad thing. But then again, it would also be bad to become Megacity One.
An automated, low cost device that people cannot reason with or argue with, that can be deployed in such a way people can't know if they're being watched.
When I say "patrol" I mean a citizen who is not on the police side of the thin blue line.
Labor shortages and costs are a red herring here: an NYPD officer makes more than the average New Yorker on their first day[1][2], and there are around 36,000 of them, most of whom are expected to be doing things like responding to noise complaints already.
Besides: it's not like we're talking about autonomous drones here, and it's not like a drone can write a noise ticket. I doubt the city is saving any time or personnel by using drones here; if anything, there's likely some sweet overtime (in the form of "drone training") available for cops who pilot these things rather than making door calls.
The latest public training figure I can find (which are very old) indicate that 29 NYPD officers have been trained to operate 14 drones[1]. That's around 2.1 cops per drone.
Pretty sure they aren’t all using the drones at the same time. Even then, the program has just started, and officers getting drone certs doesn’t mean piloting drones is anywhere near their full time job.
I also doubt that the tech won’t get better and more autonomous as time goes on, and I would guess that the department is just trying to get early experience on an obvious future trend.
Also, for tracking a suspect in a chase, a drone is surely more economical than a helicopter with two pilots.
Where is the money going? Anyone got a copy of the budget? Haha. I am always so interested in how NYC’s bureaucracy comes out with these crazy decisions.
The city's budget documents for the current fiscal year are here[1]. The NYPD doesn't appear to publish their own "internal" budget, but many details can be gleaned from their finance committee reports[2].
A large part of the NYPD's budget goes to wages, in parts because of (1) bloated wages for senior officers, and (2) rampant overtime abuse[3]. Some of that money would be recaptured in the form of income taxes, except that the NYPD has successfully lobbied to exclude itself from NYC's civil servant residency requirements[4].
> The starting salary for an NYPD officer is $55,910 without overtime. Meanwhile, the required annual income for a person living alone in New York City with no children is $53,342, according to an MIT living wage calculator.
So a police officer starts out barely makes a living wage. No wonder they end up living outside NYC to save money. And then if they manage to save up a down payment, good luck qualifying for a NYC mortgage on that salary.
Emphasis on "without overtime." Their actual take-home pay includes overtime.
And note: the NYPD has very handsome perks: it's a 22-years-to-half-salary-pension job that rises to 121k after 5.5 years in the service[1]. The other benefits are worth looking at as well.
Working as a cop doesn't entitle someone to be able to afford a mortgage; millions of New Yorkers can't afford mortgages. Millions of New Yorkers also live in this city while making less than the NYPD does; on a basic civic level, it would behoove the NYPD to live a bit more like the people they're meant to protect.
If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary.
Including overtime seems questionable. It's arguably a "perk" but it damages work/life balance and contributes to burnout. Most people do a ~40 hour work week, comparing that to a police officer doing 50-60 does not seem fair.
I understand the issues with policing as an institution, but average police officers are basically societal janitors, doing a nasty, unpleasant job for very mediocre pay. You aren't going to improve the quality of people hired by making the job even more unattractive.
> If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary.
This is true for every other civil servant in NYC; they haven't quit. People want to live here.
Overtime does indeed contribute to burnout. But overtime use by the NYPD is culturally endemic and rampant[1]; individual anecdotes don't make a trend, but you can look up "NYPD overtime abuse" for widely shared "tricks" among NY's finest for getting paid extra money for indefinitely detaining suspects, conducting calls where they know an arrest won't be made, &c.
Finally: I agree that policing is a nasty, unpleasant job. To a certain degree, it's fundamentally nasty and unpleasant. But the current degree to which it's that way is a problem of our own making: police departments have been happy to absorb the budget that was slashed from mental health and community building programs, all while complaining about the overflowed social ills that come with doing that. I'd rather make the job more attractive by funding those things than dumping more money into the black hole that is the NYPD's labor budget.
Controversial, but I don't think it's a bad use of resources. Noise from parties is horrible and it's too easy to get away with it by just not answering the door.
How much do you think it costs to send an armed officer in a squad car to knock on a door in response to a noise complaint? How much do you think it costs to send a drone to observe a place in response to a noise complaint? A place which legally has no expectation of privacy by the way.
Consider also the fact that armed officers sometimes shoot and kill people. A camera drone completely avoids this potential outcome.
These are excellent reasons to disarm ordinary police, not to give our overarmed police drones. As noted in another thread: the drone can’t give out a ticket; it isn’t as if this eliminates the shoe-leather work that cops are still doing here (and the corresponding risk due to them being overarmed.)
NY has a privacy law that enshrines a reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s backyard. But I haven’t made any argument around this: I don’t think we should be paying cops to fly drones around, regardless of whether or not it’s a civil liberties issue.
>But as the technology proliferates, privacy advocates say regulations have not kept up, opening the door to intrusive surveillance that would be illegal if conducted by a human police officer.
Since these drones don't fly themselves and there is a trained officer somewhere at the controls then this surveillance is in fact conducted by a human police officer and should be an illegal violation of privacy.
Frankly if one of these things shows up over my backyard while I'm smoking a brisket for my family I'm gonna moon it and make lewd hand gestures.
I agree. A drone that stays over someone else's private property is their problem. If it is operated from neighboring property as a device to gather information about me when I am on my property then that changes everything. When it is purposely guided over mine then I should have the option to handle it in any way I deem appropriate. Looking into my back yard, which is enclosed by a fence and is therefore not open for public viewing should be a violation of my privacy.
I think the deciding factor is going to be how we define "observable to the public" now that flying cameras on are the table.
My sad guess is that the general rule will change to accept things that can see your property from public airspace as "observable to the public", and that eventually building design and landscaping will change to give you private spaces outdoors if you have money and desire.
This may be how it works out but anyone arguing that an observer flying in an airplane through public airspace has the same opportunity to peer into your private back yard or other areas of your private property is arguing apples and oranges. Most people flying in planes are passengers in transit between two locations with no opportunity to guide the plane to allow them to view specific locations. On the other hand a drone operator has full control of the path the drone takes and can operate it so that it peers into private spaces from public airspace.
If a property is marked as private property then that privacy should offer protection from those who would trespass using public airspace.
But you can't limit it like this... the airspace is public!
So for commercial flights... sure - but there are a whole host of private pilots owners that absolutely can do this.
Ex - how do you think news helicopters work?
Basically, I'm saying that this phrase
> "who would trespass using public airspace"
is non-sense. You can't have public space that is being trespassed on. You can apply some limitations (ex: a pilot's license) but many drone pilots already need to be registered anyways.
At best, you can argue that there was a clear expectation of privacy (aka: the same argument that prevents you from pointing a telescope at the windows of a private bathroom from public land) and make it illegal after the fact, but I don't really believe that the courts will accept that you have the same expectation of privacy in an outdoor area visible from public space (incl airspace) as you would in a bathroom.
I know of a couple related SCOTUS cases on the topic -- both split 5-4:
California v. Ciraolo (1985)[1]:
> Question: Did the warrantless, aerial observation of Ciraolo's back yard from an altitude of 1,000 feet constitute an illegal search and violate the Fourth Amendment?
> Conclusion: The divided Court found that the observation did not violate the Constitution. Chief Justice Burger reasoned that the Fourth Amendment protections regarding the home had never been absolute: for example, police officers are not obligated to shield their eyes when passing homes on public streets or sidewalks. Since the observations of the Santa Clara officers was "nonintrusive" and "took place within public navigable airspace," their actions were consistent with the Fourth Amendment. "Any member of the public flying in this airspace who glanced down could have seen everything that these officers observed," concluded Burger. The dissenters, led by Justice Powell, argued that this decision was a significant departure from the Court's holding in Katz v. United States (1967) which established a two-part test to evaluate privacy claims.
Kyllo v. United States (2001)[2]:
This case has to do with use of thermal-imaging (without a warrant) to detect if marijuana was being grown inside a house. The court held that it was an unlawful search because it was effectively using technology to peer inside the home without a warrant. While that's not the same as looking into someone's backyard, the opinions have a lot to say about police using technology to erode the privacy of one's home.[3]
I know there are conflicting rulings. I think both of them need updating to be able to cover trespass and violation of privacy using aerial drones that have many more sensor packages available today.
After an incident with a drone peering through their window one evening after dusk, one of my close relatives tracked the drone to a neighbor and let that neighbor know that it better not happen again. Then they contacted the sheriff and game warden and reported the drone trespass and they were told that if it happened again they should shoot it down and turn it over for evidentiary analysis and the sheriff would handle it for them. They own land in a rural area that is surrounded by a large ranch. The local ranch manager has been trying to act like a good neighbor when they meet in person but behind the scenes has been working to make life annoying for them for a long time so that they would sell out and leave.
By all accounts the apparatus is already quite capable of (and practiced at) quickly locating and dispatching officers to the locations from which fools are shining laser pointers at aircraft, so I can't imagine the first part of your statement is a good idea.
My feeling would be this does violate the law. The problem is new technology must often go through courts to actually establish the law. So it seems that while the NYPD could decide it’s a no-go, their worse case is to do it, get sued and then let a judge make the call.
(1) it's not been tested in courts, so it might not be legal
(2) the likely argument from the government would be that open backwards are but subject to the same expectation of privacy as other interior parts of the home. If the cops have a helicopter surveiling your back yard no one says that it's a warrantless search. Why is a drone different?
The obvious answer there is levels of scale, but it's an open question if that will hold up to actual legal challenges
I think, 30 years after that decision, it is fair to re-evaluate it in light of the proliferation of inexpensive surveillance technology. If/when drones are the size of a fly, would it be legal to land it on the fence of my property and record my conversation?
Strangely everyone here is suggesting overt attacks on the drone. That will get you put in prison. Rules for thee but not for me is how the police operate. The drone will have an FAA number and it'll become a felony for "shooting down an aircraft".
On second thought: Perhaps I should edit this post. LOL.
I have wanted to learn more about the RF spectrum as it relates to drone control, and how susceptible various brands of drone would be to interference of those frequencies. For research purposes.
The arrogance of the NYC and New York State governments regarding the entire Bill of Rights apparently knows no bounds. This is a stereotypical example of a government which believes its citizens aren't constituents whom they serve, but stupid proles who have to be kept down by their alleged "betters."
There is an almost infinite amount of things to reasonably blame the NYC and NYS governments for, but this doesn't look like one of them (other than in the basic sense of enabling this behavior through budgeting): it's the act of a largely unaccountable police force, rather than a legislative order or rule.
The NYC government, at the very least, is ultimately accountable for the acts of its police department. My NYS comment was a more wide-ranging shot at what happens to individual rights when one political party (red or blue) gets to call the shots.
But if the NYPD is really "unaccountable" to the NYC government, well, that seems like a ripe situation for the Feds to step in because the local government has lost control. A PD which isn't accountable to its elected government isn't a PD; it's an armed gang.
> But if the NYPD is really "unaccountable" to the NYC government, well, that seems like a ripe situation for the Feds to step in because the local government has lost control. A PD which isn't accountable to its elected government isn't a PD; it's an armed gang.
Perhaps you should brush up on your constitutional law, because at least in this one instance the Bill of Rights is entirely being respected.
Also consider that for every noise complaint to the police, there is a complainant - a citizen constituent - who is being bothered by a loud party. But let's forget about those people, their rights to reasonable peace and quiet don't matter? I don't agree with that stance.
The really abhorrent thing here is how absurdly difficult it is to fly a drone commercially in NYC - and the NYPD is going to fly them at night beyond line of sight.
The NYPD promises an officer will respond to a noise complaint within 8 hours, and only if there are no other emergencies. That’s a terrible SLA. A drone can probably respond to five calls an hour since it doesn’t get stuck in traffic.
Recording a back yard in NYC, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (it’s visible from everywhere), from a drone which has probable cause (a complaint) seems perfectly reasonable.
109 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadhttps://xkcd.com/1523/
Short of using a rail gun, your projectile is unlikely to reach escape velocity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoglia/2016/04/13/faa-confi...
(I'm not actually advocating anybody do this.)
And by the way, as has been decided this year (though it might yet be appealed) in the Wyoming border crossing case, even using a ladder to cross through the airspace above private lands is not trespassing.
Release a bunch of helium balloons, each trailing as much thread as they can lift. Might just tie a bunch and do a barrage balloon thing as a canopy anyway.
I also think it's absurd to think, just yet, that NYPD is going to be using kamikaze drone bombs to take out backyard pits. Where's the fun in that? Cops don't get to crack any heads.
(It's a rhetorical question: the answer is that the NYPD has abject contempt for the communities it ostensibly serves, and increasingly is made of people who don't even live in the city they police[2].)
[1]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
[2]: https://nypost.com/2023/06/03/more-nypd-officers-are-opting-...
I think people underestimate how big NYC really is. It is basically a small country.
So yeah, how much funds do the police of Austria or Switzerland get?
according to https://cbcny.org/research/six-fast-facts-about-nypds-prelim..., the NYPD budget in 2023 was $10.8 billion. so, NYC spent about twice as much on police as Austria spent on police plus fire protection, law courts, prisons, etc.
even if they have the same population, it should cost more to police Austria than NYC because Austria has a larger area, so they need to have more police stations and cars.
That's basically saying that all companies are daydreaming about what they'd like to do if only they had more people.
They're not willing to pay higher wages though, while inflation has gone up quite a bit in the last few years.
So yeah, "labor shortage," in quotes.
Incidentally, NYPD is pretty well paid, if you think they need to be making tech salaries…well, I’m not sure where to start with that. Someday this might be more of a tech career (think riggers from shadow run).
I feel like automating and centralizing surveillance for troubled police departments is a bad thing. But then again, it would also be bad to become Megacity One.
When I say "patrol" I mean a citizen who is not on the police side of the thin blue line.
Besides: it's not like we're talking about autonomous drones here, and it's not like a drone can write a noise ticket. I doubt the city is saving any time or personnel by using drones here; if anything, there's likely some sweet overtime (in the form of "drone training") available for cops who pilot these things rather than making door calls.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...
[2]: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/--in-New-York
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/nyregion/nypd-drones.html
I also doubt that the tech won’t get better and more autonomous as time goes on, and I would guess that the department is just trying to get early experience on an obvious future trend.
Also, for tracking a suspect in a chase, a drone is surely more economical than a helicopter with two pilots.
A large part of the NYPD's budget goes to wages, in parts because of (1) bloated wages for senior officers, and (2) rampant overtime abuse[3]. Some of that money would be recaptured in the form of income taxes, except that the NYPD has successfully lobbied to exclude itself from NYC's civil servant residency requirements[4].
[1]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy2023/
[2]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
[3]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov...
[4]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hir...
> The starting salary for an NYPD officer is $55,910 without overtime. Meanwhile, the required annual income for a person living alone in New York City with no children is $53,342, according to an MIT living wage calculator.
So a police officer starts out barely makes a living wage. No wonder they end up living outside NYC to save money. And then if they manage to save up a down payment, good luck qualifying for a NYC mortgage on that salary.
And note: the NYPD has very handsome perks: it's a 22-years-to-half-salary-pension job that rises to 121k after 5.5 years in the service[1]. The other benefits are worth looking at as well.
Working as a cop doesn't entitle someone to be able to afford a mortgage; millions of New Yorkers can't afford mortgages. Millions of New Yorkers also live in this city while making less than the NYPD does; on a basic civic level, it would behoove the NYPD to live a bit more like the people they're meant to protect.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...
Including overtime seems questionable. It's arguably a "perk" but it damages work/life balance and contributes to burnout. Most people do a ~40 hour work week, comparing that to a police officer doing 50-60 does not seem fair.
I understand the issues with policing as an institution, but average police officers are basically societal janitors, doing a nasty, unpleasant job for very mediocre pay. You aren't going to improve the quality of people hired by making the job even more unattractive.
This is true for every other civil servant in NYC; they haven't quit. People want to live here.
Overtime does indeed contribute to burnout. But overtime use by the NYPD is culturally endemic and rampant[1]; individual anecdotes don't make a trend, but you can look up "NYPD overtime abuse" for widely shared "tricks" among NY's finest for getting paid extra money for indefinitely detaining suspects, conducting calls where they know an arrest won't be made, &c.
Finally: I agree that policing is a nasty, unpleasant job. To a certain degree, it's fundamentally nasty and unpleasant. But the current degree to which it's that way is a problem of our own making: police departments have been happy to absorb the budget that was slashed from mental health and community building programs, all while complaining about the overflowed social ills that come with doing that. I'd rather make the job more attractive by funding those things than dumping more money into the black hole that is the NYPD's labor budget.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...
Because the noise complaints have been decriminalized: https://nypost.com/2017/05/10/nypd-cops-forbidden-from-break...
Consider also the fact that armed officers sometimes shoot and kill people. A camera drone completely avoids this potential outcome.
NY has a privacy law that enshrines a reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s backyard. But I haven’t made any argument around this: I don’t think we should be paying cops to fly drones around, regardless of whether or not it’s a civil liberties issue.
Since these drones don't fly themselves and there is a trained officer somewhere at the controls then this surveillance is in fact conducted by a human police officer and should be an illegal violation of privacy.
Frankly if one of these things shows up over my backyard while I'm smoking a brisket for my family I'm gonna moon it and make lewd hand gestures.
My sad guess is that the general rule will change to accept things that can see your property from public airspace as "observable to the public", and that eventually building design and landscaping will change to give you private spaces outdoors if you have money and desire.
If a property is marked as private property then that privacy should offer protection from those who would trespass using public airspace.
So for commercial flights... sure - but there are a whole host of private pilots owners that absolutely can do this.
Ex - how do you think news helicopters work?
Basically, I'm saying that this phrase
> "who would trespass using public airspace"
is non-sense. You can't have public space that is being trespassed on. You can apply some limitations (ex: a pilot's license) but many drone pilots already need to be registered anyways.
At best, you can argue that there was a clear expectation of privacy (aka: the same argument that prevents you from pointing a telescope at the windows of a private bathroom from public land) and make it illegal after the fact, but I don't really believe that the courts will accept that you have the same expectation of privacy in an outdoor area visible from public space (incl airspace) as you would in a bathroom.
California v. Ciraolo (1985)[1]:
> Question: Did the warrantless, aerial observation of Ciraolo's back yard from an altitude of 1,000 feet constitute an illegal search and violate the Fourth Amendment?
> Conclusion: The divided Court found that the observation did not violate the Constitution. Chief Justice Burger reasoned that the Fourth Amendment protections regarding the home had never been absolute: for example, police officers are not obligated to shield their eyes when passing homes on public streets or sidewalks. Since the observations of the Santa Clara officers was "nonintrusive" and "took place within public navigable airspace," their actions were consistent with the Fourth Amendment. "Any member of the public flying in this airspace who glanced down could have seen everything that these officers observed," concluded Burger. The dissenters, led by Justice Powell, argued that this decision was a significant departure from the Court's holding in Katz v. United States (1967) which established a two-part test to evaluate privacy claims.
Kyllo v. United States (2001)[2]:
This case has to do with use of thermal-imaging (without a warrant) to detect if marijuana was being grown inside a house. The court held that it was an unlawful search because it was effectively using technology to peer inside the home without a warrant. While that's not the same as looking into someone's backyard, the opinions have a lot to say about police using technology to erode the privacy of one's home.[3]
[1]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1985/84-1513 [2]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2000/99-8508 [3]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/533/27/#tab-opin...
https://www.cnet.com/culture/judge-rules-man-had-right-to-sh...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt7GNuCrIaQ&t=104
The NYPD has not historically shown an institutional interest in laws enforced on them, rather than by them.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/about-nypd/policy/post-a...
(2) the likely argument from the government would be that open backwards are but subject to the same expectation of privacy as other interior parts of the home. If the cops have a helicopter surveiling your back yard no one says that it's a warrantless search. Why is a drone different?
The obvious answer there is levels of scale, but it's an open question if that will hold up to actual legal challenges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley
The 5-4 Podcast has an episode covering it and they are not light in their criticism of the court's decision: https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/florida-v-riley/
The people need to care.
On second thought: Perhaps I should edit this post. LOL.
It would be a lot more fun to build a drone that can drop a net over another drone.
But if the NYPD is really "unaccountable" to the NYC government, well, that seems like a ripe situation for the Feds to step in because the local government has lost control. A PD which isn't accountable to its elected government isn't a PD; it's an armed gang.
We're in agreement!
Also consider that for every noise complaint to the police, there is a complainant - a citizen constituent - who is being bothered by a loud party. But let's forget about those people, their rights to reasonable peace and quiet don't matter? I don't agree with that stance.
Recording a back yard in NYC, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (it’s visible from everywhere), from a drone which has probable cause (a complaint) seems perfectly reasonable.