New York City police will send drones to sites of reported robberies and gunshots

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 117 points –
New York City police will send drones to sites of reported robberies and gunshots
theguardian.com

Summary

The NYPD announced an expansion of its “Drone as First Responder” program, using drones to respond to robberies and alerts from ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system with a high error rate.

The drones will provide real-time video and audio to officers, aiding in investigations, crowd monitoring, and emergency responses.

Civil liberties groups have raised privacy concerns, especially as ShotSpotter has been criticized for inaccuracies and for disproportionately targeting Black and brown neighborhoods.

Other cities, like Chicago and Durham, have already moved to end or review their ShotSpotter contracts.

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I can imagine being robbed and a drone just flies around with blinking red and blue lights with a siren.

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Nice. We finally know we’re in the Watch Dogs universe.

Or creeping into Slaughterbots terrority.

Yeah, we are yet to make sure that the drones run on the same OS as the Teslas.

So what's to stop the government using these for mass surveillance or targeting government dissidents

Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. If you're not doing anything wrong then it won't matter, right?

Lol.

So even more useless than it already is?

Just want until the drones discover Candy Crush. Then the drones will get drones.

It would be so unfortunate if someone made an Open source hardware version of anti-drone guns...

The first time someone shoots one down, they're going to make it so that downing a drone has the same criminal penalty as attacking an officer. Mark my words.

But like the police dogs. They’ll abuse them themselves without issue.

I’m sure they’ll put them back in storage after problems are resolved…NOT.

In before they shoot down the drones.