By Albert Fox Cahn
Those walking the sunny streets of Times Square Tuesday saw menacing new figures casting shadows: The NYPD’s newest drones. While these knockoff RoboCops may not pack the firepower of their onscreen namesake, they are bristling with cameras, sensors, and ever more sophisticated AI. The combination is a powerful threat, not a threat to crime, but to the Constitution and the city’s budget.
When libraries, schools, and other social services are screaming for the funding, the costly publicity stunt rubbed many the wrong way, highlighting the disparity between the NYPD’s near-limitless budget and every other city agency. But for those of us who study the evolution of policing technology, this is more than an unwelcomed PR stunt; It’s an ominous sign of how our cities will be policed in the future.
Some of the robots being shown off have familiar names for those of you who follow NYPD scandals. Boston Dynamics’ Digidog made its Cujo-style return after previously leaving countless New Yorkers creeped out. After Digidog was seen walking through public housing back in 2020, huge numbers of New Yorkers spoke out in opposition. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman both took to social media to denounce the robotic police pooch. And City Council officials even took the extraordinary step of subpoenaing NYPD records about the project.
Digidog may be creepy, but it looks almost cuddly compared with the other new drone on display, the Knightscope K5. The 400-pound monstrosity may move with the speed of a sedated turtle and look like a demonically possessed car vacuum, but it’s bristling with all-too-serious levels of surveillance. The system can record HD video from every angle, using visual spectrum and thermal imaging. It will log nearby phones and computers, tracking users’ movements, while following cars via automated license plate readers.
But while we know that these systems are expensive, and while we know that they are invasive, it’s still unclear what good they could ever do. When given a chance to justify their dystopian drones, the NYPD always claims that any tech they buy can magically save lives. But not only have those claims failed repeatedly to materialize for past surveillance tech, it’s especially dubious for the future of drones like these.
One scenario police officials trot out is the idea that you can use a drone to respond in a high-stakes hostage crisis or when someone is in a mental health crisis. But it doesn’t take a spy drone to see right through these explanations. If someone were in a mental health crisis, and officers sought to deescalate, it’s hard to think of a worse option than to march in one of these robotic abominations. Seeing one of these drones break into your apartment could send the most sanguine amongst us into a complete meltdown, and the results would be truly catastrophic for someone already on the edge.
Sadly, the hostage crisis scenario doesn’t play out much better. I pray I never find out what it’s like to be held hostage, but if I am, I sure hope the police don’t rely on a first responder that moves at 3 miles per hour like K5.
The NYPD’s new toys go beyond the bots. They also highlighted the StarChase GPS gun, which fires a tracking device about the size of a Coke can to track vehicles. While we don’t know how much the system costs, other cities have paid nearly $10,000 per device, meaning that the cost to equip the NYPD fleet would run in to the tens, maybe hundreds of millions. And such a gimmick seems even harder to justify when the NYPD already has tens of thousands of cameras, drones, helicopters, and license plate readers to track cars throughout the city.
And the dangers don’t just stop with surveillance. Many of us know that drones have been used to kill countless people abroad, but they may not realize that robots have already been used to take lives here at home. Dallas police used an improvised explosive device to transform a bomb-disposal robot into a bomb delivery device. And while NYPD and robot manufacturers are clear that they don’t have any plans to weaponize the latest robots, there’s alarmingly nothing in New York law to prevent it.
These purchases highlight the continued failure of this mayor to actually look beyond tech companies’ marketing claims and question whether the technology we’re purchasing is actually living up to its hype. I just wonder how many more millions, and how much more of our Constitution we’ll have to give up before he realizes just what a mistake this is.
Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based civil rights and privacy group.