Hours after the ACLU of Louisiana and watchdog group Eye on Surveillance called for the New Orleans Police Department to suspend its drone program over privacy concerns Monday, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick defended the technology as an efficient way to solve crime and bolster the department’s staffing shortages.
Kirkpatrick championed her department’s drone usage at a news conference in the French Quarter Monday evening, hailing it as a program that has been developed with widespread community involvement and sufficient guardrails.
“So the purpose of really what I wanted to share again with our community is that we represent the voice of the community,” Kirkpatrick said at the news conference. “They want the police department to use technology, they want it to be legal, and they want it to be ethical. So all voices matter, but I think the voice of our community has been clear about the support of the technology.”
In a Monday presentation to the New Orleans City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee, the ACLU and Eye on Surveillance said NOPD should stop using drones “until the city can verify that the department is capable of operating the program lawfully, safely and transparently.” The organizations suggested the department does not yet require complete, public reporting on every deployment, including the reasoning for each flight, authorizing supervisor and any outcomes.
Kirkpatrick argued that the department has worked to launch it’s drone program as transparently as possible over the last three years, hosting public demonstrations, calling for public comment on its policies related to drone deployment and making policy changes based on such feedback.
She also pointed to a new drone dashboard that launched online Monday, where the public can see records and detailed flight paths for every drone deployed in the city.
“We’ve been trying to be as open with the community as we possibly can unless it jeopardized any kind of investigation,” Kirkpatrick said.
While Kirkpatrick said she appreciates that surveillance technology often comes with a host of privacy concerns, drones in particular can speed up first responder efforts in emergency situations, able to fly to the scene faster than a police cruiser could drive and able to cover more ground in a search.
“So it all is a balance,” Kirkpatrick said. “And my goal is to strike that balance appropriately, put those guardrails in.”