Since October 7, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has used drones at least 13 times to make 239 arrests at pro-Palestine protests — including on Sunday, when police allegedly used a drone to film people protesting in solidarity with Kings Theatre staff who refused to work an event held by a Zionist organization.
According to anti-Zionist activists, the event at Kings Theatre, which took place on December 3, was organized by and for Colel Chabad, a Zionist charity organization based in Israel. Black Lives Matter organization Equality for Flatbush and other groups organized an emergency protest in solidarity with King’s Theatre staff who refused to work the event.
The groups said in a statement that the event should not have been held in Flatbush, Brooklyn, a majority Black Caribbean migrant neighborhood just blocks away from multiple Islamic cultural centers and surrounded by a host of Arab and Middle Eastern-owned businesses.
“A large percentage of the Kings Theatre staff, who are Black Flatbush residents, have been very vocal to the parent company, Ambassador Theatre Group, about their opposition to a Zionist event being held in Flatbush during the current genocide being carried against the People of Palestine,” the organizers of the solidarity protest said in a statement. “We the community commend the courageous workers of the Kings Theatre for taking an important political stance.”
According to reporter Talia Jane, the NYPD seemed to break the police drone used to surveil the protest. “Per one witness, ‘It was shaking & swerving in the sky & then it flew directly into the ground,’” Jane said on social media.
The NYPD has more than tripled its use of drones in the past year, according to Gothamist. Just in October, during the upsurge of pro-Palestine demonstrations, the NYPD deployed police drones 13 different times to monitor the public protests. Police allegedly handed over drone footage taken during October protests in Times Square and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to prosecutors to use as evidence in criminal charges being pursued against 158 demonstrators.
“This is a local police department that increasingly acts like a national intelligence agency,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Gothamist.
While the NYPD has maintained that its drones are not equipped with facial recognition software, police can run drone footage through such software back at police headquarters, and use the results to pursue arrests.
“The idea that you can have a drone hovering over a protest, collecting the identities of every person there, without any oversight, without any protections? That’s unbelievably chilling,” Cahn said.
Since the drone program was launched five years ago, the NYPD’s drone fleet has doubled in size from 13 to 30 drones. In June, the NYPD paid $87,750 for a Lemur 2 drone which has night vision and thermal sensors. The drone can also break glass to enter buildings.
New York City mayor Eric Adams has been a big proponent of drone use by the NYPD since he was Brooklyn Borough President. Last fall, Adams met with the founders of two Israeli drone companies whose drones are used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to patrol asylum seekers at the Mexican border and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to monitor Gaza. In August, Adams visited Israel to learn more about the possibility of incorporating Israeli drone technology and police tactics in the NYPD.
During his visit, Adams praised the drones used by Israeli law enforcement, telling reporters that “the method in which [the IDF is] using them, the methods in which they are training to use them, is what caught my interest.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.