Drones could soon be used as first responders in tourist areas and in larger districts where officers are stretched too thin, said Anne Kirkpatrick, Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, who floated the idea last week on WWL Radio.
“One of the things we have been looking at is using technology—specifically drones—as a first responder. We’re gonna be doing it as a pilot here in the Eighth District, which is the French Quarter and our CBD. But think about the Seventh District, all of that East New Orleans, a huge mass of land,” Kirkpatrick told WWL. “We don’t have enough officers we can staff out there.”
The concept would be a first for the city, but not for the country nor even for the metro area. In December, Jefferson Parish announced that it would be using drones to respond to emergency calls, in a move that JPSO described as “the future of public safety.”
On Monday, the French Quarter Management District’s security and enforcement committee took the first step toward drone response in New Orleans, as it voted to finance one $250,000 NOPD drone and docking station—the place where the drone parks and deploys from. The NOPD had initially requested the purchase of three to four drones, but the committee only approved one.
The drone project will next be considered by the FQMD’s finance committee, before going to a full board vote.
In 2018, the city of Chula Vista, California and its police department, the CVPD, became the first city in the country to institute a “drone as first responder,” or “DFR” program.
In theory, a DFR program allows police to launch a drone or fleet of drones to an area in order to give officers “situational awareness” – allowing them a first glance at the scene, the ability to observe people of interest, and a chance to understand the situation better before deploying boots-on-the-ground officers.
One actor in the industry calls it a “force multiplier.”
Response time by drone could be ‘under a minute’ in New Orleans
NOPD drones would be able “to ascertain if an officer is even needed,” said former NOPD superintendent Michael Harrison, who’s now deputy mayor of public safety for the city. Though the NOPD did not respond to questions from The Lens by press time, Harrison talked about the drones in an interview with JD Carrere posted on Monday on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, @JDfromthe504.
Drones would also speed response times, Harrison said, responding to many places on the city “in under a minute,” much more rapidly than an officer coming by car.
The most common drone-response scenario is a minor car crash, a fender-bender, Harrison told Carrere, or a non-emergency nuisance call, or a medical situation where someone may need an ambulance, not a police officer. In those cases, the drones would allow NOPD officers to focus on other matters that require on-scene officers, he said.
Dennis Gakunga, who helped launch Chula Vista’s use of drones as first responders, is now working for the City of New Orleans as its Deputy Chief Information Officer, according to his LinkedIn.
Chula Vista and other departments have since grappled with privacy concerns caused by the program.
Chula Vista’s program was the first urban police force in the country to receive permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to “fly beyond physical sight lines” according to Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group that represents the American wireless communications industry.
Many city police departments now use drones
Dozens of cities now use a DFR program, according to the Washington Post. The number of departments implementing the program has skyrocketed since the FAA streamlined the process in 2025, according to the Post, which noted that approval times had dropped from up to a year to a matter of days.
Behind the benefits are privacy concerns about how much the drone cameras observe to, from, and during the emergency call, within private and constitutionally protected areas, as one 2024 report described it. Concerns go far beyond cameras, the report from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, since“drones can be equipped with cameras, thermal imaging, microphones, license plate readers, face recognition, mapping technology, cell-site simulators, weapons, and other payloads.”
“Proliferation of these devices,” the EFF report concluded, “enables state surveillance even for routine operations and in response to innocuous calls—situations unrelated to the original concerns of terrorism or violent crime originally used to justify their adoption.”
The DFR program may also be used as an excuse to add more police attention, through drone observation, to already over-policed and racially profiled communities, according to the report. Some 1,500 police departments use drones in some capacity, according to the report.
Opening the door to even more widespread surveillance?
“‘Drones as first responder’ is mass surveillance with a sympathetic name,” said Matthew Wollenweber, a New Orleans-based security researcher.
“Cameras don’t stop crime. Cameras don’t provide first aid. Drones are camera systems,” Wollenweber said. “Instead of a police officer responding to a 911 call, he’s sitting at a police station piloting a drone to uselessly watch crime on a computer monitor. New Orleans doesn’t need more mass surveillance, and NOPD can’t be trusted with more spy cameras.”
The introduction of drones as first responders raises questions about other technologies that Gakunga brought into common use in Chula Vista. “It’s not just for drones. We have automated license plate readers, traffic cameras, and we collect information. There’s a lot of information we collect from residents,” Gakunga said when he was Chief Sustainability Officer for Chula Vista.
But in recent months, there’s been a backlash across the country to some of that now-common tech. Cities have been yanking their contracts with Flock, a company that runs a network of license-plate readers, which allowed out-of-state law enforcement to access municipal-resident data, some for immigration purposes.
One major concern is how artificial intelligence (AI) will be integrated into DFR programs, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
“AI can search through enormous oceans of video data for very specific things – it makes it a much more powerful surveillance device,” Stanley said.
“So, if cameras are ‘on’ while drones are flying around a city en route to a call, they could be storing up a huge amount of video for random other things. It could be abused by individual officers, it could be abused by entire departments: tracking people for political reasons, instead of because they’re suspected of a crime – something we’ve seen throughout American history,” Stanley said.
NOPD drones will ‘collect intelligence’
NOPD drones will not be “combing through people’s information to scan faces,” Harrison asserted. But they will collect intelligence at the scenes, he said. “If people are shooting at each other, there’s information that could be known.”
For now, drones tend to be operated by human beings. But that may not always be the case. And that raises serious questions, Stanley said.
“There is a move in the drone world to move towards autonomous flights that navigate themselves,” he said, “and make decisions about where they fly and also potentially decisions about where they focus their cameras.”
For Wollenweber, the solution to concerns around surveillance in New Orleans can primarily be resolved at a local level.
“The City Council needs to pass legislation with teeth to make sure any surveillance technology is not abused,” he said.
