It's public hearing related to an agreement with acting corporation to provide police department.

All righty.

So what we're gonna do is if there's anyone for housekeeping that would like to speak, there's yellow cards in the back.

Fill out one, please, and turn it and we'll turn it in.

And restrooms, if you're looking for a restroom, they're in the back of the building.

And when you come up, you'll have two minutes to speak.

Please state your name, your address, so that the we have a technology here.

And please speak loud enough that she can understand what you're saying.

All right.

Our first speaker.

Barry.

You want to say anything for this?

Hi, Barry Goodwanter, 232 Riders, Zip Code 13207.

I no longer live on Bellevue.

Um the renewed policy.

Um, sorry, I reviewed the policy that is proposed, uh, which is SPD policy 606, but I also reviewed the policy that existed from 2020, and also the procedure document number 602 from 2020.

There has not been any update of that procedure document to date, only the policy document.

However, the two documents need to be read together.

And right now, procedure document 602, unless it's been updated in the last day, only allows for authorization of line of sight operation of drones.

And the documents section does not require any indication of whether it was remote or a line of sight operation.

For this reason and others, this program is not ready for approval, and I urge you to delay consideration until a new procedure document is drafted.

Several other concerns are addressed.

The name of this program in police circles is unfortunate because it gives the impression that drones may be used as a substitute for officer response.

Reported statements of SPD command also indicate that there's a desire to use drones for all types of calls, including lower priority calls with no in-process incident or apparent threat of danger.

That's not acceptable to me.

In my opinion, remotely operated drones could be used for the management of in-process incidents, assessment of on-scity issues for both officers and for the public for active investigations.

I there's like two or three speakers.

I'd love to be able to see it.

But if you have it written, you can give it to the clerk and she'll enter in the okay.

Not that many people here.

Can you hear me?

My name is Lee Cridlin, and I live at 12.

I just recently moved, 1204 North Glen Cove Road in Syracuse.

Good evening.

My name is Lee Cridlin, and I'm part of the Syracuse Peace Council.

We were founded in 1936 and are an anti-war and social justice organization.

We have been working with other organizations on the issue of drone usage, in particular military usage since 2009.

In 2013, we petitioned the Syracuse Common Council to pass a resolution defending civil liberties and declaring that domestic use of drones would not be improved until regulations were developed to protect citizens' rights.

Initially, they were to be used first as first responders to assist in high priority calls.

Then in April of this year, the Syracuse Police Department extended use to any and all calls.

Once again, in July, the department updated regulations and removed language that would have protected Syracuse residents from drone surveillance in their backyards.

Unrestricted use of drones by the police is not acceptable.

Additionally, there is no way to protect our rights to public protest.

There need to be safeguards in place that will prohibit the use of drones in surveillance of demonstrations and other public gatherings.

Surveillance of private citizens is a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights and marks a disturbing trend.

The Syracuse Peace Council calls for the following.

More time for public input into the use of drones by the SPD.

Public input on the issue to date has been largely negative, and it is not clear that either the police department or the common council have been listening.

And clear policies on the usage of drones need to be developed.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Lee.

Could you um leave the written comments with the clerk?

So she's a good question.

Can I do a copy of them?

Yeah, sure.

To the right here.

Okay, sure.

Right now?

Yes.

Okay.

Well, this is what is whatever you submit.

That'll be fine.

Thank you.

Aaron Burnside.

Hello and good evening.

My name is Aaron Burnside.

Uh I live at 50 Presidential Plaza in Syracuse, New York, in downtown.

I'm a graduate student and lifelong member of the Syracuse community.

This program would use military grade drones to police and surveil our communities.

Not only does this militarize Syracuse by equipping police with technologies designed for actual battlefields and war zones, but the hasty push to implement this program has left it practically empty of oversight and its ramifications unaddressed.

Particularly it risks making Syracuse residents and their data incredibly vulnerable to other parties.

At present, the SPD uses a number of other technologies that have been pushed for to use for like increasing new threats, like AI license plate reading.

This data has been shared with thousands of other police departments, oftentimes before the SPD has realized that they were sharing that data.

Video produced by the DFR program is likely to be more invasive, including video of people, their property, and public gatherings.

Does the SPD plan to share this data as well?

Is there anything in the Axon contract that requires them to share this?

This is a this is a feature of this program that has not been adequately addressed.

Moreover, the program will produce immense amounts of data.

The SPD has recently moved to a stance of passively filming everything.

Every single call will involve them filming everything from takeoff with a recent relaxation of FAA regulations that drones can fly out of sight up to 400 feet in the air.

This would mean that drones could film large portions of the city of Syracuse without having to be seen by anyone on the ground, including Syracuse residents.

This is in essence an immense invasion of privacy and has no real rem, no real oversight in the use of that data.

Thank you.

You have anything written?

Yes.

I believe it.

Okay.

Counselor Majok has rightly emphasized that safety is number one, and I fully agree.

However, true safety must encompass not just SPD's immediate crime response, but also the enduring trust and privacy of all of our residents, especially in an era where we see the erosion of constitutional rights and protections nationwide.

This program carries significant risks to that trust and those protections.

First, 67% of residents provided feedback in opposition to this program, but it's really closer to 72% if you read the sentiment of each comment.

This demonstrates a significant misalignment between the department's vision and public expectation.

Second, even with SPD's best intention for protection of privacy, the contract language with Axon could open the door for data sharing that may be used for unintended purposes.

Within their master services and purchasing agreement, Axon identifies itself as an independent data collector for usage operations and data and will disclose data to government authorities as required by law or regulation.

Daniel Schwartz of the ACLU, who is in uh is on the surveillance technology review board has warned that if our city shares data with any outside entity, there is a risk of data being shared with ICE.

Uh what this means is that while SPD naively states it doesn't intend to share data with immigration enforcement, Axon's contract and their language makes it clear that they are in within their right to do so.

Um, it stands that SPD does not have a good track record as a trusted custodian of sensitive data, as evidenced by the flock camera program.

Um, because we've got to come back, circle back.

You can finish in Beerie, you can come back.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Um as it stands, SPD does not have a good track record as a trusted custodian of sensitive data, as evidenced by the flock camera program.

SPD inadvertently opted into sharing Syracuse drivers' data with thousands of police departments nationwide across the country.

Uh this resulted in nearly 4.4 million searches of Syracuse's data by officers nationwide since June 2024.

Uh, this included 2,000 searches labeled as immigration related.

Their history of inadvertent data exposure demonstrates a shocking level of incompetence to effectively safeguard and protect our community's sensitive data, making SPDs an untrustworthy custodian of a similar, if not more sensitive program like DFR.

Finally, our city's crime rates are actually declining by 27% year to year, according to the CompSTAT report.

Um, while SPD officials cite shrinking resources and staffing struggles as the reason why we need drones, um, Syracuse is staffed more heavily with officers relative to its population than most mid-sized cities.

SPD staffing is higher than the national average and is as much as 60% above the norm of U.S.

cities of a similar size.

Given these positive trends in crime reduction and our substantial police force, perhaps the focus should be on making the best use of our current workforce and addressing underlying community issues rather than investing in new surveillance technology that generates significant public concern and risk.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You can finish.

Thank you, President Hudson and the rest of the counselors.

Several sections of the proposed policy 606 are way too broad and would justify the use of remote operated drones for any law enforcement activity of SPD to enhance the department's perception of his mission, which is an important one.

Particularly disturbing is that this rewrite of the policy took out the previous section 606.7 that delineated authorized uses of UAVs, and it allows the coordinator of the drone program to develop protocols for deployment.

Such protocols exist from the 2020 version of this policy, but counselors and the public should be able to examine them before remote operation is considered for approval.

There is no longer any indication in the policy of who in SPD can authorize use of remotely operated UAVs or criteria they should use to evaluate a request for use or how that decision is made.

They took out the former section 606.9 that talked about retention of recorded images, but even that failed to specify how requests from outside the department would be considered and processed.

There needs to be a balance between benefits of remote UAV operation and the risks to individual right to privacy and the public perception of their use in residential communities.

Without clarity on procedures and protocols and what uses are authorized, this would be out of balance.

The timing of this proposal is also very unfortunate, especially without limits and guardrails, because we're in a time when drones are increasingly being used around the world to wage war on civilians.

And despite a statement that these drones would not be weaponized, a word that is not defined in the policy, in Syracuse, police agencies should not push to make drones an everyday facet of domestic life.

Many of the limits and guard rails and norms that have limited executive power in this country are being violated and ignored, including prohibitions on the use of military might and weapons for domestic law enforcement.

Personal data is being accessed by federal law enforcement agencies without limits, including the information from SPD license readers.

People are being targeted by federal law enforcement based on the color of the skin, their skin, and even the Supreme Court is permitting such profiling.

And peaceful working people are being disappeared out of our communities by anonymous actors wearing masks.

I can't imagine a more anonymous presence than a drone in my neighborhood.

Policy 606.7 says the use of drones to harass, intimidate or discriminate is prohibited.

But at this moment in our country's history, the reality is that the very presence of these drones without an in-process incident will do exactly that.

And especially to our neighbors who are immigrants and refugees.

This is the wrong time to roll out an expansion of law enforcement use of drones, and they should not be approved for remote use without a lot more clarity and articulation of appropriate limits on their use.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You want to give that to the player?

Aaron, would you like to speak?

Um two final things that I wanted to say.

Um, the first being uh in addition to all of these data um troubles that we have that have been seen with a DFR program.

Um national legal precedence is also very much lacking for drones on police forces.

The legal permissibility of video footage is not actually clear.

Um, so much of the we don't actually know what uh to what extent video footage can be used legally uh from drones, and in many cases, we don't know to what length of time video footage from drones can be used.

Can it be used in 10 years?

Can it be used in 20 years?

No national precedence has been set.

This type of data could have long-lasting ramifications for our community because the data could be used against community members 20 years from now.

This is a problem of jumping the gun.

We can't get these technologies just because they seem new without realizing that many of the the guardrails that are set up in place are not there on a national level either.

The admissibility of this is evidence in court has not been settled at a national level.

And so the that would fall on the city to have jurisdiction over it.

And as I, as far as I can tell, the city has not yet made a decision on that.

And so something like that would need to be part of this proposal in order to actually effectively regulate the data coming out of this.

Second, like I said, these are drones that are made for combat zones and combat zones where drones are seen around the world in places like Ukraine.

One of the biggest things that also happens in these combat zones is that drones are hacked.

Um, and this proposal also risks putting data in other people's hands because drones get hacked.

That is something that happens with technology.

We can't simply think that like technology will only be used by people with the best intent.

And so, even in war zones like Ukraine, we see Ukrainian soldiers hacking into Russian drones in order to use them on the on the battlefield.

Are we to simply not are we simply to ignore the possibility of people gaining access to all of the data gathered by DFR drones because we have no measures to prevent against hacking?

What are the ramifications of having all of that data about Syracuse residents and not putting in preventable countermeasures to safeguard that data?

Most social scientists agree that the best way to reduce crime is not to simply add more surveillance and not simply add more police forces onto streets and neighborhoods, but is to actually address many of the social underlying structures that cause things like enduring poverty, things like lack of access to health care, lack of access to education.

If we're spending millions of dollars going into the future on something like drones, why can we not spend that money on something better?

Feeding our children, sending children to school, removing the amount of food deserts in the city of Syracuse, providing better equitable transportation for the city's residents.

These are programs that would actually have, again, a better usage of our money and would reduce crime at the same time by ameliorating the stresses of things like poverty, and would have a much longer lasting impact than a couple of drones that will be outdated in five years, and will also put thousands of people at risk with their data.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else that would like to speak?

All right.