VOTE Deputy Director Bruce Reilly Testifies Against Drone Surveillance 6.24.26
The short version: VOTE's Bruce Reilly tells New Orleans City Council that public money spent on drone surveillance is a budget choice with real consequences for civil liberties.
Our Take
Credit to Voice of the Experienced (VOTE) for getting this testimony on record. Bruce Reilly's framing — that public dollars are a choice, and surveillance spending is a statement about what kind of city you want to live in — is exactly the argument that gets lost when councils rubber-stamp vendor contracts without asking who benefits and who gets watched. Drones are just the latest line item in a surveillance budget that already includes ALPR networks like Flock Safety's, and the pattern is the same everywhere: little public debate, vague promises about solving crime, and no real accounting of what gets collected, who can access it, or how long it sticks around.
New Orleans isn't an outlier here. City after city is quietly normalizing always-on tracking infrastructure, often funded by budgets that could go toward housing, mental health services, or literally anything with a track record of actually reducing harm. When a deputy director of a formerly incarcerated-led advocacy org shows up to push back on drones, it's a reminder that the people most likely to be swept up in expanded surveillance dragnets are also the ones showing up to City Council to say no.
If you want to see what's already watching your own block, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a contract near you, our take-action resources walk through how to make your voice heard before the next vote happens.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Voice of the Experienced, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.