As beads flew via the air and brass bands blared alongside Bourbon Avenue, a largely unseen pressure hovered above the Mardi Gras revelry: drones.
For the primary time within the celebration’s centuries-old historical past, drones had been deployed at scale through the closing, most crowded week of New Orleans’ famed Mardi Gras pageant — to not movie the festivities, however to maintain them protected.
As a part of the 2025 Mardi Gras occasions, the New Orleans Police Division (NOPD) partnered with Verizon Frontline Disaster Response Crew to supply aerial surveillance all through the town’s carnival corridors. The outcome: greater than 140 drone flights, totaling 45 hours of flight time, throughout peak Mardi Gras celebrations.
The drones supplied what regulation enforcement calls “UAS overwatch” — real-time situational consciousness from above, giving officers on the bottom a stay, high-altitude take a look at crowd actions, site visitors bottlenecks, and potential threats.
“That is the primary time UAS is getting used on a big scale throughout Mardi Gras,” mentioned Chris Sanders, senior supervisor for Verizon’s Frontline Disaster Response Crew, which makes a speciality of emergency communication and drone deployment for public security businesses. “To be requested for by identify speaks to the belief we’ve constructed and the way severely we take our accountability to help first responders.”
Police division drone use expands nationwide
The deployment of drones for crowd monitoring isn’t distinctive to New Orleans. Throughout the nation, police departments are more and more integrating drones into each day operations. In Chula Vista, California — house to one of many nation’s most refined police drone applications — drones are launched to the scene of 911 calls earlier than officers even arrive. In New York, the NYPD has used drones throughout occasions like Instances Sq.’s New 12 months’s Eve ball drop and through massive protests to trace crowd motion.
And only in the near past, the Palm Springs Police Division vastly expanded its Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. That transfer made Palm Springs the biggest radar-enabled municipal drone response zone in america.
However throughout all police departments — NOPD or in any other case — drone use is just not with out controversy. Privateness advocates have raised issues over warrantless surveillance and the potential for drone expertise to broaden past oversight into overreach. Civil liberties teams just like the ACLU have urged departments to develop clear insurance policies round information storage, facial recognition, and accountability.
Nonetheless, departments just like the NOPD see drones as a significant trendy software, significantly for large-scale occasions the place floor visibility is proscribed and assets are stretched.
“Mardi Gras is without doubt one of the largest occasions the NOPD manages every year,” mentioned Officer Reese Harper, NOPD’s director of communications. “Using Unmanned Plane Methods throughout this 12 months’s festivities supplied our officers with enhanced situational consciousness, serving to us monitor crowds, reply extra successfully to potential issues, and maintain the celebration protected for everybody.”
With greater than 1,000,000 folks flooding the streets of New Orleans through the multi-week Mardi Gras season — a celebration that injects an estimated $1 billion into the town’s financial system yearly — the stakes are excessive. For the NOPD, drones served as an additional pair of eyes, scanning the skies for indicators of bother.
What’s Verizon Frontline?
Verizon Frontline, which gives emergency tech infrastructure like cell hotspots and moveable cell towers to public security businesses without charge to the supported businesses, has more and more leaned into drone help. Their Disaster Response Crew operates on a 24/7 foundation, quickly deploying drones and communications instruments throughout every part from hurricanes to wildfires.
The corporate’s rising footprint in public security comes amid elevated competitors amongst telecoms to produce first responders with dependable communications expertise — a race that additionally consists of AT&T’s FirstNet community. Verizon touts its three many years of partnership with public security officers as a cause businesses just like the NOPD are turning to them.
Whether or not eventualities like drones at Mardi Gras turns into the norm for large-scale public occasions stays to be seen. For now, the drone’s-eye view has landed a spot within the metropolis’s playbook for public security.
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