The meeting’s public comment period was limited to 10 minutes.
By Joshua Rosenberg. April 16, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — In a 4 to 3 vote, the New Orleans City Council French Quarter Economic Development District approved a budget item on Thursday that would allocate $250,000 to a “drone as first responder” program that the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) would operate in the French Quarter. Public comment was curtailed to 10 minutes.
Councilmembers Aimee McCarron, Matthew Willard and Lesli Harris voted against the measure. Councilmembers Freddie King, Eugene Green, Jason Hughes and JP Morrell voted in favor of it.
King, who ran the meeting, limited the public comment period to 10 minutes. There were at least a dozen public comments that were not heard by the committee as a result.
“This whole process feels very undemocratic to me,” Chris Lang, a resident of New Orleans, said. “The fact that we’ve restricted this to only 10 minutes to be allowed for public comment is… just a disgusting abuse of power. I’d rather see this be a 30 minute conversation, an hour-long conversation.”
“As folks have mentioned, the French Quarter is highly surveilled as is. We don’t need another drone under the pretense of cost savings to be able to do what we should be providing for residents through proactive deterrence of crime which is more education, more investments in food and housing and other things,” Lang said. “It’s a total breach of our privacy.”
Morrell apologized for the limited public comment period.
“I apologize for the truncated time for this discussion,” he said. “I will meet with Councilmember King and my colleagues to see if we can allocate more time for issues like this and schedule better. That is on us. That is something we’ll work on.”
The French Quarter Management District (FQMD) – a nonelected, state-created body – voted last month to approve a budget amendment that would allow the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) to purchase a drone that would operate in the French Quarter. The FQMD reports to the French Quarter Economic Development District (FQEDD)
Including comments sent electronically, there were some 66 people who spoke out against the drone program at that meeting. Four spoke in favor of it.
On Thursday, when the public comment period was limited, there were three people who spoke in favor of the drone program and three who spoke against it.
The $250,000 DFR program would allow an officer with the NOPD to dispatch a Skydio drone quickly to incoming calls, according to Police Captain Samuel Palumbo of the 8th District. The district includes the French Quarter.
At first, the NOPD asked for $740,000 for the drone program. But a private donor stepped in to cover some $500,000.
Skydio is an American company based in California. The company aided Israel in its genocide in Gaza. Skydio “…gives Israel ‘short-range reconnaissance drones’ capable of navigating obstacles autonomously and [producing] 3D scans of complex structures like buildings,’ according to Anwar Mhajne, writing in the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
The drone would be equipped with neither facial recognition technology nor weapons, Palumbo said Thursday.
The drone would have a height restriction of 400 feet, per the Federal Aviation Administration, Palumbo said. But there’s no limit on how low the drone can fly, he said, meaning it can operate at ground-level. The drone would also move “as a crow flies,” Palumbo said, meaning that it may fly over residential areas.
Willard seemed to trip Palumbo up with a question at one point:
“How does the public know if a drone deviates from NOPD policy on drones?”
“That’s a difficult one,” “Palumbo responded.
“Is there like an internal review?” Willard asked.
“There have been reports of drone operators doing things that they weren’t supposed to be doing,” Willard later said. “I just want to make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure that the policy is being followed.”
The fact that the drone is recording from the moment it launches until the moment it returns to its dock is a guarantor enough that drone operators will follow policy and protocol, Palumbo said.
“Because if there is that suspicion that they’re doing something, they would have recorded the evidence themselves,” he said.
Members of the public began to speak up themselves towards the end of the meeting.
“They haven’t even shared who the $500,000 funder is,” Alex Jaouiche, a steering committee member with the local coalition Eye on Surveillance said from the audience section of the chamber as the vote was taking place. “There’s a private investor owning our NOPD and they’ve refused to share the name,” Jaouiche said. “There’s a secret, private investor funding two-thirds of the program.”
Correction: A previous version of this story said “‘drones’” as first responders in the title. That has been corrected to “‘drone.’”
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