“It’s everything New York in that moment,” Commissioner Shea said at a news conference on Friday.

The area, which is already heavily patrolled, will, as usual, get a security boost for the holiday: more than 1,200 security cameras, thousands of uniformed and plainclothes police officers, more than 200 “blocker vehicles” to prevent crosstown traffic, bomb-sniffing dogs and countless metal detectors.

And for the first time on a New Year’s Eve, the police said, drones will be used for surveillance.

The police will be watching from above

The Police Department planned to use a drone in Times Square last Dec. 31, but because of poor weather, “we couldn’t get it up to watch it,” Terence Monahan, the chief of department, said on Friday.

Chief Monahan declined to discuss exactly how drones would be used tomorrow, but he said that the police have deployed them “on three or four different occasions here in New York City on major events.”

Last year, John Miller, the department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said a drone would “give us a visual aid and the flexibility of being able to move a camera to a certain spot with great rapidity through a tremendous crowd.”