To Jose Francis, a Brooklyn resident originally from Panama, the West Indian Day Parade is all about the dancing, the music and the food.

"The West Indian food, that is one of the best foods in the world," he said.

But there had been years when he skipped it entirely.

“It is very dangerous, especially J’ouvert.”

J’Ouvert is the pre-dawn party where people in face paint dance to steel drums.

“Too many guns in the street and that makes it a danger for the parade,” he said.

Police officials said those days are over. Officials detailed a safety plan that includes more officers on the street and checkpoints along the parade route on Eastern Parkway — where officers with wands will scan paradegoers. There will also be drones.

The NYPD started using drones to monitor the parade last year. Police officials said they came in handy. For example, police officers had an eye-in-the-sky view of Eastern Parkway and they could see where crowds were getting too big and sent officers to manage the situation.

“When we built a stronger relationship with the community and took on different tactics, like shutting down streets winding people in — those are things that we weren’t doing, but we needed that buy in from the community,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at the security briefing in Brooklyn.

Maddrey recalled his days as a captain in Brooklyn working the J’ouvert celebration.

“I was ripping and running around all night, scene to scene, shooting to shooting and it just wasn’t the way to do things out here,” he said.

There were calls to end J’ouvert, but residents and city officials figured out a way to keep the party going safely, pushing the time back to start at 6 a.m.

“We have learned from the past,” Pastor Gil Monrose, director of the Mayor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships, said. “The NYPD have shifted in terms of the ideas of what security means.”

For Jose Francis, he plans to attend the parade this year.

“I see that the NYPD have changed a lot, have more rules, have more security,” Francis said. “I advise the community: you have to work with the police department to be safe.”