The age of drone policing has dawned

Both people asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.

The West Side, on the other hand, is densely populated, and residents tend to be poorer and born outside the U.S. According to U.S. Census data, nearly half of households on the West Side earn about $55,000 or less a year—making many of them eligible for free or reduced-price meals at California schools—compared to 19 percent of households on the East Side.

Norell Martínez, a 60-year-old professor of English and Chicana/o studies, has lived her entire life on Chula Vista’s west side. A first-generation immigrant, her parents migrated to Chula Vista from Tijuana, Mexico, when she was one year old. “A lot of people on the west side have a similar background to me; it’s a diverse community,” Martinez says.

Some of the Chula Vista blocks most affected by drones are near launch sites, and that’s exactly where Martínez lives: a block and a half from police headquarters on a street that’s among the safest on the west side. But since July 2021, drones have flown over her at least 959 times, collecting nearly five hours of footage from the skies above her block.

Before the drone program began, she says, her neighborhood was quiet. Now the sound of the rotors keeps her awake. “We pay a lot of money and make a lot of sacrifices to have a small piece of land that is ours,” she says. “It feels like our home is no longer ours. Like it belongs to the Chula Vista Police Department.”

In September 2016 Police in El Cajon, a small town northeast of Chula Vista, shot and killed an unarmed man named Alfred Olango. His sister had called police because Olango, who had a history of mental illness, was behaving erratically. “I called you to help, not to come and kill him,” she screams in a Facebook Live video recorded in the parking lot of the mall where police shot her brother minutes earlier. “Why couldn’t you taser him? I told you he was sick.”

The incident, which sparked widespread protests, would become central to the CVPD story of how the drone first responder program was born. “Could the incident have been prevented if it had been seen before uniformed officers arrived?” retired Captain William “Fritz” Reber, the architect of Chula Vista’s drone program, wrote in an October 2019 blog post about the DFR program for the police publication Police1.

However, it appears that the city was considering the use of drones long before Olango was killed by police. Public records and CVPD testimony show that in December 2015 – nearly a year before Olango’s death – police formed an Unmanned Aerial Systems Committee to “investigate the use of the technology in its public safety operations.”