Police flew drones over Chula Vista, California nearly 20,000 times in 6 years

Last week, Reason reported on the growing trend of police departments in Colorado increasingly using drones as first responders to certain emergency calls.

New research published this week reveals how such a system could work in practice – with terrifying implications for privacy and civil liberties.

In WIREDDhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx write about Chula Vista, a city in Southern California located about halfway between San Diego and Tijuana. In 2018, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) launched the Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, allowing 911 operators to use drones either in place of or in addition to uniformed officers—the first U.S. city to do so.

DFR “is not a replacement for police officers, it’s a supplement,” Police Chief Roxana Kennedy told KPBS at the time. In the program’s first week, drones responded to 30 calls and led to three arrests, including a domestic violence case in which a man suspected of stabbing a woman fled to a homeless encampment and a pursuing drone led police to his location. The program was initially limited to a one-mile radius around the police station, but expanded over time before receiving federal approval for citywide use in March 2021.

As Mehrotra and Marx detail, CVPD’s drones have made nearly 20,000 flights in the nearly six years since then, “often used for serious incidents like reports of armed individuals, but also regularly used for smaller incidents like shoplifting, vandalism and loud music. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the city even used drones to distribute public service announcements in homeless encampments.”

WIRED examined “nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023,” which included “more than 22.3 million flight path coordinates,” to verify the CVPD’s claim that drones are only dispatched in response to specific emergency calls or lawful searches and do not simply roam around looking for suspicious activity.

“Drones were used in approximately seven percent of the city’s service calls,” the authors found. This included “nearly half of the incidents involving reports of armed individuals and approximately one-quarter of the incidents involving violent crime,” as well as calls about mental health issues and domestic violence.

“The vast majority” of the 10,000 flight records analyzed “could be linked to relevant emergency calls. But not all of them.” In fact, about 10 percent “lacked a stated reason and could not be linked to a relevant emergency call; for 498 flights, the agency cites an ‘unknown problem’ as the reason.” In addition, “almost 400 (flights) arrived no closer than half a mile from the location from which an emergency call came in the previous half hour.”

Even explicitly authorized flights can raise concerns: “Operators are trained to immediately fire up the drone’s camera and record the entire flight from takeoff to landing,” Mehrotra and Marx note. The cameras, “powerful enough to capture faces clearly and record continuously during flight,” have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of city residents, most of which the city refuses to release.

“On average, each drone flight flies over 13 census blocks, potentially exposing about 4,700 of the residents below to a drone’s camera,” the WIRED analysis showed. And the potential exposure was not uniform: “Drones were visible in the sky ten times longer over residents of a typical block in the working-class, predominantly immigrant western part of Chula Vista than over residents of a typical block in the east,” Mehrotra wrote in WIRED‘S Policy Lab Newsletter yesterday. West Side residents “claimed that police drones followed them personally, loitered unnecessarily in their backyards, or watched them in their most intimate moments,” and others complained about the noise of the drone rotors. (The CVPD claimed the disparity was due to the unequal number of 911 calls each area receives; the WIRED The analysis “confirmed that this is largely the case.”)

Interestingly, support for the drone program is also strongest among lower-income residents of Chula Vista, who are most likely to be affected. One Latino man – who lives in an apartment complex over which CVPD drones have flown more than 300 times since July 2021 – said WIRED that the drones make him feel safer, especially after a stranger tried to steal his child and the police used a drone to search for the suspect. This is nothing unusual: surveys show that black Americans are significantly more afraid of the police than their white neighbors, but still want a strong, effective police presence in their neighborhoods.

Regardless, Chula Vista’s drone program may be a worrying sign of where American policing is headed. Even without DFR, the city’s residents have been subjected to a shocking level of surveillance in recent years: automatic license plate readers, facial recognition software, and a partnership with Amazon for access to its Ring doorbell cameras. In December 2017, the CVPD partnered with a company to share its data with other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

As the Colorado example illustrates, police departments are increasingly viewing DFR programs as a plausible alternative to traditional policing, which involves sending an officer to the scene. While that is certainly true, it would also expose citizens to a shocking new world of government surveillance.