What Chula Vista’s police drone legal battle means for California

When Art Castañares, editor of La Prensa and a longtime Chula Vista resident, first filed a public records request in 2021 to view video footage from police drones, he wanted to “see how the police are using the new drones and whether they might be violating people’s privacy as they fly over thousands of homes across the city.”

Chula Vista authorities fought back, setting off a lengthy legal battle. This spring, the California Supreme Court declined to hear the case, essentially upholding an appeals court ruling that the city’s blanket refusal to block the public from accessing drone footage was too broad. A San Diego Superior Court judge had initially sided with Chula Vista before the case was sent to the 4th District Court of Appeals.

The consequences of this lawsuit could affect more than a dozen California cities that already use or are considering using drones as first responders.

“Our lawsuit has set a national precedent that gives the public greater access to police records that authorities had previously tried to prevent from being disclosed,” Castañares said in an interview.

Castañares is not the only one worried. Verónica Marquez, a high school teacher and 34-year resident of Chula Vista, also voiced her concerns. In the past six months, drones have flown over her house or within two blocks at least 15 times for various reasons. The reports ranged from “unknown” problems and reports of suspicious vehicles to serious matters such as “assault with a deadly weapon.”

“I believe the public should have access to video footage,” Marquez told me. “It makes me even more distrustful of the police, because if they had nothing to hide, they wouldn’t prevent access.”

In a phone call, David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, put it this way: “Drone footage is not subject to any different rules for publication. There is no exception for drones.”

In a letter filed jointly by Loy’s organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the court warned that the court’s interpretation “would undermine public understanding and public oversight of law enforcement’s use of new technologies beyond the drone program at issue in this (documents) request.”

Chula Vista, the second-largest city in San Diego County, became the first U.S. city to receive approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to use drones at low altitudes and beyond visual line of sight in national airspace. Each month, Chula Vista police send drones to hundreds of emergency calls, and since March 2021, from at least five launch sites, including a community college and two hospitals.

Like Chula Vista, numerous cities in California have signed contracts with Flying Lion, a private company that specializes in developing programs for drones for rescue operations, including Redondo Beach, Irvine, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and others. Seemingly every corner of the state has implemented or begun testing a drone program, from Hemet, Costa Mesa, Orange County and Fullerton to Elk Grove, San Ramon and Fremont.

The Beverly Hills Police Department already uses its drones for hours of surveillance as part of its “ubiquitous coverage” of the city limits. The Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association has advocated for expanded use of surveillance technologies and coupling data collection with drones, “such as public safety cameras or satellite feeds and (license plate readers) and supplemented by analytical technologies such as facial recognition software or other (artificial intelligence),” CBS 8 reported.

Chula Vista residents sharply criticized city officials four years ago after the San Diego Union-Tribune exposed how the police department carelessly shared license plate data with immigration authorities. Marquez questioned the rationale for expanding data sharing among law enforcement agencies, particularly those that enforce immigration laws.

“I understand that each agency has its own responsibilities to perform, so the fact that they share information with each other seems misleading to me,” she said. “And doesn’t that violate people’s privacy – regardless of their immigration status?”

As a member of Chula Vista’s Technology and Privacy Task Force, I attended a meeting with city police two years ago where they demonstrated various surveillance devices, including their drone program. At the time, a senior officer assured us that the aircraft tilts its camera upward to reduce the chance of inadvertently recording private property en route to a scene.

But if law enforcement’s first instinct is to withhold footage, how can we be sure? Other police departments might also intentionally combine drone footage with other surveillance technologies — as the LA County Police Chiefs Association advocates — without considering parallel policies to ensure transparency and accountability.

So, as police departments increasingly rely on drones as a new type of force multiplier, will the protection of privacy and civil liberties be pursued with the same enthusiasm, especially when the private sector is a driving force?

Chula Vista police officers have become ambassadors for their drone program. In March, Police Chief Roxanne Kennedy was a panelist at the World Police Summit in Dubai, where she introduced the program on a global stage. She is also on the advisory board for the 10th edition of the Commercial UAV Expo, scheduled to take place in Las Vegas later this year.

The proliferation of counter-drone programs is big business. Several former Chula Vista police officers who played key roles in developing the city’s program now work in the private sector, helping to spread the technology.

Given the forces at work here, it’s clear that La Prensa’s lawsuit will have far greater implications than just the potential release of video footage from Chula Vista. Castañares believes that “the impact of our case extends not only to the Chula Vista police drone videos, but also to all public entities that use unmanned aerial systems.”

In this case, at least, the state Supreme Court correctly ruled that the country’s laws must be more nuanced and provide more room for transparency and accountability so that police departments using drone technology in California do not hastily circumvent privacy rights in their eagerness to expand surveillance.