Police use drones in Calif. city to tail suspects from distance

CHULA VISTA, Calif.— When the Chula Vista police receive a 911 call, they can dispatch a flying drone with the press of button.

On a recent afternoon, from a launchpad on the roof of the Chula Vista Police Department, police sent a drone across the city to a crowded parking lot where a young man was asleep in the front seat of a stolen car with drug paraphernalia in his lap.

When the man left the car, carrying a gun and a bag of heroin, a nearby police car had trouble following as he sprinted across the street and ducked behind a wall. But as he threw the gun into a dumpster andhid theheroin, the drone, hovering above him, caught everything on camera. When he slipped through the back door of a strip mall, exited through the front door and ran down the sidewalk, it caught that, too.

Watching the live video feed, an officer back at headquarters relayed the details to the police on the scene, who soon caught the man and took him into custody. Later, they retrieved the gun and the heroin. And after another press of the button, the drone returned, on its own, to the roof.

Each day, the Chula Vista police respond to as many as 15 emergency calls with a drone, launching more than 4,100 flights since the program began two years ago. Chula Vista, a Southern California city with a population of 270,000, is the first in the country to adopt such a program, called Drone as First Responder.

Over the last several months, two cities in California and one in Georgia have followed suit. Police agencies from Hawaii to New York have used drones for years, but mostly in simple, manually flownways. Officerswould

A drone used for police operations last month in Chula Vista, a city of 270,000 people south of San Diego.

carry a drone in the trunk of a car on patrol or drive it to a crime scene before launching it over a park or flying it inside a building.

But the latest drone technology — mirroring technology that powers self-driving cars — has the power to transform everyday policing, just as it can transform package delivery, building inspections and military reconnaissance. Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars on large helicopters and pilots, even small police forces could operate tiny autonomous drones for a relative pittance.

That newfound automation, however, raises civil liberties concerns, especially as drones gain the power to track vehicles and people automatically. As the police use more drones, they could collect and store more video of life in the city, which could remove any expectation of privacy once you leave the home.

“Communities should ask hard questions about these programs. As the power and scope of this technology expands, so does the need for privacy protection,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology. “Drones can

be used to investigate knowncrimes. But they are also sensors that can generate offenses.”

With the pandemic worsening, drones are a way of policing at a distance, said Rahul Sidhu, an officer in Redondo Beach, near Los Angeles, which started a program similar to the one in Chula Vista just after the virus reached theUnited States.

“We’re just trying to limit our exposure to other people,” he said. “Sometimes, you can send a drone without sending an officer.”

But down the road, he said, as these small unmanned helicopters become cheaper and more powerful, they will provide more efficient ways of policing urban areas. That could aid police departments at a time when the numberof recruits is onthe wane across the country andmany voices arecalling for funding cuts after months of protests against police violence.

In Chula Vista, drones are already an integral part of the way the police respond to emergencies. After an emergency call comes in, officers give the drone a location, and it flies to that point on its own — before returning on its own, too.