Law enforcement drones fly almost everywhere in San Diego County now. How are they used?

They can weigh one pound or more than 1,000. They can navigate crowded indoor spaces or soar thousands of feet above ground. They can fly for hours at a time with the right battery and weather, and record scenes several miles away, increasing both their usefulness and privacy concerns. 

Uncrewed aircraft systems, more commonly called drones, can be used for everything from delivering pizzas to dropping bombs these days, and they are now ubiquitous in law enforcement as well. Police officials hail them as eye-in-the-sky force multipliers that offer a range of advantages, from situational awareness to responding to disasters. 

From city and campus police departments to the District Attorney’s Office, almost every law enforcement agency in San Diego County now operates drones as part of its public safety mission.

But as the $40 billion-a-year drone industry advances – and its products become more recognizable and accessible across the world – concerns are also multiplying, from U.S. lawmakers, privacy advocates and civil rights groups.

Some members of Congress have expressed concern that foreign-made drones, such as those made by industry leader China-based DJI, pose a threat to national security. The FCC placed a ban on new foreign drones in December, then partially walked it back this month.  Almost every law enforcement agency inewsource reviewed has drones from DJI or other foreign manufacturers.

Increasingly, officials are also concerned about drone incursions across the southern border and the use of weaponized drones by transnational criminal groups in Mexico and other places.. Recent federal legislation enabled local law enforcement to take down unauthorized drones at public gatherings after drones interfered with major sporting events recently.

The U.S. government has been accelerating its own use of drones on the border – including some technology tested or used by Ukrainians fighting the Russian invasion – as President Donald Trump’s administration has pumped billions of dollars toward new fortifications and security measures along the U.S.-Mexico border. 

When it comes to local deployments,  privacy advocates have cautioned about the use of drones in everyday policing, saying that without oversight and limits, the technology could subject U.S. communities to intrusive surveillance and discourage First Amendment-protected activities like protesting. 

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office deployed four drones from DJI without notifying the public in 2016. 

Five years later, Chula Vista police were the first in the country authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones beyond the line of visual sight to respond to 911 calls anywhere in the city. The program, called drone as first responder, has been replicated across the nation. 

Oceanside police are the latest to adopt the program locally. Chief Taurino Valdovinos said the “biggest benefit” is getting better information to officers responding on the ground and, in turn, keeping them safer.. He expects the program, which launched in August, to also bring down response times. 

With all the changes in drone technology across the globe and expanding use locally, here’s a look at how law enforcement in your community are using drones. 

Which agencies are using drones?

Law enforcement agencies in San Diego County have deployed drones for years. The list now includes the Sheriff’s Office, which patrols nine cities in the county; eight city police departments, the District Attorney’s office and at least one local university.

The number of drones each department deploys varies widely, according to annual reports law enforcement agencies have been required to file since the passage of Assembly Bill 481 in 2021. 

The Sheriff’s Office, the largest police agency in the county, has the most drones. It reported owning 71 drones in 2024, the last year for which information is available. Next were the San Diego Police Department with 43 drones and the Chula Vista Police Department with 36. 

Campus police at San Diego State University reported owning three drones, and University of California San Diego police planned to acquire two last year, but are still in the bidding process as part of a UC-wide effort, according to UC San Diego police Lt. John Smart. 

“We are hoping to acquire at least one this year,” Smart said. 

The Coronado Police Department was the sole agency in San Diego County to report having no drones. “We are a very small agency so we just don’t have the staffing to support a program like that at this time,” said Lea Corbin, public information officer for the department. 

The cost of each drone varies. Most cost departments thousands of dollars but the outliers range from a few hundred to nearly a quarter million dollars – about $235,000 for the Elistar Orion 2 drone purchased by the Oceanside Police Department using grant funding in 2023. Law enforcement drones in the county have typically been purchased with department funds or grants.

The Oceanside department hoped the expensive tool would be a regionwide resource for monitoring large-scale events. But officials said they have not used it regularly or loaned it to other agencies.

“It really hasn’t been worth it,” Valdovinos said. “I actually wish that we would’ve never purchased that thing.”

One of the drones commonly used by several local law enforcement was the DJI Matrice 30T, equipped with a laser rangefinder and a wide camera that can zoom in 16 times and fly for 40 minutes at about 50 mph. 

Most drones used by local law enforcement in San Diego County are made by foreign manufacturers such as DJI and Autel Robotics, also based in China. Their lower price point made them more accessible, though President Trump’s tariffs and tensions with China could change that. 

What are drones used for?

Generally, law enforcement agencies report using drones for a broad variety of purposes: search and rescue operations, disaster response, evidence collection at crime scenes, incidents with hostages or barricaded suspects and large events or gatherings.

The San Diego Police Department conducted 110 drone operations from July 2024 through June 2025, including 15 that were outside the city. Most were categorized as “SWAT Support, High Risk Tactical Operation, or Suspect Search.” Others involved the monitoring of special events, such as San Diego Comic-Con, the San Diego Pride Parade, the Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon, the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open and Mission Beach during Labor Day weekend. 

Since Chula Vista pioneered using drones for 911 calls in 2018, the department has conducted nearly 24,000 drone flights. Officials point to several incidents as examples of the program’s success: a drone capturing a fleeing suspect jump from roof to roof before giving up, a car on fire by the freeway located with the help of a drone, a drone zooming in on a man to reveal that the alleged gun he was holding was actually a cigarette lighter.

“It’s probably the best de-escalation tool,” said Capt. John English, who oversees the drone program. 

Having a drone arrive first on scene allows the responding officer to dispel or confirm information from the initial call and be better prepared when they get there, English said, making the officer and the community more safe.

The department has tried to address privacy concerns by incorporating community feedback into the program’s creation and posting drone flight information online, though it has resisted publicly releasing the video footage they capture. Officers are also prohibited in department policy from “intentionally recording or transmitting images of any location where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy” except with a warrant or in emergencies. 

But Chula Vista’s push to become a “smart city” through the use of drones and other surveillance technology has at times led to community concerns.

For three years beginning in 2017, the police department had unwittingly provided immigration enforcement agencies data from its license plate reader technology, which captures license plate and location information of drivers who pass the cameras.  The revelation led to an outcry from immigration advocates who said local police should not contribute to efforts to deport immigrants. Under California law, local law enforcement are generally prohibited from assisting the federal government in immigration enforcement. 

Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s border program in San Diego, said Chula Vista is the “perfect example” of the challenges that arise when the government embraces new technology without heeding concerns from the community.

“What we discovered is that with the growth of using these types of technologies, they really outpaced any type of clear laws or regulations that would provide guidance and guardrails for how these surveillance technologies would be used,” Rios said. 

How do drones respond in emergencies?

Today, three law enforcement agencies in San Diego County operate drone as first responder programs, including El Cajon, and most recently, Oceanside. The Sheriff’s Office said it was developing a drone as first responder program “that will hopefully be introduced in the future.” 

In Oceanside, Lt. Michael Provence heads the police department’s one-year pilot program, which operates four days a week. During that time, an officer working at the police station launches the drone remotely from a rooftop downtown in response to a 911 call. During the pilot period, an observer also monitors the drone flight from the rooftop. 

The drone flies to the location of the call for service and beams the video footage to the responding officer as well as the department’s real-time crime center as well as to the responding officer, where officers there use additional information to assess the call.

Oceanside police officials said drones typically only respond to calls for service about crimes, and their cameras are pointed towards the sky en route to mitigate privacy concerns.

So far, the drones have responded to about 20 to 30 calls per week and have removed the need for an officer to respond in nearly a third of the cases, Provence said.   

Still, detractors worry about the proliferation of this aerial surveillance and have urged communities to place limits on how local police can use the technology.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union focused on emerging technology, said U.S. communities are in the early days of police drone deployment. As it becomes more common, police are likely to keep pushing the boundaries to expand it – and the public should be wary, he said. 

“They want everybody to swallow this technology and accept it and they want to normalize it” he said. “Then the question is, once it becomes normalized, what happens next?”