An urgent call came into dispatch from a witness in Chula Vista: A man was waving around a gun outside a bustling taco restaurant in the middle of the day.
It could have resulted in a tense standoff, but in this city, home to America’s earliest drone-as-first-responder program, the person who got to the scene the quickest wasn’t in a squad car — rather, they were virtually watching through technology hovering hundreds of feet above.
In just a few minutes, the drone’s zoom lens focused on the suspect. The scene plays out in the video below.
The suspect flippantly twirls around the apparent weapon, at times pointing it at himself. Suddenly, he uses the “gun” to light a cigarette, and the view from above reveals that the object was just a novelty lighter.
This information, relayed instantly to officers, allowed them to approach, confirm the situation and prevent a potentially dangerous escalation.
It’s a testament to how drone technology is reshaping policing. But is the ability for law enforcement to have eyes in the sky in a matter of seconds best for communities? Years after Chula Vista launched its program, many cities have followed suit, including the New York City Police Department.
To determine whether drones-as-first-responders may be the future of policing, or just a passing trend, Government Technology dove into Chula Vista’s extensive public data portals for clues.
HOW DRONES ARE FIGHTING CRIME
In October 2018, Chula Vista launched its experimental program, sending drones to respond to calls for service. Since then, the unmanned aircraft have participated in more than 20,000 calls and assisted in 3,038 arrests.
There are four active launch pads located on rooftops throughout the city; sites have included police department headquarters, local hospitals, a college and a hotel. Working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, the police got permission to launch the drones beyond an operator’s line of sight and provide citywide coverage.
A teleoperator — a sworn officer with experience in the field — can listen in to incoming 911 calls via Live911, technology that streams emergency calls as they happen, giving the teleoperator the ability to launch drones even before dispatch is complete. The operator decides independently when to deploy a drone, but also fields officer requests for assistance. The resulting live video feed is streamed to the responding officer’s cellphone.
The unmanned aircraft have a record for responding quickly to calls in Chula Vista, far outpacing traditional patrol units. In 2024, when responding to Priority One calls — ones requiring urgent assistance — drones have arrived at the scene on average in about 3.5 minutes, less than half of the nearly 8 minutes it takes a patrol unit to get to the scene.
The concept of putting eyes on a scene before uniformed officers with flashing lights appear has long been favored by the department. Before drones, plainclothes police officers in unmarked cars would case certain incidents, remaining uninvolved in the situation following a policing strategy known as SARA (scanning, analyzing, responding and assessing a scene).
Yet, when department leaders announced drones would be launched from atop buildings in the city to collect video, many officers weren’t sold on the idea.
“When we first started, officers were skeptical. They used to kind of joke around,” said Chula Vista Sgt. Anthony Molina in an interview with Government Technology. “Now, if drone-as-first-responder (DFR) is ever not operating at a specific time, you hear the grumbles of the officers not having it available, because there’s so much more information that we didn’t have in the past. It puts officers at ease.”
Although the words “game changer” can be overused with police tech, Molina said the DFR program in Chula Vista is exactly that.
According to data from the program’s transparency portal, for the first full year of the program in 2019, drones were used for about 1,000 calls. By 2023, that number had grown to 4,600 — representing 5 percent of the department’s total calls for service.
“It’s the kind of idea that could have really been just blown off from the beginning — go to police calls with drones,” Molina said. “That could sound silly at the time, right? Look at it today. It’s a huge part of changes in policing for agencies across the country now.”
WHAT IS THE DRONE RESPONDING TO?
Nearly 12 percent of drone dispatches came for calls of a disturbance involving a person, while 6 percent were for mental health evaluations and 5 percent were for domestic violence calls. Rounding out the top five list were welfare checks and reports of a person down, both representing 3 percent of all DFR responses.
A closer look at the data reveals that what the police department does after the drone is on scene can be vastly different, highlighting that the drones benefit the logistics of the department in more than one way.
On one hand, DFR is a tool that helps the department maximize resources, determining whether a patrol car follow-up is necessary.
“We’ve had a number of calls where officers were not available, but the drone was,” said Molina, adding that the drone officer has the ability to call the reporting party to ask questions and determine whether the call can be cleared, potentially avoiding an unnecessary dispatch that could have tied up officers on a call that didn’t warrant a response.
According to the data, that situation is most likely to happen when someone calls to report a disturbance or suspicious person or request a welfare check. But in other cases, such as mental health checks, domestic violence and assaults, DFR benefits investigations in other ways. One is as an evidence collection tool to be used in the prosecution of crimes.
“We have a number of situations where prior to officers arriving, the drone is capturing really specific details that end up being helpful … that otherwise would have just been a ‘He said, she said,’ in court, especially when it comes to domestic violence situations,” Molina said.
In 2019, a drone was dispatched to a call of a domestic dispute involving a car and a motorcycle. In the video below, a drone watches the attack unfolding seemingly unnoticed by the people involved. The teleoperator reports to dispatch what is happening, calling for a patrol unit in the tense situation.
According to Molina, DFR has also helped the department navigate challenging domestic violence calls that can be dangerous for both officers and the parties involved, helping to de-escalate situations.
“Usually when the drone is overhead, people don’t even realize it’s overhead,” he said. “Sometimes we might tell the victim to put them at ease, ‘Hey, we can see you, we see what’s going on.’”
TOO MUCH SURVEILLANCE?
While the DFR program rapidly grew from the fall of 2019 to summer of 2021, the frequency of drones dispatched has fluctuated as the department strives to find the right balance.
”Over the years, we’ve started to limit the calls we respond to a bit because of some concerns with privacy,” Molina said. “We’ve listened and we now have kind of trimmed down some of the calls that we’re responding to unless we get more information.”
Engaging with the community from the start was key to successfully launching the program, and now the department continues to prioritize listening to feedback and concerns from residents, he said.
In 2021, a flight path page was created, granting transparency for curious citizens about drone activity. The page shows each DFR’s path on a map and includes the case number and summary for each flight.
“Early on we would get calls and they’d say, ‘Hey, why were you over my yard?’ ‘Why were you looking at me?’” Molina said. “We could say, ‘There was a report of a robbery, and it’s our drone — it was probably over your house but the camera was focused on the mall.’”
In Chula Vista, the drones don’t patrol for crimes; they respond to calls for help or are used in investigations. Yet, Molina admits, not everyone is pleased with the tools, recalling one incident where an individual attempted to throw something at a device in the air.
Recently, the department has made adjustments to how calls are coded on the transparency portal in an effort to bridge gaps between police work and community knowledge.
“We just started changing it up because there was some confusion when we used the words, ’unknown problem,’ it can get confusing for the public,” he said. “We’re trying to be a little more clear about that, and a lot of it has to do with privacy concerns. On one end, some people think that means it’s really not a big deal, but it can be someone calling 911 and just screaming and not saying anything. We need to dispatch officers right away, so the call goes in as an ’unknown problem.’ We’re trying to get a little clearer about those things.”
Other steps the department has taken to attempt to mitigate privacy concerns include instituting a policy that by default sets the drone camera to the horizon when it’s making its return trip back to the launchpad. They’ve also focused on a video retention plan. Depending on the incident’s classification, the video may be deleted by the department after 30 days or retained as long as three years.
The city continues to experiment with emerging technologies to enhance the program, adding drones with longer battery lifespans, thermal technology and even parachutes.
“For communities that have hesitations, it’s understandable to think about, you put a camera up in the sky,” Molina said. “But technology for good can really make a difference and an impact in the community, and that includes the officers, victims and community members.”
Only time will tell how many other police departments incorporate DFR programs into their policing. What appears to be true from Chula Vista’s experiment is that the success of the program hinges on transparency and community engagement. It’s technology that could change the game, but only if transparency is at the forefront.
This article first appeared in Government Technology magazine, sister publication to Industry Insider — California.
