Chula Vista 911 Drone Cops Test-Pilot Emergency Response In Sky

CHULA VISTA — On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in February 2019 in Chula Vista, California, the stormy relationship between Carmen Alcoser and Robert De Los Rios worsened.

Things got heated outside a taco shop, and Alcoser went to her friend’s house and told her to call 911. When De Los Rios arrived to find out police were on the way, he took off on his motorcycle. Alcoser made chase. She floored her white sedan in reverse and trailed De Los Rios on residential streets, at one point jumping a curb and driving on a sidewalk, and blowing through stop signs. In an alley, Alcoser nudged De Los Rios off his motorcycle with her car’s bumper.

Without a squad car in sight, neither of them knew that one of America’s most high-tech municipal police department was already on scene — 300 feet in the sky.

Chula Vista police officer Kyle Roberts, one of the department’s two full-time drone teleoperators, caught up with the feuding couple and began to capture the high-speed chase on video about two minutes after launching from the rooftop of police headquarters.

Over the police radio, he gave a play-by-play to officers who arrived just as Roberts feared Alcoser might run over De Los Rios.

That’s just one example of how Chula Vista — a flat, sunny, bayside city of 270,000 sandwiched between San Diego and Tijuana near the U.S.-Mexico border — has become a high-tech testing ground for drone-assisted policing.

Since October 2018, the department has been flying seven to 15 drone missions a day, and more than 1,200 active missions in all. The cop-piloted drones are often first on scene, with a bird’s-eye view of car chases, liquor store holdups and those dreaded front-porch package thieves. Their footage led to 130 arrests in its first year.

While 599 law enforcement agencies in the country use drones, Chula Vista is the first local police department to have the Federal Aviation Administration’s permission to fly, and record high-definition video, from beyond the line of sight.

“It’s the future of policing,” Lt. Dan Peak said.

Not everyone thinks that’s a good thing. Privacy advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Project on Government Oversight are all concerned about drones’ unique and unprecedented ability to spy on people. They can fly most anywhere, including into a backyard or outside a window.

They already have lenses with powerful zoom lenses. But pair them with facial recognition technology or equip them with license plate readers, microphones and possibly the scariest drone technology — Active Track, which can affix on a person and track them autonomously — and we’re on our way in a hurry to living in a surveillance state, according to the Project on Government Oversight.

When Alcoser’s case landed in court, local prosecutors were the first in the country to introduce video evidence from a drone acting specifically as a first responder.

Alcoser said she was “a little bit glad and scared” after she found out that Chula Vista police’s drone captured the tail end of the domestic dispute.

Judging the impact the drone had on Alcoser’s case — such as the trial program that could set a standard for drone-assisted policing in America — depends on one’s perspective.

“The video didn’t tell the whole story,” Alcoser said, “and neither did the police, for that matter.”

‘A natural fit’

The FAA’s Integration Pilot Program was started in 2017 as a way to test a variety of different ways to blend drones into existing traffic in the nation’s airspace. Public agencies and private tech companies combined to study agricultural uses on tribal lands in Oklahoma; package delivery in Herndon, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina; airport operations and security in Memphis; medical device delivery in Reno, Nevada; oil pipeline inspection in Alaska; and all sorts of uses in San Diego, from Uber Eats deliveries to law enforcement applications.

Chula Vista was already embracing the “smart city movement,” a sort of electronic interconnectedness between everything from traffic lights to telecommunications. And since Chula Vista is flat and the weather is often sunny and mild, the city is an ideal geographic location for testing drones. Police Chief Roxana Kennedy expressed interest in developing a first-responder drone program, and the city council approved it, dedicating a portion of a wide-ranging, half-cent sales tax increase to pay for it.

“The city was suited to participate in this type of program because we were well into our own smart cities initiatives,” Chula Vista Mayor Mary Salas said. “The philosophy is you use technology in order to enhance your services. So it was just a natural fit, I think.”

One of the main pilots, or teleoperators, is officer Matt Hardesty, a 27-year veteran who was injured in a motorcycle accident that sidelined him permanently from full duty. He was offered a spot on the drone program instead and took it.

“It’s better on the back,” Hardesty says. “This is fun, but I do miss patrol.”

Chula Vista police deploy two DJI Matrice 210 V2 drones, which cost about $30,000 each. Equipped with 30X zoom lenses, they can clearly see — from hundreds of feet high — what a person is holding in their hand.

Up on the roof of the police station one December morning, Roberts stood in the shade underneath a picnic-style pop-up canopy. A few feet away on a plywood launch pad sat the drone, looking a bit like a mechanized spider at rest. In an instant, with the wooshing, buzzing sound of a demented swarm of wasps, the drone’s rotors forced air down, and the whole device shot straight up, hovering motionlessly 130 feet high.

Down on the first floor of police headquarters in the drone room, Hardesty stands in front of two giant screens. He can fly the drone in three ways. By entering an address on the computer or putting a pin on a map, the drone will fly there autonomously. He can also control the drone manually, which he often does, having grown up in Chula Vista and knowing the city intimately.

The software suite for the drone, Cape, allows up to 50 other officers to open their smartphones and see the same thing that Roberts and Hardesty see, in real time. Additionally, the department is testing a program called Live 911 that allows every officer to listen to a 911 call in real time so that they’re all connected and have access to the same information during an incident.

Even though nearly 600 other law enforcement agencies use drones, according to Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone, Chula Vista’s program is vastly different. Most other police departments will roll up to the scene, open the trunk of a squad car, pull out their drone and launch it, leaving one less officer available to respond. Plus, the drone-operating officer is the only one who can see what the drone sees.

Chula Vista’s police officers say their program is far better. As in Alcoser’s case, the police department can be on scene even when all other officers are responding to other calls elsewhere in the city. The drone teleoperator can triage 911 calls to see whether, say, a car accident requires more officers or if it’s a minor fender bender. And officers aren’t relying solely on secondhand information from a dispatcher about the incident — they can view the drone footage themselves, in real time, for information on a car chase, a hostage situation or any other fraught encounter. And it’s far cheaper to fly than a police helicopter.

But even though drones are far less costly than choppers (which run roughly $1,000 per hour, according to Lt. Don Redmond), they won’t make police helicopters obsolete. Drones can’t fly in winds beyond around 25 miles per hour, nor in rain or snow. And the Chula Vista Police Department’s drones are geofenced to stay within city limits; for highway car chases, missing-child incidents or emergencies that require a loudspeaker, helicopters are still optimal.

Yet because drones can be flown more often, they’re able to capture the same evidence as a helicopter would — just much more of it on a day-to-day basis. Unsurprisingly, prosecutors welcome this.

“Anytime we have video of the crime, it’s obviously incredibly helpful,” said Deputy District Attorney Bree Garcia, the prosecutor in Alcoser’s case. ‘It’s pretty similar to when you have surveillance footage from a store or something like that. That’s what this footage effectively was. It captured most of the crime on video.”

Complete transparency?

While law enforcement hails this new technology, privacy advocates warn that putting surveillance technology in the hands of police could lead to a worst-case-scenario police state.

Before launching its drone program, Chula Vista police held several community meetings and invited the local chapter of the ACLU to voice concerns.

“We wanted complete transparency,” Redmond said. “We have a great relationship with our community, and we wanted to continue it. We wanted to point out that this drone [program] is to offset officers. We’re one of lowest-staffed agencies in state because of funding, but here’s a tool and technology that we can use to offset some of that.”

Even those meetings, however, weren’t all that transparent, an ACLU spokesman said.

ACLU representatives “attended one meeting and presented our general concerns about the use of drones ... No policy was available for review at that meeting. That one meeting has been the extent of the ACLU’s involvement in the city’s process,” ACLU spokesman Edward Sifuentes said.

Dave Maass, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who studies law enforcement drone use, is, like others, concerned about the abilities of drones to spy on citizens, as well as the use of drones by the FBI to surveil protests — the right to assemble being enshrined in the First Amendment. But the issue for law enforcement goes way beyond drone use.

“One of my bigger-picture concerns is that the fundamental nature of policing is changing due to technology, and there isn’t necessarily much consideration being placed on what that means,” Maass said. “A lot of the adoption of technology is being driven by vendors and by conferences, but nobody’s thinking, ‘What does this look like five or 10 years down the road?’”

With police misconduct and community relations in the spotlight now more than ever before, Chula Vista’s police department posts flight logs and flight patterns of all its drone missions on a link from its website with the aim of assuring locals they’re not being spied upon. There’s no camera footage, but it includes the time of launch, the duration of the flight and a video animation showing the specific flight path the drone took on a map, so people can see where exactly it flew.

“We welcome the media in here so they see what we do,” Redmond said. “We have nothing to hide here, so that when the ACLU looks at our drone program they know it’s not us they have to worry about. We’re above board, and we’re here for the community.”

Mayor Salas thinks the public has been well-informed about the police’s drones, and she remains in full support of the program, citing the community workshops, a city council workshop and meetings with Chief Kennedy. Redmond says the department hasn’t received a single formal or informal complaint about its drones, and that residents now ask the police department to surveil a specific hot spot — the alley behind their home, for example — though he says the police refuse to do any surveillance activity.

All eyes on Chula Vista

From an initial charge of assault with a deadly weapon, Alcoser ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor driving charge and agreed to take domestic violence classes.

“That video was everything in my case,” Alcoser said. The video provided evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and yet without it, there might have been no case at all.

Alcoser seems wary of the drone’s use in general — including the footage it might incidentally capture of innocent bystanders. “All citizens should know what’s going on around them,” Alcoser said. “Who knows what these drones will catch while in pursuit?”

For now, nobody’s sure what will happen next to Chula Vista’s robust police drone infrastructure once the FAA’s drone pilot program ends in November.

“Because it’s such a new technology, there aren’t a lot of grants and funding sources for it,” Salas said. “My hope is that we have enough data that will show us that the program would be even more effective on a larger scale. We’ve received briefings that ultimately what we’d like to see is a drone launching site on each one of our fire stations in order to have full coverage of the city. That would be the ultimate.”

People around the nation who don’t agree say they’ll be keeping their eyes on what happens in Chula Vista from afar — just like the city’s police drones out on patrol.