Five months into the San Francisco Police Department’s drone deployment operations, officers have sharply increased their use of the controversial technology, including at major events like Outside Lands, the Dolores Park Hill Bomb, and SF Pride, according to SFPD’s drone flight log data.
City officials and law enforcement’s talking points around police drone use, both before and since it became legal in the city, have centered around supporting officers in vehicle pursuits and burglaries, criminal investigations, and “critical incidents.” In August, SFPD chief William Scott spoke at a press conference about how drones helped lead to the arrest of a sexual assault suspect and contributed to solving several auto burglaries.
But privacy advocates have warned the technology can also be used for more troubling public surveillance. The department’s own drone flight data reveals police have deployed drones at big gatherings as part of what SFPD calls a “command authorized special event,” rather than for a disclosed public safety reason, according to logs analyzed by Gazetteer SF.
Drone use by SFPD was allowed under Proposition E, which 54% of San Francisco voters approved in March this year. The department wasted no time getting their drones, purchasing six in May for about $35,000, according to the department’s UAV policy.
At the time, though, the purchases were actually still against the law. AB 481, a state law that went into effect in 2021, requires law enforcement agencies to obtain approval from the appropriate governing body before purchasing or using military equipment, including drones — something the police department failed to do.
SFPD deployed their new drones for the first time in May 2024, shortly after purchasing them, according to the department’s flight logs. But the department didn’t seek approval from the Board of Supervisors until early June. Supervisors passed an ordinance approving the drone purchases in September, which Mayor Breed signed on Oct. 3.
Since that May deployment, SFPD has increased its drone usage every month through the end of August, when the department deployed its drones 71 times, bringing its total number of deployments to 123. That same month, SFPD chief William Scott, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, and Breed touted how the drone program had already led to arrests.
The majority of the deployments in August were classified as “calls for service,” which SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky told Gazetteer indicates drones being used to respond to emergencies.
SFPD has not yet released its September data.
That the SFPD expanded its use cases, and more than doubled its use of drones from July to August, “doesn’t feel surprising” to Electronic Frontier Foundation senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia.
“What we’ve seen in police departments is when they get new toys, they tend to invent reasons to use them,” he told Gazetteer. “And the way the model has gone historically is devices or technologies that they say are only going to be used in the very extreme circumstances — in order to justify their purchase and their use — end up getting used more and more frequently for everyday aspects of policing.”
SFPD, which currently has six drones and plans to acquire more, only deploys drones for “law enforcement purposes, like criminal investigations and critical incidents," according to its website.
Their website isn’t the only place where SFPD is vague about how they plan to use the drones. A presentation SFPD made to supervisors in September mentions “pre-planned crime prevention and investigation operations” and “planned operations” as authorized use cases for drones.
While the drone flight dataset doesn't reference specific events, it does label several unnamed "special” events that correspond to the dates and locations of major events this year, including Pride and Outside Lands.
In response to questions about why drones were used at those gatherings, Sernoffsky directed Gazetteer to the above-linked department page on drones. That page links to two separate drone policies, one for the department’s Tactical Company and the other for SFPD’s Technical Services Unit. Neither policy explicitly authorizes nor explicitly prohibits drone deployment at major events. SFPD, however, cannot use drones for the purpose of infringing on First Amendment rights, according to their policy.
Police are supposed to delete drone footage that doesn’t contain any evidence within 30 days, but can retain data with evidence relevant to a case for a minimum of two and a half years, according to the policy. The policy also prohibits collecting or retaining footage for protected First Amendment activities.
Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of non profit advocacy group Media Alliance, told Gazetteer the police department’s use of drones at big events follows a pattern of how SFPD has used new technologies in the past. In 2020, for example, an EFF investigation found that the SFPD had accessed a live feed of a downtown business district’s camera network during protests against police violence.
Rosenberg said there’s a pattern “of having one conversation in public and then doing other sorts of things, a little, I don’t want to say undercover, but without sort of a public conversation, which is, ‘Why are we watching gay pride events with heavy duty surveillance equipment.’ Like, what is this about?”
Given the sheer volume of major events in San Francisco, Rosenberg expects to “see more of this, not less of this,” she said.
Beyond these special events, SFPD has used drones for a variety of other reasons, like tracking “smash and grab” suspects, and helping officers apprehend “armed and dangerous” people. They’ve deployed them all throughout the city, and even in the East Bay and San Jose to conduct SFPD activities in those jurisdictions, including executing search warrants, Sernoffsky said.
Brian Cox, head of the Integrity Unit in the city’s Public Defender’s Office, is concerned about the privacy implications with SFPD’s drone use. Police access to drones with the ability to capture and record images of people “seems to be a massive invasion of privacy,” he told Gazetteer.
The city has a long history of civil protests and civil disobedience, Cox said, pointing to the thousands of people who gathered in the streets of San Francisco to protest the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“Now the police department has this powerful tool where they can record everyone's faces, so to me, I think this has a really clear chilling effect on people exercising their free speech,” he said.
Cox is specifically concerned about how SFPD could use drones to overpolice and surveil communities of color.
SFPD’s official policy prohibits monitoring people based on race, gender and other identity-based features, and drone operators are directed to only focus the camera on “areas necessary to the mission.”
But the department has a “history of ignoring and flouting rules and regulations” pertaining to new technologies, Cox said. In July, for example, nonprofit Secure Justice sued the city, claiming that the police department had repeatedly violated the facial recognition ban that went into effect in 2019.
“I’m really concerned that in putting another tool in their hands, when there is this history, and hoping and praying that there won’t be any misuses, I’m not confident in that,” he said. “And I don’t know that San Franciscans should be either.”
