Police Drones Spread in California as Residents Push Back

Two California cities moved to put police drones in the air the same week, and both ran straight into residents who don’t want them there. West Hollywood launches a sheriff-run drone program by the end of July.

Berkeley opens bidding on a public safety package that bundles drones with license plate readers and cameras. DroneXL has tracked the drone-as-first-responder wave since Chula Vista crossed 25,000 missions in May, and this is the moment the pushback caught up to it.

West Hollywood puts sheriff drones over the city in July

West Hollywood will launch a one-year, $750,000 pilot by the end of July that sends Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department drones to certain calls before deputies arrive, making it the only city so far to contract with the department for drone-as-first-responder service.

The program has been slow to get here. The council first explored it in February 2023, approved it in July 2024, then paused it in June 2025 over policy conflicts. It took a Sheriff’s Department policy update in April 2026, written specifically to carve out West Hollywood, to clear the runway.

The drones respond only to calls where someone requested police, and they fly ahead of deputies to scout the scene. Captain Fanny Lapkin of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station said the cameras stay off in transit. “The drone will not record when flying to and from said location, but instead record from when it arrives to when it leaves, similar to body-worn cameras,” she said.

The city plans a public dashboard showing how many calls the drones answered and what types. That transparency is the pitch: residents get to see the program’s footprint without filing records requests. The vendor behind the aircraft has not been named.

Berkeley bundles drones into a $2.4 million surveillance package

Berkeley is taking a different route to the same place, folding two drone systems into a public safety technology package worth up to $2.4 million that also covers automated license plate readers, fixed cameras, community cameras, and the investigative software to tie the footage together.

The city releases its request for proposals around July 8, with bids due August 7 and a contract vote to follow. The police department wants both mobile and fixed drones, the fixed ones a step toward a standing drone-as-first-responder capability.

Getting here was a fight. On May 7, the council rejected a single-vendor Flock Safety package and extended only its existing license plate reader contract, ordering police to open the full list to competitive bids instead. Chief Jen Louis’s department now has to find the money, and has floated cutting vacant officer positions to help cover it.

Residents are drawing the line at ICE and data access

The opposition in both cities is aimed less at the drones themselves than at where the footage ends up, and both fights keep landing on the same fear: that police surveillance data gets shared with federal immigration agents.

In West Hollywood, Public Safety Commission member Stephen Post put it bluntly. “In multiple cities, we have seen improper access and use of this data,” he said. “In this moment of heightened ICE and DHS enforcement, we should not be a city leading the push for creating the digital infrastructure that an authoritarian leader could use to harm our communities.”

Berkeley’s opposition runs on the same track. Critics there point to past Flock Safety data breaches and to reports of federal agencies reaching immigration data in other cities, and many say they’ll fight any surveillance expansion no matter which vendor wins the bid.

Not everyone objects. Steve Martin of the Eastside Neighborhood Watch offered a counterweight. “As a person who does go out and exercises my first amendment rights freely, in some ways I would welcome having sheriff surveillance,” he said.

Here’s where I’ll add a reality check. As far as I know, a department doesn’t hand its drone footage to anyone outside its own ranks. Whether ICE can reach it, I can’t confirm or deny.

That likely comes down to how each department gets along with federal agents and whether it chooses to cooperate. The part I can speak to is the camera: a properly run DFR drone doesn’t film the ground on its way to a call, and that has been shown over and over.

Chula Vista wrote the playbook these cities are copying

As Berkeley Scanner reported, none of this started in West Hollywood or Berkeley. Chula Vista launched the first drone-as-first-responder program in the country back in 2018, and by May 2026 it had run more than 25,000 missions, beating patrol cars to the scene on over 17,000 of them.

When the drone got there first, it averaged about 97 seconds to arrive. That number is why departments keep signing up. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Redondo Beach already fly DFR programs, and the LAPD is preparing its own launch with Skydio.

The money is following the same path. Flock Safety bought DFR pioneer Aerodome for more than $300 million in 2024, and Axon has been pushing Skydio hardware to police departments ever since. Orlando stood up an 11-drone Skydio network in June.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud, the drone is the easy part. The hardware works, the response times are real, and Chula Vista has eight years of missions proving a camera overhead can reach a scene faster than a patrol car ever will.

The fight was never really about the aircraft. The footage outlives the flight, and the real question is who can reach into it a month later, and why. A drone program is only as trustworthy as its data retention rules and its access log, and those are the parts that never make the announcement.

California is where this gets tested first because the state runs hot on both ends. It’s the ring: the departments want the drone, and the residents are organized enough to make them show the receipts. The drone is here to stay, and the real fight is only getting started.

The calendar makes this concrete. West Hollywood’s dashboard goes live with the July launch, and it’s the first real test of whether a DFR program can show its work in public. Berkeley’s bids close August 7, and the vendor the council picks, along with the data terms attached, will tell you how seriously the city took its own residents.

Photo credit: Ariel Nava