The Age of the Drone Police Is Here

On a Wednesday afternoon in August, Daniel Posada and his girlfriend were screaming at each other at a bus stop when someone called 911. From a rooftop a mile away, the Chula Vista Police Department started the rotors of a 13-pound drone.

The machine lifted into the air with its high-resolution camera rolling. Equipped with thermal imaging capabilities and a powerful zoom lens, it transmitted a live feed of everything it captured to a sworn officer monitoring a screen at the precinct, to the department’s Real-Time Operations Center, and to the cell phone of the responding officer racing to the scene.

It flew northwest at 392 feet above the southwestern border town, a suburb of San Diego, passing near a preschool and a church, then near a financial services center used by Chula Vista’s immigrant communities to send money to their families. En route to Posada, the drone—a Matrice 300 RTK—would cross the airspace of 23 blocks, potentially exposing thousands of Chula Vista residents to the gaze of law enforcement over an incident that had nothing to do with them.

Posada was riding his bike down the street when he heard it—the distinct buzz of a police drone’s rotors over his head. Within seconds, a police car pulled up alongside him, and an officer was soon rummaging through his pockets, he would later tell WIRED. For Posada, who’s known as “Focal” in the homeless encampment where he stays, this was neither the first nor the last time he would feel singled out by the cops or their drones.

Police department records show that no one—neither the officer monitoring the drone feed nor the person who called 911—observed any kind of physical altercation between Posada and his girlfriend that day. He says the argument wasn’t serious and that it didn’t warrant such a high-tech police response. (His girlfriend could not be reached for comment.) The money would be better served feeding and clothing unsheltered people like himself, he says, whose lives are upended every time officials break down their encampments, tossing their worldly possessions into a dumpster.

“I could understand sending a drone for something serious,” he says, shaking his head. “I feel like a target.”

As police departments look to expand their use of unmanned aerial aircraft, no agency has embraced the technology quite like the CVPD. A model for police departments around the United States, “some police officers joke that visiting the Chula Vista Police Department is like visiting Mecca,” says Jay Stanley, author of a 2023 American Civil Liberties Union report on police use of drones.

In October 2018, the city became the first in the nation to start a Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, where department teleoperators listening to live 911 calls decide when and where to dispatch the department’s growing fleet of drones. Now those devices criss-cross the skies of Chula Vista daily—nearly 20,000 times since 2018—and are often first to appear above the sites of noise complaints, car accidents, overdoses, domestic disputes, and homicides.

The department says that its drones provide officers with critical intelligence about incidents they are responding to ahead of initiating in-person contact—which the CVPD says has reduced unnecessary police contacts, decreased response times, and saved lives. But a WIRED investigation paints a complicated picture of the trade-offs between public safety and privacy.

In Chula Vista, drone flight paths trace a map of the city’s inequality, with poorer residents experiencing far more exposure to the drones’ cameras and rotors than their wealthier counterparts, a WIRED analysis of nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023 found. The drones, often dispatched for serious incidents like reports of armed individuals, are also routinely deployed for minor issues such as shoplifting, vandalism, and loud music. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the city even used drones to broadcast public service announcements to homeless encampments.

Despite the police promoting the benefits of the DFR program, residents who encounter the technology day-to-day report feeling constantly watched. Some say they are afraid to spend time in their backyards; they fear that the machines are following them down the street, spying on them while they use the public pool or change their clothes. One resident says that he was so worried that the drones were harassing him that he went to the emergency room for severe depression and exhaustion.

The police drones, equipped with cameras and zoom lenses powerful enough to capture faces clearly and constantly recording while in flight, have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of the city’s residents. Their flight paths routinely take them over backyards and above public pools, high schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, immigration law firms, and even the city’s Planned Parenthood facility. Privacy advocates argue that the extensive footage captured by the drones makes it difficult to distinguish between flights responding to specific incidents and mass surveillance from the sky. Department secrecy around the recordings remains the subject of ongoing litigation.

The CVPD insists that its drones do not conduct random surveillance, do not go out in search of suspicious activity, and that the technology is deployed only in response to 911 calls or lawful searches. An analysis of Chula Vista’s dispatch logs supports this claim: The vast majority of drone flights could be linked to corresponding 911 calls. But not all of them.

At the time of our analysis, approximately one in 10 drone flights listed on the department’s transparency portal lacked a stated purpose and could not be connected to any relevant 911 call; for 498 flights, the department lists the reason as an “unknown problem.” For residents we spoke to, the discrepancy raises serious concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the department’s transparency efforts—and experts say the use of the drones is a classic case of self-perpetuating mission creep, with their existence both justifying and necessitating their use.

Despite these concerns, most of the dozens of Chula Vista residents interviewed for this story support the police department and its use of drones. The program is growing, with the department now deploying dozens of drones and using ever more staff and resources to support them. Meanwhile, in an arrangement that makes some policy experts uneasy, former heads of the Chula Vista drone program have gone on to work for drone makers, leveraging their contacts in law enforcement to help sell DFR programs elsewhere.

WIRED analyzed more than 22.3 million coordinates from flight paths published online by the CVPD from July 2021 until September 2023 to understand where drones went and why. We looked at precisely when the drones’ cameras started recording and calculated the approximate amount of time in seconds that each resident in each Chula Vista block could have been exposed to the department’s eyes in the sky.

Our analysis found that, on average, each drone flight passes above 13 census blocks and potentially exposes approximately 4,700 of the residents below to a drone’s camera.

Overall, the poorer the neighborhood, the more exposure to drones its residents faced, WIRED’s analysis found. Residents in the working-class and largely immigrant west side of Chula Vista were far more likely to be exposed to police drone cameras compared to those in the wealthier communities on the east side. According to our analysis, drones flew over the typical west side block 10 times longer than over the typical east side block while en route or at the scene of an incident.

From the department’s perspective, the reason for this disparity is simple: Drones are sent more frequently to neighborhoods on the west side because there is more crime reported there. An analysis of Chula Vista’s dispatch logs confirms that this is largely the case and that the areas where drones spent the most time tended to have higher numbers of calls for service.

This circular explanation is part of a broader pattern: Throughout the US, low-income communities of color are often the targets of additional aerial surveillance. Last year, researchers at the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA found that, based on an analysis of flight data, Los Angeles police flew helicopters more often over Black and Latine neighborhoods at lower altitudes—even when controlling for income and other variables.

Chula Vista, approximately 120 miles south of Los Angeles, is a divided city. The east side of Chula Vista is suburban—driving through, you’ll see large estates, gated communities, and lush golf courses. “There’s a higher expectation of privacy here,” says one man, a retiree, standing in the driveway of his home near Bonita Long Canyon Park. He, like other residents on the east side interviewed for this story, says that while he supports police drones, he understands that the city mostly flies above the people living west of Interstate 805. “There’s less crime out here and higher incomes, so that’s why there are fewer drone flights.”

The manager at a golf course on the east side was even more explicit. “Right now we’re sneaking up on chaos in a lot of areas,” he says, “and if drones are what’s needed to take care of the criminals,” so be it. “Buzz that son of a gun all you want to,” he says.

Both individuals asked not to be named, citing privacy concerns.

The west side, on the other hand, is densely populated, and residents tend to be poorer and tend to be born outside the United States. According to US Census data, nearly half of households on the west side earn approximately $55,000 a year or less—making many of them eligible for free or reduced-price meals at California schools—compared to 19 percent of households on the east side.

Norell Martínez, a 60-year-old professor of English and Chicana/o Studies, has lived on the west side of Chula Vista her entire life. A first-generation immigrant, her parents migrated from Tijuana, Mexico, to Chula Vista when she was a year old. “A lot of people on the west side share a similar background as me; it’s a diverse community,” Martinez says.

Some of the blocks in Chula Vista with the highest exposure to drones are located near launch sites, which happens to be where Martínez lives: a block and a half from police headquarters on a street that is among the safest on the west side. Since July 2021, however, drones have flown overhead at least 959 times, amassing nearly five hours of footage from the sky above her block.

Before the drone program started, she says, her neighborhood was quiet. Now the sound of the rotors keeps her up at night. “We pay a lot of money and make a lot of sacrifices to have a little tiny piece of property that’s ours,” she says. “It feels like our home is not ours anymore. It’s like it belongs to the Chula Vista Police Department.”

In September 2016, police in El Cajon, a small city northeast of Chula Vista, fatally shot an unarmed man named Alfred Olango. His sister had called the police because Olango, who had a history of mental illness, was acting erratically. “I called you guys for help, not to come kill him,” she cries in a Facebook Live video filmed in the parking lot of the strip mall where the officers minutes earlier had shot her brother. “Why couldn’t you tase him? I told you he was sick.”

The incident—which sparked widespread protests—would become central to the CVPD’s story of how its Drone as First Responder program spun to life. “Would the ability to have eyes on this incident before uniformed officers arrived have prevented this?” retired Captain William “Fritz” Reber, the architect of Chula Vista’s drone program, wrote in an October 2019 blog post about the DFR program for the law enforcement publication Police1.

It appears that the city was considering deploying drones well before police killed Olango, however. Public records and statements made by the CVPD show that police formed an Unmanned Aerial Systems Committee to “study the use of the technology in its public safety operations” in December 2015—nearly a year before Olango’s death.

The UAS Committee’s meeting minutes, obtained through a public records request, show that it met three times starting in September 2016 to discuss the logistics and plan the rollout of the DFR program. From the outset, community engagement and a press strategy were central to its approach. “We need to include the media and community more,” a note from a November 2016 meeting reads. “This should be done to prevent any appearance of deception or secrecy.” At a September 14 meeting, the committee scheduled its first public forum for a date nearly two weeks later: September 27—the day police killed Olango.

City officials say that prior to launching the program, the CVPD received “strong support from the community” during public forums where it detailed plans for the DFR program. The CVPD did not respond to detailed questions about its community outreach prior to launching the program and has yet to fully respond to WIRED’s request for records from these forums.

The earliest recording from a public forum that WIRED could find took place in February 2019 at City Hall—months after the first drone lifted off the roof of CVPD headquarters in October 2018.

When the program officially launched, it was much more modest than envisioned. Limited by Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibiting drones from flying beyond the line of sight of operators, the department limited the flight of its two drones to a one-mile radius from the main police station. By May 2019, the FAA granted the department a waiver for “beyond visual line of sight” operations, allowing it to fly drones over a three-mile radius. In March 2021, the same month that the Chula Vista City Council agreed to pay for additional full-time police staff, the FAA cleared the department to launch drones across the entire city.

Not every 911 call is met by a drone. A teleoperator monitoring incoming service calls decides when to deploy them. WIRED’s analysis of 911 calls, totaling 139,522 from July 2021 to September 2023, reveals that drones were used in about 7 percent of the city’s service requests. Specifically, drones were dispatched to nearly half of the incidents involving reports of armed individuals and about a quarter of those related to violent crime. Calls involving mental health evaluations and domestic violence were frequently met with drone dispatches, according to data published by the city.

Police drones have flown through the airspace of the Vistan Apartments on the west side more than 300 times since July 2021. The complex, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chula Vista, is populated largely by Latine families, many of whom are immigrants. Over the past two years, CVPD drones have spent a total of eight hours flying above the Vistan Apartments’ census blocks and have been dispatched to respond to incidents ranging from indecent exposure to an attempted kidnapping.

Vistan Apartments resident Jesús López says that one afternoon, while he was away from home, a man banged loudly on his front door. When his 3-year-old opened it, the stranger reached in and tried to grab his kid. According to Lopez, his babysitter quickly yanked the child inside, slammed the door, and dialed 911. Within minutes, Lopez says, a police drone arrived to search for the suspect.

The department did not find the individual, but López—who spoke to WIRED through his locked door, because he no longer opens it for people he doesn’t recognize—says that police drones make him feel safer.

Asked if he sees any downsides to the drones, he says, “Not really.”

In 2022, Chula Vista conducted a survey intended to gauge public opinion about its use of police drones. It found that residents across the board are largely in favor of the DFR program and that, as a trend, the poorer the resident, the more likely they were to support the drone program. “A lot of communities want this, because they see the value and benefit,” says Don Redmond, the captain of the CVPD drone program from 2020 until 2022. Now vice president of advanced public safety projects at Brinc, a company that builds first-responder drones, Redmond helps other agencies roll out their own DFR programs. “If our community was protesting outside of our police department saying no more drones, I’m fairly confident we would have shut down the program.” Instead, Redmond says, “we had people thanking us for doing what we are doing.”

While the survey found that residents are largely in favor of the DFR program, a majority are concerned that devices might record people not suspected of a crime or that the video might be shared with federal immigration authorities. In 2020, the San Diego Union-Tribune found that the Chula Vista Police Department had been sharing data from its network of license plate readers with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a partnership with Vigilant Solutions, a leading provider of the technology for law enforcement agencies around the country. In the uproar that followed, city officials said they’d removed immigration authorities’ access to the data, at least temporarily.

Constitutional law experts worry that without oversight, these public safety deployments will inevitably lead to excessive and potentially inappropriate drone usage. An ACLU report published in July 2023 cautioned that while police departments were using serious situations—fires, accidents, gun violence—as the basis for drone deployment, many were also using drones to investigate more mundane incidents. In Chula Vista, that included a “water leak” and someone “bouncing a ball against a garage.”

According to WIRED’s analysis, Chula Vista police have sent its drones to investigate hundreds of 911 calls for seemingly minor incidents like suspicious activity, loud music, public intoxication, vandalism, and shoplifting. Last July, for instance, a Chula Vista resident called 911 to complain about a party; police deployed a drone to investigate. En route to the alleged party, the drone flew over 11 blocks where approximately 2,500 people live, ultimately arriving at a house on a quiet suburban street in east Chula Vista.

Before returning to the station, the drone hovered above Roxanna Galvan’s house for three minutes. Galvan, who works at the San Diego County Office of Education, recalls that her neighbors were hosting a party that night, but she was unaware of the drone’s presence until contacted by WIRED. “I don’t mind that CVPD is using drones to check out what’s going on,” she says, but it concerns her that they can send high-tech tools over her home without her knowledge.

In an effort to ease concerns about drones, the department uploads data about every flight to its transparency portal. Through the portal, residents can look up details about why a drone was in the sky at a particular time. While organizations like the ACLU have praised the department for its transparency, WIRED found that approximately one in 10 flights on the portal didn’t list a reason for why they were flown. These unexplained flights weren’t assigned an incident number from the department—meaning they couldn’t be connected to a 911 call—and nearly 400 of them didn’t come within half a mile of where any call in the preceding half hour originated.

Jay Stanley, author of the 2023 ACLU report, tells WIRED that he is concerned by the hundreds of unexplained drone flights listed by the department. “Considering how novel and sensitive this technology is, they—and other departments—should be scrupulous in their attention to detail when logging these activities,” he says. Nevertheless, Stanley believes that the department should still be “commended” for the amount of transparency that it does have.

Ahead of Stanley’s report, Chula Vista police chief Roxana Kennedy offered him a tour of the department’s high-tech headquarters. The department has said that it opens its headquarters to civil liberties organizations and the press as part of its transparency efforts; however, after WIRED scheduled a tour of the facilities in March, Kennedy personally canceled and declined to make the DFR facilities available for this story.

CVPD spokesperson Anthony Molina declined to respond to WIRED’s detailed list of questions, citing ongoing litigation related to its refusal to release footage captured by its drones. In lieu of a statement, Molina referred WIRED to a series of documents related to that court case and the agency’s July 30, 2023, response to an early version of WIRED’s analysis, which Molina characterized as “superficial and out of context.”

Police using the drone program for a broad range of incidents has some experts wondering whether it was rolled out too quickly. “Fundamentally, this is a mission-creep issue,” says Christopher Burr, senior researcher at the Alan Turing Institute in London. “We’re letting technology run away and not fully understanding what effects it has on ourselves.” That applies not only to residents but to the police department itself.

The empirical research between aerial surveillance and mental health in the United States is weak; the technology is still relatively new, and controlled experiments are difficult to conduct. Still, some experts argue that the awareness of being watched by others can trigger a negative reaction baked into human psychology.

Jonathon W. Penney, a legal scholar and social scientist who’s working on a book about the chilling effects of electronic surveillance, says that “the possibility of surveillance alone has a normalizing effect.” That was the point of Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon—an architectural system of control intended to pacify a prison population with only a single guard. Persistent forms of observation, Penney argues, when coupled with the power and authority of the state, can also open doors to conspiratorial thinking.

WIRED spoke to several residents on Chula Vista’s west side who alleged that police drones were following them personally, lingering unnecessarily in their backyards, or watching them during their most intimate moments.

That fear is not entirely unwarranted, although examples nationwide are sparse. On August 27, 2004, for instance, New York Police Department officers aboard a police helicopter equipped with thermal imaging equipment intentionally recorded two people having sex on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse.

One west side Chula Vista resident showed WIRED a series of cell phone videos he recorded of drones passing by his home or flying over his car while he was out driving at night. He’s convinced that the drones fired laser beams through his bathroom window to intimidate him and spy on his family because he belongs to the city’s low-rider community. WIRED could not find evidence that the CVPD drones are equipped with lasers. The department did not answer detailed questions about the allegation.

His torment came to a head in December 2020. Medical records he shared with WIRED show that he went to an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms; he was suffering from a lack of sleep and says that he complained to hospital staff that the drones were harassing him.

There was nothing they could do about the drones, so they released him, he says. Hopeless, he swallowed a handful of antidepressants in the hospital parking lot and was readmitted for observation. A doctor recorded his justification for self harm: “Nobody was taking me seriously.”

In 2022, the man lodged a formal complaint against the CVPD about the drones. The department did not assign an investigator to look into the complaint and promptly concluded it was unfounded.

As Chula Vista’s use of drones has expanded, so has its arsenal. According to its 2022 “Annual Military Equipment Report,” the department has 32 drones with features that include high-definition cameras—some capable of infrared and thermal imaging—speakers, and lights.

Captain Miriam Foxx, who oversees the department’s DFR unit, said in a 2022 deposition that operators are trained to start recording with the drone’s camera immediately, capturing video throughout the entire flight, from takeoff to landing. This footage is clear enough to identify a person’s face, she said at the time. CVPD officials have said they have no interest in using facial recognition in conjunction with their drones, but the city’s Unmanned Aerial Systems policy does not explicitly prohibit it. A state law that banned the practice expired in 2023.

Chula Vista’s drone policy does, however, prohibit the use of drones to conduct random surveillance, harass or intimidate individuals or groups, or conduct personal business. It also prohibits the department from weaponizing drones.

While CVPD policy states that drone operators must take “reasonable precautions” to avoid recording areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, the flight data shows that police drones routinely fly over backyards and other places that make people uncomfortable.

Maggi Baker, another west side resident and a volunteer with South Bay People Power who helps immigrants find housing and medical care, says the city’s array of surveillance gear—drones as well as license plate readers—makes her uneasy. She often meets with people going through immigration proceedings at her house and sees drones while she’s out walking. “It’s just part of our daily life now,” she says. “We feel like we’re in a spiderweb, and we can’t get out.”

Tim Czaja has lived off Guava Avenue for 12 years, about a half-mile from police headquarters. Pushing his bicycle downtown one morning, Czaja tells WIRED that he sees police drones on a daily basis—one time even lingering above the nearby public pool. According to flight data, drones have flown through the airspace of that pool 59 times since 2021—inadvertently amassing nearly an hour of footage from the area.

The flight data show that police drones routinely fly over places that even the Department of Homeland Security considers “protected areas”—places where DHS recognizes that enforcement actions might impact “access to essential services or engagement in essential activities.” Such locations, according to the department, include places of worship, playgrounds, schools, mental health care facilities, domestic violence shelters, food banks, and homeless shelters.

Diagram: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

About a mile south of the public pool is Chula Vista High School. In the past two years, its students have been exposed to approximately four hours of aerial surveillance, as drones were dispatched to 151 incidents that took them through the airspace of the campus. While many of these dispatches were unrelated to public safety incidents at the school, WIRED’s analysis shows that drones have been dispatched to Chula Vista High to assist with “suspicious activity,” missing persons, and fights.

The department says it tries to limit people’s exposure to drone cameras. Upon takeoff, teleoperators are trained to zoom in on the area of the incident. At the conclusion of the flight, the department states, the drone’s camera is programmed to automatically tilt upward and zoom out “to reduce the chances that private property is accidentally recorded.”

However, without access to the underlying drone footage, reporters have no way to verify this claim.

Chula Vista withholds almost all of its drone footage from the public—arguing that they are investigatory records and that their disclosure would violate the privacy of people at the other end of a drone’s lens. For years, Art Castañares, the publisher of a local bilingual newspaper called La Prensa, has been trying in court to get the footage. If he succeeds, the consequences will have ramifications for the DFR model in the future.

In 2021, La Prensa requested a month of drone camera footage from the CVPD. When the department would not provide the documents, he sued the city for the videos, arguing that the drone program was not above state public records law. Though La Prensa initially lost its case, an appeals court later concluded that the city cannot categorically withhold drone footage as a matter of policy. That ruling is now a statewide precedent after the California Supreme Court declined to take up the case and reconsider it. La Prensa’s case will return to trial court to determine which videos, if any, the department must release.

Castañares estimates that the city has spent more than $1 million fighting to keep the documents secret. “They aren’t being transparent, and the fact that they are fighting it so much is what makes it suspicious,” he tells WIRED. “The fact that they don’t want to give me the videos makes me feel like there’s more to it.”

When Chula Vista got the FAA’s permission to fly beyond the line of visual sight in 2019, it propelled the city—and CVPD chief Kennedy by extension—into the international spotlight. City officials have since hosted media and diplomats from the world over. The Interpol Drone Expert Summit was held in Chula Vista in October. In January, Kennedy spoke at CES, the Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade show, on a panel titled “Wide World of Drones.” In March, Kennedy spoke at the World Police Summit in Dubai.

Indeed, new DFR programs seem to spring up on a weekly basis. In recent years, police departments in New Orleans; Brookhaven, Georgia; and Clovis and Redondo Beach in California; have all launched drone programs. In May, the New York Police Department announced its plans to use drones to respond to gunshot alerts generated from its ShotSpotter platform. Activists and academics have criticized the gunfire-detection system, primarily placed in low-income communities of color, as being faulty and inaccurate.

This attention has opened doors to the private sector for Chula Vista officials. William Reber, the mastermind behind Chula Vista’s drone program, became the head of public safety integration at Skydio, a drone company started by MIT grad students that donated four of its drones to the city in 2019. Then, in March, Reber started a new job at Aerodome, another company building drone platforms for public safety. Retired captain Vern Sallee went to work for Axon Air, the drone division of the company famous for its Taser weapons and police body cameras. Retired captain Don Redmond joined Brinc, maker of the police drone platform LiveOps.

“My hope is that you’re gonna see more of [these] companies that are here take a much closer look at the value of drones and what the future will hold,” Kennedy told the audience at CES. “It might not be the huge money-maker today, but in the near future it’s going to be.”

As Chula Vista officials have used the drone program to advance their careers, on the ground in the city no group has been impacted more immediately by the DFR program than the city’s hundreds of unhoused residents.

Early in the pandemic, the city used drones to deliver public safety announcements to homeless encampments, a tactic that critics likened to those used by police states. “This is a public health announcement,” reads a script of the announcement obtained by WIRED, intended to play through the drone’s loudspeaker. “The County Health Officer has issued an order requiring all parks to close, people to stay at least 6 feet away from each other, and your tents to be 12 feet apart.” The script requests “voluntary compliance” and informs people about available services such as Covid-19 education materials and sanitation kits.

As a communications tool, the drones didn’t seem to have the desired effect. Sebastian Martinez, a homeless advocate who has worked with volunteer street medical teams, says everyone he encountered in the early months of the pandemic knew nothing about Covid. “Working with the unhoused is really a person-to-person workspace,” he says. “You can’t develop that continuity or trust with an inanimate object.”

A small encampment on the west side near a fenced-off park and a county Health and Human Services Agency office is sometimes home to both Daniel Posada, the man stopped by a CVPD drone near a bus stop, and his friend Nancy Rodriguez. “It’s not like I want to be here,” Rodriguez says. She, like other residents of the encampment, says she would prefer the money spent on drones to go toward housing, hygiene, and parenting classes.

Nearly everyone at the encampment has a story about a police drone, but the technology is among the least of their concerns. Every week or so, residents there brace for raids by CVPD officers who they say clear the encampment. They happen so frequently that a Google Street View vehicle happened to capture an image of police throwing people’s possessions into a dumpster.

“There’s no such thing as privacy out here,” Rodriguez says. “The cops will show up and poke their heads into people’s tents as they please.”

If Chula Vista’s foray into police drones has shown anything, it’s that technology does not alter the physical landscape—it conforms to existing socioeconomic fault lines.

At the encampment last year, a man who was staying in a tent near Posada’s told WIRED that he had just been released from jail after being hunted by a police drone. Two years ago, he says, he walked into Home Depot and stole an ax that he needed to chop wood. Within minutes, the man noticed the unmistakable buzz of the drone overhead.

He bolted, running through the parking lot before diving into a bush to hide. The drone tracked his every move. It hovered above him, its camera fixed on his hiding spot. Soon enough, a police officer arrived and arrested him. “I was thinking, ‘Oh man, these things can go pretty much anywhere,’” he says. “There’s no way I’m getting away this time.”

Years later, it’s the cold efficiency of technology and the image of the robot tracking him as he fled that sticks out in his mind. Sweeping broken glass away from his tent, he says with a shrug: “It did its job.”