• Police departments nationwide are increasingly using drones for various tasks, including patrolling, enforcing ordinances and responding to 911 calls.

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The camera-equipped devices can hover overhead, shine a spotlight at individuals and play a prerecorded message telling them to leave the area. Most comply and leave. “People kind of laugh. They take pictures of it,” said Sgt. Jonathan Konetz, who leads the drone unit for the police department in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.

The drones have helped free up resources for the department, which previously had to deploy two officers to patrol the closed beach at night at the expense of other priorities.

While police departments have been using drones in limited circumstances for years, Sunny Isles Beach is among a number of municipalities expanding their use. It hasn’t been uncommon for police to launch drones to assist in search-and-rescue operations, but some departments now rely on drones instead of patrol officers to enforce ordinances and issue tickets.

Drones are often the first responders to a crime scene in local jurisdictions around the country, trailing a suspect from the sky until officers arrive. In Sunny Isles Beach, drones have searched for missing people and for stolen vehicles, and followed suspects who steal from retailers. In a town outside Pittsburgh, police deploy drones to record motorists who roll through stop signs.

The use of drones has led to more fines, giving a revenue boost to city coffers. A Northern California city sent out police drones whirring 400 feet in the air this Fourth of July to hunt for people setting off illegal fireworks, and issued more than $300,000 in fines.

Police officers say drones are rapidly becoming a routine part of law enforcement. “You are starting to see drones as synonymous as a Taser or a patrol car,” said Brandon Karr, public information officer for the Law Enforcement Drone Association. When the association began five years ago, there were few police departments with drone units, Karr said. Now there are at least 6,000 programs nationwide. 

Civil liberty groups say the growing reliance on drones leads to privacy concerns and encroaches on people’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable government searches. Patrolling drones verge on harassment if they track individuals for lengthy periods without warrant, the groups say.

The American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns about the expanded use of drones by some police departments, including to monitor peaceful protests. The organization opposes the deployment of drones for patrol purposes and remains skeptical of their use in a more targeted way responding to 911 calls. 

 Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in some instances drones are helpful, such as searching for missing people. “But there needs to be limits, lest drone surveillance becomes pervasive and changes what it’s like to be out in public in America,” he said.

Police departments say they respect residents’ right to privacy and aim for transparency about drone usage. In Elk Grove, Calif., near Sacramento—where police deployed drones on July Fourth—the department makes drone flight records available to the public on its website. Its drones keep their cameras focused on the horizon, rather than the ground, until they are within a quarter-mile of the location they are responding to, he said.

“We’re not flying drones in a surveillance capacity. We’re not flying just to fly them,” said Lt. Nate Lange, head of the Elk Grove Police Department’s drone program.

Elk Grove officers operate drones remotely from a workstation with a computer monitor, keyboard and mouse. A pilot can click on the location of an incoming 911 call and a drone flies to the scene. The police department first used one of the drones to crack down on illegal fireworks in 2024 in response to repeated complaints from residents.

This past Fourth of July, three Elk Grove drones darted across the city to record video of illegal fireworks. A code-enforcement officer sat next to a drone pilot writing out the tickets and verifying who owned or leased a property. The city has issued hundreds of tickets over the past two years but has lost only two appeals, he said. “We only looked at violators that were slam-dunk cases,” Lange said.

Other California municipalities using drones to combat illegal fireworks have faced pushback. In Citrus Heights, near Sacramento, the police department issued $25,000 in fines to a landlord earlier this year, alleging that tenants set off illegal fireworks in a street near the property on July Fourth. 

The landlord’s lawyer, Ashley DeGuzman, said she got the fines dismissed, arguing at an administrative hearing that the law required an individual to have knowledge of the illegal fireworks. Her client lived hours away from the property and was unaware of the tenants’ activities, she said. The Citrus Heights Police Department chief declined to comment specifically on the case but said that while the citation process isn’t infallible, all individuals who get a summons receive due process.

 If the case wasn’t dismissed, the landlord was prepared to take further action to challenge the legality of the drones looking into people’s properties from the sky, DeGuzman said. 

“You’re looking into people’s backyards, you’re looking into their homes,” she said. “It opens up a whole new can of worms.”