EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) began regularly deploying drones two years ago and has since expanded their use in a way that has outpaced its documented policy and evaded existing local and state oversight of these devices. 

The department has a new proposed policy, which continues to be grossly inadequate in protecting privacy and civil liberties. At best, the draft policy continues the SFPD’s pattern of putting vague guardrails on a powerful surveillance tool, but at worst, if implemented, the policy could effectively usher in sweeping, non-targeted, and unspecified general surveillance over the city with few guardrails. 

EFF has repeatedly opposed the unaccountable development of the SFPD’s drone program and recently sent a comment to the Police Commission, the local civilian oversight body, about the SFPD’s new proposed policy. 

The SFPD has been sidestepping oversight of its drones since 2024. In March 2024, San Francisco voters approved a heavily-funded, billionaire-backed measure, Proposition E, which sought to expand police access to surveillance technology. Among its impacts, Prop E removed drones from oversight required by the 2019 Surveillance Technology Ordinance. Nonetheless, in its haste to purchase drones after Prop E passed, the SFPD knowingly violated California’s AB 481, a state statute requiring law enforcement agencies to get approval from their local elected governing body before purchasing military equipment, including drones. Eventually the SFPD sought retroactive approval from the Board of Supervisors and, soon after, announced that it would be launching a drone-as-first-responder (DFR) program.

Now, San Francisco finally has an opportunity to update the SFPD’s guidance in a way that won’t quickly become stale, as has happened while the SFPD steadily increases the purposes for drone use. Though drones were initially identified as tools to use for specific actions such as vehicle pursuits and active criminal investigations, within a year, the SFPD expanded use cases to include patrol, i.e. unrelated to a specific incident. Along with this mission creep, the SFPD has also steadily and exponentially increased the number of drone flights, from roughly 350 deployments in 2024, to over 1,100 from January to August 2025, to over 3,500 in just the first five months of 2026.

The original draft of an updated policy brought by the SFPD to the local Police Commission, a civilian oversight body, earlier this month provided limited details and proposed allowing police to treat drone flights as an extension of their patrol abilities, paving the way for general surveillance, including of First Amendment-protected activity. The proposal received significant community pushback, and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office authored a letter describing the policy’s shortcomings. That letter was signed by over a dozen local, state, and national groups, including EFF. 

Based on these concerns, the Police Commission deferred taking action until the SFPD addressed them. The SFPD then revised its proposed policy, but this, too, falls short of providing practical guidance to officers and protecting civil liberties, as the Public Defender’s Office identified in a follow-up letter signed by over 40 organizations, including EFF.

EFF’s additional comment to the Police Commission, in part, calls out the incredible gap in oversight of these ballooning drone flights and the immense data collection they facilitate:

The revised policy states that “[unmanned aerial vehicles] may be used as an asset in any situation in which a member may be deployed for a public safety response or when a member onviews criminal activity” but fails to define what is meant by a “public safety response.” The revised policy also provides a definition of “Drone as First Responders,” but it fails to provide any more detail about appropriate DFR deployment. Without appropriate safeguards around deployment and use, drones could be deployed to every call for service, even in situations that are ultimately deemed nonincidents, collecting data along the way that is then stored for 30 days. This type of general patrol could effectively become general surveillance, which SFPD acknowledges is an inappropriate use of their drones and yet is still possible under the vague terms of the current DGO. 

The Police Commission is set to consider the matter on October 14. You can read EFF’s full comment here.