City bets on drones for faster police response

Drones will soon be flying to 911 calls in Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park before deputies even arrive on scene.

By November, a 911 call anywhere in the city — including Newbury Park's neighborhoods along the 101 corridor — could bring a remotely piloted aircraft overhead within moments, giving law enforcement a live aerial view of emergencies as they unfold.

The program moved forward on two fronts in recent weeks. The Thousand Oaks City Council voted 5-0 on Aug. 25 to spend $700,000 expanding the police drone program, and the Ventura County Board of Supervisors followed with its own 5-0 vote Sept. 2 to move ahead with a contract with the drone provider. The Board of Supervisors oversees the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, which provides police services to Thousand Oaks under contract.

The Thousand Oaks Acorn (Newbury Park) first reported the details of the votes and the program.

How the drone program will work

The upgraded program includes six pre-positioned Skydio X10 drones that will launch immediately and be piloted remotely when a 911 call comes in, according to the Acorn's reporting.

The drones will be stationed in pairs on commercial rooftops along the 101 Freeway: two on the west end of the city, two in the center and two on the east end. That positioning matters for Newbury Park residents on the city's western side, where rooftop-based drones could dramatically shorten the time it takes to get eyes on an emergency near Borchard Road, the Rancho Conejo area or the neighborhoods ringing Potrero Road.

A single pilot — a sheriff's deputy stationed at the 911 dispatch center — will launch the drones located nearest the call. The aircraft will initially fly autonomously using collision-avoidance technology, after which the pilot will steer them over the scene, feeding live video and updates to responding officers along the way. The pilot can also cancel, downgrade or upgrade a call if the scene turns out to be less or more serious than initially reported.

Authorities said data collected by the drones, including videos and pictures, will be treated like body-worn camera footage. Evidentiary footage will be kept for two years, while non-evidentiary footage will be retained for at least 60 days.

Privacy concerns and the Flock backdrop

The council's unanimous vote came despite pushback from residents worried about surveillance and civil liberties.

"Given the concerns from many in our community when it comes to over-surveillance, I would ask that the council pause the distribution of these funds until everyone in our community can be presented with specific policies concerning these DFR drones," Thousand Oaks resident Clint Fultz said during the public comment period, according to the Acorn. "I feel that further engagement and education should be conducted … much like was done for the downtown project."

Those concerns carry extra weight given the Sheriff's Office's recent history with surveillance technology. An internal audit found the department's Flock Safety license plate reader system had shared county data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies more than 364,000 times without the department's approval or knowledge, the Acorn reported. The Sheriff's Office said it disabled Flock's "National Lookup" feature in June 2023, but deputies later learned that several California law enforcement agencies reported the feature had somehow been reactivated without explanation.

What police officials are saying

Thousand Oaks Police Chief Jeremy Paris sought to draw a bright line between the drone program and the license plate controversy.

"This is a call response tool," Paris said. "It doesn't involve license plate readers, facial recognition, and there's no data sharing involved."

Paris and Thousand Oaks Police Capt. Greg Gibson took questions from the council and addressed residents' concerns. They confirmed the drones will not randomly patrol and are not equipped with facial recognition or biometric identification features.

"This expansion of our unmanned aircraft systems program is not a surveillance program," Paris reiterated. "This is a tool to use in response to calls for service to reduce our response times and help keep our community safe."

Paris also argued that criminals are becoming more sophisticated and that the department would be derelict in its duties if it did not use available technology to combat crime.

What's next for residents

The program isn't limited to Thousand Oaks. The Sheriff's Office will provide drone services to both Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, with Camarillo — which approved its own budget allocation for the program in July — paying up to 40% of the cost.

With both the City Council and the Board of Supervisors on board, hardware installation is expected to begin by early November, and the program is expected to launch later that month, according to the Acorn.

For Newbury Park residents, the practical changes will be felt in day-to-day emergencies: a reported traffic collision, a suspicious-person call or a missing person search could all get aerial support before a patrol car pulls up. Whether the program eases concerns about over-surveillance or sharpens them may depend on how transparently the Sheriff's Office handles the footage — and whether it can avoid the data-sharing missteps that dogged its license plate readers.

Residents with ongoing concerns about drone policies can raise them at future City Council meetings, where the department is expected to provide updates as the program rolls out.