Here is a sequence of numbers, per the Electronic Frontier Foundation: the San Francisco Police Department deployed drones roughly 350 times in all of 2024. From January to August 2025, it flew them more than 1,100 times. In just the first five months of 2026, more than 3,500 times. Drones, in SFPD’s hands, have the growth curve of a successful startup — roughly tenfold in two and a half years — which is an unusual trajectory for a surveillance tool whose governing policy has not really kept pace with its first month.
The EFF laid out its case in a comment to the San Francisco Police Commission, the civilian oversight body, ahead of an October 14 meeting at which the commission will consider the department’s new proposed drone policy. The group’s argument, in essence, is that the drones arrived first, the oversight arrived late or never, and the rulebook now on the table would ratify whatever the department has grown accustomed to doing.
The origin story matters. In March 2024, San Francisco voters passed Proposition E, a heavily funded, billionaire-backed ballot measure expanding police access to surveillance technology. Among its effects, Prop E removed drones from the review required by the city’s 2019 Surveillance Technology Ordinance. The SFPD then moved fast — too fast, the EFF says, because in its hurry to buy drones it knowingly violated AB 481, a California law requiring police to get approval from local elected officials before acquiring military equipment, a category that covers drones. The department eventually went back to the Board of Supervisors for retroactive approval, then announced a “drone-as-first-responder” program, in which a drone beats an officer to the scene.
Retroactive approval is a revealing detail. The normal sequence of civilian control is: ask, then buy. SFPD’s sequence was: buy, then mention it. Once you own the drones, the approval conversation is mostly about whether anyone wants to confiscate them, and nobody ever does.
Then came the mission creep. Drones were originally framed as tools for specific situations: vehicle pursuits, active criminal investigations. Within about a year, the department had expanded the list to include general patrol — flights unrelated to any particular incident. That expansion is what turned the fight over the new policy into a fight about definitions, because definitions are where surveillance programs live.
The department’s first draft, brought to the Police Commission earlier this month, proposed treating drone flights as an extension of ordinary patrol. Community groups pushed back; the Public Defender’s Office wrote a letter detailing the shortcomings, signed by more than a dozen local, state and national organizations including the EFF. The commission deferred and told SFPD to revise. SFPD revised. The Public Defender’s Office wrote a follow-up letter, this one signed by more than 40 organizations, saying the revision still falls short.
[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
That sentence is from the revised policy, quoted in the EFF’s comment, and the problem the EFF identifies is the phrase “public safety response,” which the policy never defines. Undefined terms in police rules are not gaps; they are permissions. Under the draft language, a drone could be sent to every call for service — including calls that turn out to be nothing at all — collecting data along the way, and that data is then stored for 30 days. Run that a few thousand times a year, which is exactly what SFPD’s flight numbers say is happening, and patrol-by-drone shades into something that looks a lot like persistent, non-targeted surveillance of the city, including of constitutionally protected activity. The EFF’s point, and it is a quietly funny one, is that SFPD itself concedes general surveillance is an inappropriate use of its drones — the department just wrote a policy whose vague terms permit it anyway.
There is a familiar rhythm to these fights. A new capability appears in a moment of political demand for tougher policing; the restrictive old rules are loosened by ballot measure; the hardware is bought before the paperwork is done; usage grows exponentially; and the policy that eventually shows up is drafted around what the department is already doing, with the key nouns left carefully blank. The oversight body’s leverage is that it can insist the nouns be filled in. October 14 is when San Francisco finds out whether it will.