Drones will respond to emergency police situations in Elk Grove before officers do
The short version: Elk Grove's plan to send police drones to calls before officers arrive raises the same warrantless-surveillance red flags DeFlock tracks with ALPRs.
Our Take
CBS News Sacramento reports that Elk Grove is rolling out a "Drone as First Responder" program, putting cameras in the sky ahead of patrol cars. It sounds efficient, but it's the same playbook we've seen with Flock's ALPR network: quietly normalize a surveillance tool by framing it purely as a public-safety win, with little public debate about retention, access, or mission creep once the cameras are airborne.
Drones dispatched to "emergency situations" don't stay confined to emergencies. Once a department has real-time aerial footage of neighborhoods, it tends to get used for far more than the initial 911 call — parked outside homes, hovering over crowds, or feeding into the same data-sharing pipelines that already link ALPR hits across agencies. Elk Grove residents should be asking who reviews this footage, how long it's kept, and whether it's shared with ICE, other police departments, or private databases — because those are exactly the questions Flock customers rarely get straight answers to.
We credit CBS News Sacramento for putting this rollout on record early, before it becomes just another invisible layer of the surveillance stack. If you want to see how this kind of camera and drone infrastructure is spreading near you, check our map, and if you want to push back on unchecked deployment in your own city, our take-action page is a good place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBS News Sacramento, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.