A major drone surveillance program could be coming to Waikīkī as soon as March as part of a statewide push to use modern technologies to fill gaps in policing.
Sheriffs plan to fly drones over the tourist district to watch for crimes being committed in public spaces during peak busy hours, festivals and large events. The machines also will be able to respond to crime scenes and emergencies in about 30 seconds, transmitting back crucial information, according to Mike Lambert, director of the state Department of Law Enforcement.
Honolulu police and the Department of Law Enforcement already use drones for special operations, most recently for fireworks enforcement, but this would be the first time they would be used as first responders.
The program comes as agencies around the state incorporate more modern technology into their operations. Late last year, the Honolulu Police Department began testing an artificial intelligence software program to help write police reports. The Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation in January announced a campaign to equip drivers with dashcams to monitor the roads for infrastructure issues and reckless drivers.
HPD also has been expanding its use of drones, although so far it has declined to provide more detailed information about how and when it uses the devices.
Police department spokespersons did not make anyone available for an interview for this story and said police could not discuss tactics and strategies in order to preserve “operational security.” The department also declined to discuss how a drone helped capture a shooting suspect in Kalihi in January, citing the ongoing case.
Brandon Nakasato, assistant chief of the department’s investigative bureau, offered some clues in an emailed statement, saying that drones are “useful in many circumstances,” including “search and rescue, situational awareness, mapping, and other instances where they are not used for violations of privacy.”
But as the use of drones by police has proliferated across the country, so have concerns from community members and watchdog groups about violations of privacy and the potential for integration of more controversial technology like facial recognition.
“If you’re going to have these kind of technology-enabled surveillance programs, at the very least they need to be authorized and transparent,” said Jesse Woo, technologist and AI policy counsel at the NYU Policing Project, a police accountability group based at the New York University School of Law. “I think it should really be up to the communities that are being policed and that are being impacted.”
Drones As First Responders In Waikīkī
Lambert said drones acting as first responders in Waikīkī could help relieve stress on officers operating in chronically understaffed departments. The Honolulu Police Department vacancy rate is around 20%; the Department of Law Enforcement’s is even larger, around 25%.
“We have a shortage of officers,” Lambert said. “We’re trying to stem the gap through these technologies.”
The Waikīkī Neighborhood Board voted to approve the drone program at its October meeting, and one of the board members, Rolf Nordahl, said he is working with the Department of Law Enforcement on an agreement to house a drone launch pad on top of the Waikīkī Grand Hotel, a condo hotel where he is association president.
He said he supports the program but asked that the drones not take off over the hotel’s sun deck area, which faces Diamondhead, because he doesn’t want them to startle guests.
“I think there’s a lot of unnecessary speeding and other activities that go on on Kapahulu Avenue that I hope that this could be an assistance in solving,” he said.
Crime rates have dropped in Waikīkī in recent years. In 2024, there 71 aggravated assaults, 70 robberies and 1,781 thefts reported, according to the Honolulu Police Department’s annual report. By comparison, in 2019, there 123 aggravated assaults, 95 robberies and 2,756 thefts, according to that year’s report.
But Lambert said state officials want Waikīkī to be a pilot site for the drone program to see if the additional safety measure boosts tourism. Lambert has also proposed using drones as first responders on Hawaiian homelands.
The presence of the drones could deter people from committing crimes or scare them away in the middle of the act, he said. They will be equipped with two-way speakers so drone pilots can announce that officers are en route.
From the scene of an emergency, Lambert said the drone’s video feed also can prepare arriving officers so they are prepared to de-escalate the situation, showing them how many people are on scene, if there are any weapons visible and who any potential aggressors are.
“The old way was, ‘I’m going to a case and I literally have no clue what I’m going to see when I get there,’” he said.
The presence of the drones could also deter people from committing crimes in the first place or scare them away if they’re in the middle of the act, he said. The drones will be equipped with two-way speakers so drone pilots can announce that officers are en route.
The department leases 12 drones from the California-based security company Skydio for about $30,000 per year, Lambert said. He plans to install four launch pads in Waikīkī.
Adding the drones, as well as other technology like more automated license plate readers and ShotSpotters, a gunshot detection device, to Waikīkī will cost around $500,000 annually, Lambert said — about the cost of four full-time police officers.
“The goal is to interlay technology to offset the 20% vacancies experienced by HPD,” he said.
Privacy Concerns
Jacob Wiencek, a citizen member of the public safety committee for the Waikīkī Neighborhood Board, said the idea of police drones buzzing around an area so densely packed with high-rises raises concerns about privacy and civil liberties.
“Americans have an expectation of privacy as part of our constitutional rights,” he said. “I might not be doing anything wrong, but that doesn’t mean I want the government to, quote unquote, accidentally or purposely be looking into my condo unit.”
Chris Magnus, a member of the Honolulu Police Commission, said it’s important to educate the public on exactly how and when drones will be used before they’re deployed.
“There is no right to privacy in public space, that’s true,” he said. “But I still think it’s always something that people in a community like to know a little bit about before it happens.”
Hawaiʻi legislators first raised concerns about drones and privacy a decade ago, before the devices were widely used by law enforcement.
In 2016, lawmakers in the Senate introduced a bill that would have prohibited law enforcement agencies from using drones to gather evidence without first obtaining a warrant. The bill would have restricted police use of drones to limited situations such as search and rescue operations, hostage situations or training exercises.
The Honolulu Police Department at the time submitted testimony partially supporting the bill and said it intended to use drones in an “ emergency or critical situation where a person’s life is in direct jeopardy.” It opposed the section of the bill that prohibited the use of drones to gather evidence without a search warrant.
“There are possible situations that may necessitate obtaining a search warrant in order to utilize (drones) for investigative purposes,” the department’s testimony reads. “However, this is not always a feasible option and could result in the loss of evidence essential to an investigation.”
The bill never made it out of committee for a full vote.
Last year, drones entered the conversation again through a bill passed by lawmakers to ramp up fireworks enforcement.
The bill — which became law in June — allows video recordings made by police drones to be used to establish probable cause for an arrest as long as the drone is recording over public space and the act leading to the person’s arrest was committed on public property.
Honolulu police and Department of Law Enforcement personnel used drones on the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve to try to crack down on fireworks violators, though some officials, including Mayor Rick Blangiardi, expressed disappointment that police only issued 29 fireworks citations on New Year’s Eve.
Brian Lynch, assistant chief of HPD’s Regional Patrol Bureau, told the Honolulu Police Commission in January that the drones weren’t as helpful as expected.
But Lambert said the drones helped pinpoint where fireworks were coming from, and footage they captured is being used to open civil nuisance abatement investigations into eight homes. Because in those cases the drones captured the properties where fireworks were lit, not the individual who lit them, nuisance abatement against the property owner is the best course of action, he said.
The Department of Law Enforcement is in the process of sending letters to those homes.
Chula Vista
Chula Vista, California was the first city in the country to implement a program to use drones as first responders in 2018.
The drones were used for more than 20,000 missions in the first six years of the program and helped officers respond more effectively to calls for service, police Chief Roxana Kennedy told Fox 5 San Diego in 2024.
She used a video from a 2019 call as an example, which initially came in as a report of a man with a gun at a local taco shop.
When the drone arrived on scene before officers, it found the man sitting at a picnic table with a black item resembling a gun in his right hand. In the video footage, he brings the item to his mouth and uses it to light a cigarette. At that point, the drone pilot realized it was a lighter and told the responding officers.
“When they change it up and it appears to be a cigarette lighter, it changes your response,” Kennedy told the news station. “That’s sometimes when tragedies come into play because you don’t have a crystal ball and you don’t know what you’re going into.”
The Chula Vista program also raised privacy concerns among community members.
In 2021, a local newspaper, La Prensa, sued the police department for its drone footage after the department denied the paper’s public records request.
The case went through multiple appeals courts before the California Supreme Court ruled in August that the department, and all police departments in California, must release drone footage not tied to open investigations.
The department now publishes information about all of its drone flights on a public dashboard.
In a 2023 paper on the program, the ACLU expressed concerns about any police department using drones to conduct regular surveillance of specific neighborhoods. More than 1,400 police departments were using drones that year, and the ACLU warned the programs were “proliferating with little oversight or accountability.”
The ACLU opined that drones should only be used to respond to serious emergencies and that police departments should be completely transparent about when and how they’re being used.
“It’s not hard to see how, once normalized by deployments such as (drones as first responder) programs, police drones could become an increasingly common sight over American communities for a wide range of police purposes,” the paper says. “That last step — that drones will usher in an era of pervasive, suspicionless, mass aerial surveillance — has always been one of our biggest fears.”
Watchdog groups also warn about the potential for drones to be employed in more extreme ways.
In 2022, the body camera company Axon proposed a plan to equip drones with tasers as a way to stop mass shootings. Nine members of an ethics board formed to advise the company on its AI policy resigned in protest. The company never built the drones.
Accountability groups also have expressed concerns about drones being equipped with facial recognition technology and the potential to use them to monitor demonstrations and identify protesters. The ACLU sued multiple federal agenciesfor information on their aerial surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The lawsuit was settled and dismissed in 2024.
Lambert said his department’s Skydio drones are equipped with facial recognition technology, but he has not accessed that feature yet because of its controversial nature.
Woo, of the NYU Policing Project, said drones can be positive policing tools as long as community concerns are addressed and departments are transparent.
“We are aware of the risks and we think there ought to be safeguards,” he said. “But there are good use cases for these technologies. It’s all about finding the right balance.” ___
Story originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
