California Post89%
Exclusive | LAPD chief reveals plan to double drone fleet to tackle homicides, kidnappings and burglaries amid cop shortage 84%
By Ben Chapman57%
7/24/2026, 12:54:22 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Framing Effect, with Halo Effect as the most egregious example at 31% saturation with 149 hits. Analysis detected 1,110 faulty-reasoning hits from 480 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 75.8% and a BS Rank of 84% (3,459 of 21,194 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 83.70% of the article peer group.
Facing an ongoing officer shortage, the Los Angeles Police Department plans to more efficiently deploy its officers and shorten response times by doubling the size of a cutting-edge drone fleet that the department is making permanent this week.
The nations’s third largest police force increasingly deployed the unmanned aircraft since launching a “drone as a first responder” pilot program last July.
Now, department leadership is doubling the size of the effort and making it official.
In an exclusive interview with The California Post, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said the department is better able to fight crime thanks to the new, smaller craft joining the LAPD’s familiar black-and-white helicopters.
“To be able to decrease our response time to emergency calls for service, and to be able to use it as a force multiplier for a very lean department, that is very important,” McDonnell said.
“The operation of the drones has been very, very impressive.”
Drones have already been used by the department with strong results, McDonnell said, boosting safety at high-profile events such as the World Cup, and helping cops more quickly defuse dangerous situations and rapidly solve crimes.
The fleet is growing from 13 to 26 electric drones, with the aircraft used to assist first responders and some used on occasion to enforce flight-restriction zones.
McDonnell said the program so far has been very effective in helping the department better deploy resources, prepare officers for crime scenes, and track down suspects.
“We have the ability to identify suspect vehicles, license plates, description of suspects, how many suspects, if they leave, what direction to travel,” he said.
“It’s able to capture evidence of the crime and then send that back via video to the control center.”
The drones are meant to reinforce rather than replace the LAPD’s fleet of 17 helicopters, which is among the largest of any force in the world.
The department relies on its choppers for patrols and emergencies, keeping at least two in the sky for around 20 hours each day.
The LAPD drones are used to respond to crimes rather than conduct surveillance, police officials said.
The LAPD website has a drone-as-first responder dashboard showing drone flight paths, and the department’s drone policy is posted online.
The policy for recording video produced by drones is similar to that of the department's policy for body-worn cameras, with footage recorded only just before drones arrive at crime scenes and while the scenes are active.
McDonnell said drones are never used to identify people involved in protests.
“We would only use them in protest circumstances to look for crowd size, or to focus on people who are committing acts of violence there, and then to be able to focus on them once a crime has been committed,” he said.
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