Last year, defense attorney Will Helvestine hit “play” on San Francisco police drone footage tracking one of his clients through downtown streets.
The feed showed his defendant, who was charged with possessing narcotics for sale, locking hands with a man on Powell Street on March 6, 2025, before walking off with another man.
What Helvestine said he did not see, as officers had claimed, was a hand-to-hand drug transaction.
Instead, he said he saw a handshake.
The next few days, said Helvestine, were spent flagging down the district attorney prosecutor in court.
“I told him, ‘Take a look at the drone footage. I don’t think it shows what you think it shows,’” Helvestine recalled.
DA officials did not say whether they agreed with Helvestine’s argument that the footage showed only a handshake. But the DA’s office subsequently motioned to dismiss the case ahead of its preliminary hearing, records show. That motion was granted on May 8 last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Michelle Tong.
On this much, both sides of the bench agreed: The video did not support the charge.
“After further review of the video footage, we determined that we could not proceed with the prosecution,” the DA’s office wrote in its statement, even though a police incident report had quoted officers saying they had identified drugs on the defendant, and witnessed multiple hand-to-hand drug transactions.
The DA’s office did not respond to questions about why it dismissed the case despite the police report.
Helvestine’s client was released after four days in jail. Court records indicate the defendant had no prior charges at the time, but has since picked up other drug charges and was booked into jail again this month.
The public defender’s office has highlighted the case amid broader concerns about San Francisco’s growing reliance on high tech surveillance evidence.
“I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that drones could be a useful tool in some cases, but there is a disconnect between the drone and the people on the ground that doesn’t exist in the same way between officers on the ground and civilians,” Helvestine said.
Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox, the head of the office’s Integrity Unit, argued police officers regularly mischaracterize normal interactions as drug transactions, and that drones amplify those risks.
“SFPD interprets otherwise innocent behavior as criminal because to a hammer, everything is a nail,” said Cox. “Drones and other surveillance technologies simply give police more power — and greater reach — to do that.”
San Francisco prosecutors pushed back, arguing that drones have served as an effective force multiplier to investigate crime and yield prosecutorial evidence.
The DA’s office did not respond to requests for numbers behind the prosecutorial evidence statement, but the police department last year touted making more than 500 arrests with the help of its Real Time Investigations Center, which deploys the drones.
“The Public Defender’s comments are overbroad and seek to undermine the value of the SFPD’s drone-as-first-responder program that has been a game changer for law enforcement over one dismissal ignoring the numerous times that drone footage has been essential to prosecutors,” the DA’s office wrote in its statement.
“In this case, the defense requested a more careful review of the video footage, showing just how important that video footage can be.”
Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for SFPD, declined to comment on the case, but said drones are only used for active criminal investigations, not to look for crime.
“Cracking down on drug sales and drug use in our neighborhoods has been hugely popular with people who live, work and visit those neighborhoods, and the feelings about the work we’re doing — the support for police — have gone up significantly,” said Sernoffsky, referring to polls such as one conducted by the billionaire-backed advocacy group GrowSF, which found 72 percent of voters supported police using drones and live cameras to aid in active investigations.
The police hub that deploys San Francisco’s police drones is also backed by billionaires.
The Real Time Investigations Center, which helps the police department find suspects on the streets and aids arrests using drones and Flock Safety automatic license plate reading cameras, has bulked up through benefactors including Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel, and Michael Moritz’s family foundation Crankstart.
Much of the surveillance hub’s upgrades came the year after voters approved Proposition E, a ballot measure championed by then-Mayor London Breed, which expanded police authority to use drones and facial recognition cameras without approval from the police commission or Board of Supervisors.
Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the March 2025 drug case is concerning amid more recent reports about officers in San Francisco and across the country misusing high-tech crime tools, such as Flock license-plate readers.
“The eyes in the sky are not all-knowing,” said Hussain.
Our ruling classes and their minions must be thrilled at the prospect in the not-too-distant future when their (i.e. Peter Thiel’s) drones can collect “evidence,” arraign, prosecute, convict, and execute punishment instantaeously at the site of the purported offense (but not for white collar crime, though, never for that).
SFPD apparently has forgotten how to do the basic police work of making these kinds of busts legally, and presenting a solid, prosecutable case to the DA.
One SFPD told me this past week that there was an incident in SOMA where someone was passed out in a dealer’s car, they saw the deal go down before they nodded out, but SFPD did not do the probable cause correctly, and the case was dismissed on constitutional grounds.
SFPD gets paid the big bucks and chunky retirement packages. The laws are well understood, there is no mystery here. There is no excuse for dropping the ball like this on checking fentanyl supply.
Even with the drones this DA’s office is still too stupid to win a case.
Chris Larsen’s dancing makes Elaine look like Josephine Baker.
Steve Huffman is unfit to clean pigeon guano off a statue of Aaron Swartz with his stinking, scabby, money-grubbing tongue.
Happy Friday to all lovers of liberty here in San Francisco!
Did the cops even look at the tape? Or was it the drone AI that decided it was a drug deal? Apparently that’s what happened with Flock in CO. https://reason.com/2026/08/13/flock-cameras-and-license-plate-readers-are-everywhere-can-we-trust-cops-with-them/. Was the man arrested of color?
The question as always, is not about the technology, it’s about the cops, not the cops on the line, but their bureaucratic overlords who have over the past decade regularly encouraged officers make arrests to serve quotas and overtime, while excusing and covering up abuses. For those who are new to SF, check out what the previous DA, a local Grand Jury, the Federal DOJ and the SFPD itself said about its oversight and investigation problems.
Those SFPD Police Drones thats flying around have 4K UHD video footage and photos.
The video footage and photos that’s released to the public on YouTube is a downgraded quality. Anybody that has a Drone Pilot License and fly their own hobbyist drones will understand.
“polls such as one conducted by the billionaire-backed advocacy group GrowSF, which found 72 percent of voters supported police using drones and live cameras to aid in active investigations”
I received this poll. It was worded in an extremely misleading way: a push poll designed to create this talking point, not an honest attempt to measure what people think. Compare their 72% to when we voted on expanding police surveillance in March 2024. Prop E won, but only by 8 points, 54%-46%, and that was before GrowSF’s specific draconian proposals were on the table, and at a time when the “Mass Deportations Now” party wasn’t in power, hunting down our neighbors. Clearly, the real support when people have had a chance to hear the pros and cons is nowhere near 72%.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
Politicians who would buy the GrowSF polls and keep doubling down on mass surveillance might want to think twice. The voter support is a mile wide and an inch deep.
“Helvestine’s client was released after four days in jail. Court records indicate the defendant had no prior charges at the time, but has since picked up other drug charges and was booked into jail again this month.”
Surely the takeaway from this story is that a regular drug offender got away with it once due to a technicality. But otherwise is guilty as sin.
The drone did its job but they need to be backed up by officers on the ground who, in this case, would have detained the two perps and procured the actual drugs as evidence of their crimes.
Correct me if I am wrong. This story is proof that more cameras are better. What one camera sees asproof one way; another camera sees the opposite. I can’t count the amount of times while watching a sporting event where cameras are used to verify what a referee has called. One camera said the ref got it right. Another camera says, no, the ref did not get it right. I say yes to more cameras and a higher level of penalty for law enforcement who have been known to abuse this great tool.
MOAR cameras! Cameras to infinity, cameras to the moon! Nice grift if you got it.
Hey, Allen, SFPD asks if you’ll mind
a few severalcameras all over your house? They promise the cameras in the john will turn off when you approach the throne.