LAPD’s Drone Surveillance of No Kings Protest Reveals Militarized Policing Trends in U.S. Urban Centers

Indigenous epistemologies frame surveillance as a colonial violence that disrupts communal autonomy and sacred reciprocity, where observation without consent is tantamount to theft. The No Kings movement’s decentralized, leaderless structure may resonate with Indigenous governance models, which are often targeted by state surveillance for their refusal to conform to extractive hierarchies. The erasure of these perspectives in mainstream coverage reflects a broader failure to recognize non-Western frameworks of resistance and security.

The deployment of drones against protesters echoes COINTELPRO’s infiltration of civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as the FBI’s post-9/11 fusion centers that blurred policing and intelligence. The militarization of urban police forces via programs like 1033 (transferring military equipment to local departments) has normalized drones as 'standard equipment,' despite their origins in battlefield surveillance. Historical parallels include the use of balloons and later helicopters to monitor civil rights marches, illustrating a long-standing pattern of protest suppression through aerial observation.

In India, drone surveillance has been used to monitor farmers’ protests, with companies like IdeaForge supplying hardware, mirroring Skydio’s role in Los Angeles. Palestinian activists have long documented how Israeli drones are repurposed for crowd control in Gaza, with U.S. tech often enabling these systems. South Africa’s apartheid regime pioneered aerial surveillance of Black townships, a legacy that persists in post-apartheid policing, showing how surveillance technologies travel across colonial and neocolonial contexts.

Research from the ACLU and EFF demonstrates that drone surveillance chills First Amendment activity by creating a 'chilling effect' on protest participation, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Studies on facial recognition (e.g., Joy Buolamwini’s work) show racial and gender biases in surveillance algorithms, which are likely replicated in drone-based tracking. The lack of transparency in LAPD’s drone programs violates principles of algorithmic accountability, as outlined in the EU’s AI Act and proposed U.S. regulations.

Artists like Trevor Paglen have exposed the aesthetics of surveillance, framing drones as 'seeing machines' that objectify human subjects, stripping them of agency. In many spiritual traditions, the act of watching without being seen is a violation of divine balance, as seen in Buddhist concepts of 'right mindfulness' or Indigenous notions of 'seeing with two eyes.' The No Kings movement’s use of art and performance as protest tools may be uniquely vulnerable to drone surveillance, which seeks to commodify dissent into data points.

If unchecked, drone surveillance could normalize fully automated protest suppression, where AI-driven 'threat detection' preemptively flags individuals for arrest, as seen in China’s social credit system. The integration of drones with predictive policing (e.g., Palantir’s tools) could create feedback loops where surveillance data justifies further surveillance, entrenching authoritarian governance in nominally democratic cities. Future scenarios include the weaponization of drones against labor strikes or housing justice movements, with tech firms profiting from both sides of the conflict.

Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles have long faced disproportionate drone surveillance, with ICE and LAPD collaborating to target immigrant neighborhoods under 'public safety' pretexts. The No Kings movement’s intersectional framing (anti-racism, anti-capitalism) is precisely the kind of organizing that triggers state surveillance, as seen in the FBI’s labeling of Black Lives Matter as a 'terrorist threat.' Trans and queer activists, who often lead protests, are also uniquely vulnerable to surveillance that seeks to 'out' them or document their participation for future harassment.