In the summer of 2020, when so many of us joined Black-led protests and peacefully took to the streets to march, mourn, demand an end to police brutality and call for justice for George Floyd and the many other Black lives taken by police, California police spied from above with high-definition video surveillance.

Through a year-long public records investigation, we uncovered records including flight logs and actual aerial surveillance footage that show California Highway Patrol (CHP) spying on protesters for racial justice in cities up and down the state including Berkeley, Oakland, Palo Alto, Placerville, Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and Rancho Cordova. CHP recorded hours of video footage of peaceful protests and people calling for justice.

In Sacramento, CHP closely zooms in on a protester as they sit alone on a fountain next to a Black Lives Matter poster. An hour later, when people peacefully assemble in front of the fountain to hear an organizer speak, CHP continues to hover and record, zooming in closely on people’s faces and signs.

In Placerville, CHP captures detailed footage of several dozen protesters peacefully assembled in front of the El Dorado County courthouse. The video captures an organizer thanking and hugging participants as they hold up signs. CHP also recorded a Riverside County courthouse protest described as a “vigil... so quiet that the loudest sound was helicopters overhead.” In the CHP recordings, police cameras zoom in on faces and linger over people speaking at vigils, handing out water, making signs, participating in die-ins, and even dancing.

This video footage is just one piece of the CHP aerial surveillance picture. We also obtained nearly two hundred pages of agency flight logs detailing the times, places, and descriptions of CHP flights, which referenced deployments to protests in late May and early June throughout the state.

From Southern California to the Central Valley and Northern California, the logs show how CHP deployed its surveillance aircraft over protesters, with officers logging entries such as “No Justice, No Peace Protest,” “Aerial Surveillance for George Floyd Protest,” and “Patrol flight over peaceful protest.” These surveillance deployments appear to be part of the tens of millions of dollars that CHP reportedly spent policing the protests from late May to early June 2020.

The footage produced by CHP also raises serious questions about how CHP decides what kinds of protests to surveil and record. We asked CHP whether it had any surveillance footage of other protests last year, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated shelter-in-place orders. But in hour after hour of footage provided by CHP, what we saw were protests against police violence, not protests of pandemic policy. The mere possibility that CHP may have fixated its surveillance and recording on the racial justice protests is extremely troubling.

The California Constitution guarantees the right to free expression and assembly and provides an inalienable right to privacy to protect people against modern threats of surveillance – and for good reason. Tech-powered government surveillance and the recording of people exercising their rights of free expression and association can be used to intimidate, instill fear, and undermine the exercise of these rights. When we reached out to organizers and community members who attended the surveilled protests last summer, we heard this first-hand.

Recalling their experience being watched and recorded by CHP helicopters during a protest in Cesar Chavez Park last May, Sacramento resident Salisa Campos described the police presence as “psychological warfare…the protests were very peaceful and it was mostly young people, kids in attendance…but many people got scared off by the police aggression and helicopters, and it felt like the goal of the low-flying choppers was to terrorize people.” Another protest attendee feared that CHP might use the footage as “social blackmail,” where local politicians and residents might face retaliation for showing up in solidarity with Black protesters.

These are reasonable concerns, informed by a long and troubling history of government agencies surveilling movements for freedom and justice. CHP captured hours of extremely detailed video footage of racial justice protesters – and we do not know who in the government has access to it, how it has been used, or how it may be used in the future. What we do know is that recent years, the FBI has targeted Black activists as “black identity extremists,” continuing its long legacy of attempting to disrupt and discredit Black-led movements. Decades earlier, California police agencies blatantly attacked the Black Panthers and infiltrated student organizations at UCLA. CHP itself has a history of anti-movement activities and discriminatory policing. It was reported that CHP recently used aerial surveillance to target non-existent anti-fascist protesters based on fraudulent social media posts circulated by right wing accounts.

The events of 2020 demonstrated that we are fighting for justice and equality on new terrain. Government agencies and the tech industry are too often working hand-in-hand, wielding the latest technologies to prop up oppressive systems and undermine movements for justice. CHP’s use of aircraft and high-resolution cameras to spy on racial justice protests is an alarming illustration of this pattern.

CHP shouldn’t be launching high-powered surveillance aircraft to spy and record people marching for racial justice. And Californians protesting police violence should not be in the digital crosshairs of police surveillance. It’s long past time we reckon with the legacy of harm and make sure that it can’t continue. Join us in demanding real action from elected officials to investigate and address out-of-control police surveillance in California and further strengthen laws to protect our rights and support our movements for social justice.

Matt Cagle is staff attorney for the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the ACLU of Northern California.

After decades of advocacy by community and grassroots organizations, California is making significant strides toward criminal and juvenile justice. This past year, Los Angeles County’s new district attorney began working to end cash bail for misdemeanors, enact new sentencing policies, and stop the transfer of children to adult court. Meanwhile, a 2020 state law and a budget directive from the governor’s office have resulted in plans to close all three of California’s juvenile prisons by 2023.  

These reforms recognize the need to address egregious racial disparities and the criminalization of poverty that are both hallmarks of these systems. Despite these efforts, a large gap will remain if we do not also take a critical look at how these same problems exist within our child welfare and foster care system—our family regulation system.  

This system creates a broad web for government surveillance of and grievous harm to Black, Indigenous, and other families of color with little accountability.  

L.A. County maintains the largest child welfare agency in the country, and alarming racial disparities exist within the family regulation system: 

• Black children make up 27.8% of children in the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services’ (DCFS) custody, despite only making up 7.5% of children in the county.  
• In 2018, Black children made up 15.9% of children in the Riverside County foster care system, despite making up only 5.3% of the county population.   
• A staggering 58% of Black children in L.A. will be subjects of a DCFS investigation before they are 18.  
• Despite laws adopted to explicitly protect Indigenous children from being removed from their families and communities, the proportion of Indigenous children in foster care is 2.6 times higher than their representation in the total child population.   
• About half of all Indigenous children in California will experience a child welfare investigation before they are 18. 

The family regulation system also impacts low-income families. A broad definition of neglect frequently pulls in families struggling with houselessness, lack of childcare, or access to basic resources. Instead of providing parents with the support necessary to raise their children, the system funds removing children and system-appointed caretakers. L.A. County refuses to help pay for services that parents are ordered to obtain by Child Protective Services, while paying foster care providers to care for children who are removed from their homes.  

The United States has a long history of family separation. Beginning in the 1600s, during chattel slavery, family separation was a common condition of bondage used to threaten parents and prevent strong familial bonds. From the 1800s to 1900s, California’s Apprenticeship Laws incentivized the kidnapping of Indigenous children so they could be sold as indentured servants to white families, oftentimes also resulting in the murder of Indigenous parents seeking to protect them. During the same period, Indigenous children were also removed from their families and their reservations to be sent to boarding schools under genocidal assimilationist policies resulting in the systemic erasure of their culture through generations. 

Today, the removal of Black and Indigenous children in our country and immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border is a continuation of this country’s family separation history.   

Our family regulation system remains as entrenched and harmful as our criminal legal system, and, in fact, work in tandem. Many incarcerated and newly released parents struggle for years to reunify with their children to no avail. Children in foster care are frequently involved in the juvenile legal system that it is known as the “foster care-to-prison pipeline.” One study found that by age 17, over half of youth in foster care experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility.  

It is time to reimagine child safety.   

This week, the Reimagine Child Safety Coalition issued demands to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to take immediate action to protect families. Join the campaign to end law enforcement partnerships with DCFS.