The Brief

The LAPD officers’ union and city have agreed on a new tentative labor contract that includes an 11% increase to the base starting salary for new recruits. City and department officials say that boost in pay is needed to address what they’re calling a crisis in recruiting.

Where things stand

The number of sworn LAPD officers has dropped by more than 1,000 in just the past three years, putting the department’s ranks at about 9,000, according to LAPD officials.

Currently, a new recruit starts at $74,019. After 18 months of academy and field training, their salary automatically goes up to $83,687. The new starting salary would be $82,161.

By comparison, the starting salary for a social worker for the city of Los Angeles, as of January, is just over $65,000 a year, according to city documentation.

What’s in the deal for veteran officers

The deal covers four years and includes a 6% raise for all officers in the first year, a 4% raise the second year, and 5% raises the following two years.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that the increases are consistent with goals she’s laid out to date.

“Like many major cities across America, our police department is enduring a hiring and retention crisis so we are taking critical action,” Bass said. “In April, I proposed a budget to address concerns within the Los Angeles Police Department and to provide investments to hire more police officers, expedite the hiring process, and improve retention.”

Support and pushback

The union representing the officers, Los Angeles Police Protective League, put out a statement in favor of the proposed new contract:

“We believe this tentative agreement will put the LAPD on the right path forward retaining our experienced officers and supervisors and recruiting qualified cadets to enter our academy,” said Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz, the LAPPL vice president.

Longstanding critics of the police pushed back on the deal. The increases are “absolutely ridiculous” given the “hugely problematic” way the LAPD polices Black people in the city, said Melina Abdullah, the leader of the Los Angeles Chapter of Black Lives Matter. The city should instead be investing in the housing crisis and afterschool programs, she said.

What’s going on with police recruiting

There are several reasons for the recruitment problems in policing, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. In a recent report, the group said millennials and Generation Z “are more apt to value work-life balance than their Baby Boomer counterparts” and that the demands of policing are less appealing.

That report also cited the declining public image of the law enforcement profession.

“Scrutiny of the police, cellphone recordings of interactions between the police and public, media coverage, and popular entertainment portrayals of police have led many young people to view police differently than their parents may have,” the report stated.

Public pushback over municipal police drones is boiling over across California, turning routine local policy hearings into high-stakes battles over the boundaries of neighborhood surveillance.

The increasingly heated public debates are driven by landmark privacy litigation and a 2021 law that mandates explicit local board approvals for the use of “military equipment,” including drones. Those disclosures make clear that police are increasingly looking to drones as potential “first responders” in cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Ana and Stockton — forcing local leaders to face skeptical residents in public hearings required before drone programs can expand.

At those appearances, law enforcement agencies are pushing to broaden their drone use beyond emergency-only response to aid in everyday patrols, while citizens are concerned about drones conducting warrantless searches, if municipalities are hoarding too much data collected by drones, and whether drone makers have too much power and information.

Those tensions were on stark display earlier this month in San Francisco, when a policy debate at a police commission meeting drew a packed room of opposing residents.

The San Francisco Police Department asked commissioners to approve a policy allowing drones for a wide array of uses, including “public safety response,” active investigations, training, and “community outreach.” While prohibiting random “general surveillance” or tracking activities protected by the First Amendment, the draft stipulated that public footage would be retained for 30 days unless tied to an open investigation.

“With drones, you can fly at much lower altitudes, you can get thermal imaging, you can get tracking.”

Supporters argued the technology is vital for modern crime-fighting. “Public safety and personal privacy shouldn't be competing interests,” said Anna Carney, president of Stop Crime SF, urging commissioners to give officers every responsible advantage to save lives.

But privacy advocates and skeptical residents saw a slippery slope toward unchecked surveillance, drawing explicit parallels to the contentious rollout of automated license plate readers across the state. In recent years, cities like San Francisco and Stockton built extensive fixed camera networks supplied by vendors like Flock Safety. Now, communities fear that attaching drones to those same networks creates an inescapable, multi-dimensional dragnet — one that tracks citizens not just by car on the street, but from the air above their homes.

“We are all here today because these drones are impacting all of our communities, " said Manny, a member of the privacy advocacy group DeFlock SF, who urged the commissioners to cancel the department’s contract with drone manufacturer Skydio. "If SFPD truly cared about operating these drones with any respect to privacy, the very least that can happen is one of you make an amendment to require a warrant,” he added, referring to language used in the department’s proposed policy.

Although commissioners voted to advance the policy to labor negotiations without adding a warrant mandate, the friction displayed in San Francisco reflects a statewide reckoning.

Legal uncertainty and the policy vacuum

The 2021 rules governing military equipment in law enforcement still leave a policy vacuum confronting municipalities across California: Local agencies that deploy drones are stepping into a legal gray area where technology is far outpacing state regulation.

A lawsuit against Sonoma County underscores the uncertainty. Privacy concerns festered for years in the county after officials launched a drone program in 2019 for code enforcement. But investigators with the American Civil Liberties Union later uncovered hundreds of warrantless searches over private yards, homes, and windows — all conducted without a published policy in sight. In 2025, the ACLU of Northern California sued Sonoma, and last month, the county settled. Sonoma pledged to reel in its drone use, obtain warrants or consent before conducting residential property code inspections, restrict data retention, and directly notify residents if their property was subjected to aerial surveillance.

The case brought to the forefront the complex legal matrix officials must navigate in deploying unmanned aircraft.

"There's three main buckets," explained Katie Inman, a drone policy expert and attorney at Holland & Knight who previously worked at the Federal Aviation Administration. "You've got the broad … constitutional law principles, then you've got state statutes, and then you've got the third bucket, which is FAA operating rules."

Inman noted that California belongs to a category of states that lack a comprehensive state statute explicitly governing law enforcement drone use, leaving municipalities on their own to read and comply with constitutional Fourth Amendment case law, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

She said the Supreme Court has ruled that aircraft surveilling areas that are visible to the naked eye from lawful altitudes do not violate Constitutional protections.

"But those were manned aircraft; they are not drones,” she said. ”With drones, you can fly at much lower altitudes, you can get thermal imaging, you can get tracking, you can get just a lot of hovering — a lot of surveillance potential there that you would not normally have."

Across the state, nearly 60 law enforcement agencies use drone programs, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Most foundational policies, including those in Chula Vista, Fremont, and the policy proposed in San Francisco, prohibit random surveillance, but programs diverge when it comes to deployment triggers and public oversight. Departments like Chula Vista deploy automated "Drone as First Responder" units broadly ahead of ground officers for routine 911 calls, whereas newer or more heavily scrutinized frameworks, such as San Francisco's proposed policy, attempt to draw tighter lines by limiting flights to active criminal investigations, vehicle pursuits, or specific, incident-based emergencies.

Multimillion-dollar contracts and unproven safety claims

Beyond constitutional and policy questions, the rapid growth of drone programs is closely tied to an aggressive push by defense and surveillance technology vendors.

Both the San Francisco and Los Angeles police departments rely on hardware manufactured by San Mateo-based Skydio, while industry peers like Axon, which makes body cameras, and license-plate-reader manufacturer Flock Safety have also aggressively expanded into the market. Skydio originally launched to give extreme sports athletes a way to track and film themselves doing parkour or snowboarding. But after the U.S. government labeled Chinese drone maker DJI a national security risk in 2020, Skydio pivoted to fill the void for military, police, and enterprise customers.

At a recent customer conference, Skydio CEO Adam Bry laid out an ambitious roadmap: small drones for tactical flights inside buildings, mid-range aircraft for vehicle pursuits, and high-speed models capable of traveling 100 mph up to a 30-mile radius. Bry also outlined a future driven by AI, envisioning software that analyzes 911 calls in real time to automatically recommend dispatching an autonomous drone to a scene.

Executing that vision requires major investments — from taxpayers and billionaire backers alike. Santa Ana recently greenlit $682,900 for its Drone as First Responder initiative in partnership with Skydio, while the Stockton City Council approved a $3.15 million contract expansion with Flock Safety to integrate six drones into its existing network of 120 license plate reader cameras. In San Francisco last year, the police department received a $9.4 million donation from the crypto billionaire and Ripple cofounder, Chris Larsen, to expand its drone program and surveillance systems, Mission Local reported.

“The premise of the Bill of Rights is respect for liberty of the individual, and that used to mean something in this city,” a San Francisco resident named Ilona said at the Oct. 14 Commission meeting, lambasting officials for accepting Larsen’s drone donation. “But it doesn't anymore because now we have sold out to tech billionaires. ... SFPD has been sloppy and reckless with our privacy. How can we trust them with these tools?”

Venture-backed drone vendors have spent heavily to influence local officials to support their expansion — Flock Safety, for instance, has reportedly spent millions of dollars on local and federal lobbying, claiming its technology helped “solve” a million crimes last year alone. Yet researchers are increasingly skeptical of what vendors and law enforcement say the technology can help accomplish.

Police argue that drones help them respond to incidents more quickly, help them deescalate potentially dangerous situations, and improve crime clearance rates. A February 2026 study by the UC Berkeley Criminal Law and Justice Center found that while first-responder drones can improve response times, there is no evidence they reduce officer-involved shootings, lower overall use of force, or improve case resolution rates.

The rapid rollout has also intensified community anxiety over interconnected surveillance networks, and intensified the brewing nationwide backlash against AI-powered police tech.

Jesus Gabriel Yanez, a recently-retired police commissioner, spoke at the San Francisco commission meeting. He briefly read a passage from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” before expressing his opposition to the drone use policy outlined by his former peers.

“SFPD should tie deployments to specific incidents that cannot be addressed without compromising officer safety — period,” Yanez said. “Those are the only times when we should allow for the deployment of a drone. No general routine patrol. No general surveillance.”

Opponents like Yanez point to past instances where California law enforcement agencies illegally shared license plate tracking data with federal immigration authorities, as well as technical missteps like a recent leak that exposed live police drone video feeds online due to vendor misconfigurations. That anxiety over vendor overreach and AI surveillance isn't confined to California—similar resistance is bubbling up across the country. In Minneapolis, the city council voted to reject a police drone contract with Skydio following community protests over privacy and dual-use military technology. In New Orleans, advocacy group Eye on Surveillance successfully mobilized against a proposed policy that would have allowed weapons on police drones.

Whether through public city council debates sparked by AB 481 or court-enforced settlements like Sonoma County's, California communities are trying to make it clear that adopting cutting-edge public safety technology will not come at the cost of privacy. The automated eye in the sky may arrive in seconds, but citizens are demanding to know exactly who is watching — and who holds the remote.

CalMatters Technology Reporter Khari Johnson contributed to this report.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Free events centered around Dia de Los Muertos are coming to MacArthur Park where people can celebrate the memory of their loved ones. 

Music, Arts & Community Los Angeles (MAC·LA) kicked off the holiday by hosting two hands-on art making workshops led by artist Marelené Nancy Lopez this past Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and this Monday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the MacArthur Park Bandshell. 

Lopez will be gathering art and stories from residents that will be part of a large canvas mural and also a part of the community altar that’s going to be built for their main “Dia de Los Muertos” event on November 1st. 

“This is free and open to all ages, and a wonderful way for people to embrace the diverse cultures of the Westlake community,” said Allegra Padilla, executive director of MAC·LA. 

Since 2007, MAC·LA, formerly known as the Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles, has turned the MacArthur Park Bandshell into a space for concerts in the summer and community events. 

The Dia de Los Muertos event on Nov. 1 will start at 3:30 p.m. with a procession on Alvarado and Sixth streets led by the Project for the Arts and Dreams of Indigenous Oaxacan Heritage in collaboration with the Westlake Theater Community Alliance. 

According to the PADIOXH website, the nonprofit is on a mission to save and share the vibrant culture of Oaxacan communities in Mexico and the U.S. through a mix of educational programs like dance, artisan workshops, traditional cuisine and indigenous language courses. 

The Westlake Theater Community Alliance is a nonprofit organization with the goal of  turning the Westlake Theatre into a community space for the arts, events, spaces for vendors and more. 

The group will arrive at the park at 4 p.m. to kick off the event and there will be an opening prayer and ceremony with local indigenous leaders. 

Although primarily associated with Mexico, Dia de Los Muertos is a holiday that’s also celebrated in different Central and South American countries where families welcome back the souls of loved ones who have passed away in a celebration that includes altars, prayer and traditional food and drink.

The theme for this year’s event at MacArthur Park is “Ancestral Protection,” according to MAC·LA.

The event will include dance performances, a fashion show, music, community organizations hosting resource booths and there will be a community altar that people can participate in.

The event organizers encourage rideshare, carpooling, walking, biking and public transportation whenever possible. 

The post Dia de Los Muertos celebrations starts early in MacArthur Park appeared first on LA Local.

An appeals court on Monday declined to rule on whether California elections officials can count roughly 20,000 ballots that the Justice Department alleges likely belong to noncitizen voters.

The 2-1 decision sets the Trump administration and state officials up for another legal showdown on the matter on Tuesday in front of a federal district judge, giving the federal government a very short window to compel California to sequester votes before the Nov. 3 elections.

The decision marks the latest in a string of legal setbacks for President Donald Trump’s administration as it seeks to assert greater federal control over state-run elections. Noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s political messaging for years, although available data indicates it is exceedingly rare.

Although the panel primarily ruled it was premature for an appeals court to get involved, two of the three judges also wrote separate concurrences making it clear they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots at this late date. They questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of alleged noncitizen voters and argued that to set aside votes risks disenfranchising citizens.

One judge dissented, arguing that federal law bars noncitizens from voting and compels California to vet the potentially illegal ballots before they are counted. The failure to do so, he wrote, would cause irreparable harm to the election.

Trump administration sued California officials over list of 20,000 names

The Republican administration sued election officials in the heavily Democratic state in mid-October, accusing them of failing to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a list of 20,000 people it alleged were likely noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The administration asked the judge to stop the state from counting those ballots until immigration status checks could be completed. The Justice Department made similar demands Monday in Washington, another state with races that will help determine control of the U.S. Senate and House.

Both state and federal law prohibit noncitizens from voting. But California officials say it’s not even clear the administration’s purported 20,000 noncitizen voters are actually not U.S. citizens. In court papers, Los Angeles election officials said the majority of a random sample of voters that the Department of Justice identified as immigrants seemed to have been born in the United States. The Justice Department, for its part, has said there is as much to lose from keeping the potentially illegal ballots in the count.

After a district judge had scheduled an Oct. 27 hearing on the issue, the federal government appealed to the 9th Circuit Court, arguing that a faster decision was needed to prevent the further counting of votes.

But two of the three 9th Circuit Court judges rejected that argument on Monday, writing that the federal government “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” their initial request to sequester the ballots in question.

The time-sensitive emergency that the federal government used to justify the appeal, wrote Gabriel Sanchez, a circuit judge appointed by President Joe Biden, was at least in part “the product of the United States’s own decisions” to file so close to the elections, after votes had already started to get counted.

The federal government was delayed “in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief,” Sanchez wrote.

One judge wrote that setting ballots aside would invite ‘electoral chaos’

He wrote that setting aside the ballots at this stage “would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway” and “usher in electoral chaos.”

Judge Mark J. Bennett, who was nominated by Trump, also said that the federal government’s arguments weren’t supported by the law, writing that it appeared the administration had no power under the Constitution to force California to separate the ballots.

Judge Patrick Bumatay, who was appointed by Trump, forcefully dissented against the ruling. He argued that federal law precludes “California from commingling ballots likely cast by aliens with legitimate ballots, because it encourages and induces illegal voting. Stopping that practice for those identified as likely noncitizens is the bare minimum.”

Bumatay also affirmed the federal government’s arguments about the need for an urgent ruling to sequester the ballots. While he conceded that the federal government could potentially prosecute fraudulent voters after the election, Bumatay said that the federal government “has an interest in stopping the illegal voting in the first place.”

California’s attorney general called ruling a ‘welcome speed bump’ against Trump’s attacks

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, hailed Monday’s ruling against the Republican administration as a “welcome speed bump to Trump’s disgusting attacks on the Constitution and our country’s democracy.”

In a statement, he urged voters to cast ballots early and “participate in democracy, don’t become disillusioned.”

The 9th Circuit decision sends the case back to a federal judge in Southern California, who will hear arguments from both sides on Tuesday at 1 pm.

Neither the Justice Department nor the Office of the U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California immediately responded to an emailed inquiry asking for comment.

The man who has helped produce the Super Bowl halftime show is stepping into the spotlight: Jay-Z will headline the show himself.

The NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced Monday night that Jay-Z will be the featured performer for the halftime festivities on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he had one request when the league first reached an agreement with Roc Nation: that Jay-Z take the stage himself “whenever the moment felt right to him.”

“From ‘Reasonable Doubt’ to standing on the Super Bowl halftime stage, this has been a journey,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “Thirty years of music, work, and culture on the world’s biggest stage. This run continues to be a dream come true.”

After days of speculation, Jay-Z is set to return to the stadium where he closed his celebration of the 30th anniversary of “Reasonable Doubt,” the mogul’s 1996 debut album. The concerts included three sold-out shows at Yankee Stadium and sold-out performances in London and Paris ahead of a stop at SoFi Stadium over the weekend.

Jay-Z’s Roc Nation has partnered with the NFL since 2019 to advise on and help produce the league’s entertainment presentations, including the Super Bowl halftime show. At the time, Jay-Z said he had told Goodell, “If this is about me performing at the Super Bowl, then we can just end this conversation now.”

Seven years later, Jay-Z is ready to perform after all.

Jay-Z, born Shawn Carter, has won 25 Grammy Awards and received 89 nominations, the second-most in history behind his wife, Beyoncé — who has performed at two Super Bowls. His catalog also includes the albums “The Blueprint” and “The Black Album,” and hit songs such as “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” “99 Problems” and “Empire State of Mind,” his collaboration with Alicia Keys.

Last year, “Reasonable Doubt” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.