Sheriff’s Drones Are Now Hunting for Homeless Camps in Malibu
Lost Hills bought its drones to find lost hikers. Last week, one found an encampment.
Holly Bieler · August 25, 2026
Deputies at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station flew a drone over Malibu last week and found a homeless encampment, a sheriff’s representative told the City Council during Monday night's meeting, in what appears to be a new use for a program launched to find missing hikers and crash victims.
The department has "significantly expanded" its drone use in recent months, the Malibu liaison for the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Department, Sgt. Christopher Soderlund, said. After the encampment was spotted, the city’s homeless outreach team was sent to the site.
The Lost Hills station got [its first two drones in 2024](https://www.theacorn.com/articles/drones-assist-mountain-rescue/), paid for with private funding, after then-Capt. Jennifer Seetoo spent two years seeking approval. Equipped with thermal cameras, they were pitched as a search-and-rescue tool for the Santa Monica Mountains, where night flights by manned aircraft are often impossible. Lost Hills was designated a pilot station for a possible countywide rollout.
The program’s signature success came in December 2024, when a drone [located a 78-year-old man with dementia](https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/rescue-teams-in-malibu-use-drone-technology-to-find-elderly-man-with-dementia) who had wandered from his Malibu home, within about 20 minutes of takeoff.
Malibu’s homeless population has fallen for five straight years, [to 44 people](https://www.smdp.com/malibu-continues-multi-year-trend-of-declining-homelessness/) in this year’s count, down from a peak of 239 in 2020. But encampment clearances have not slowed: the city cleared 44 camps in each of the last two years. Earlier this month, the council [declared a local emergency](https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/malibu-declares-local-emergency-to-clear-homeless-encampments-amid-wildfire-conditions/) over fire conditions that lets it remove encampments in high fire hazard zones within a day, bypassing the longer notice period required by state law.
Malibu isn’t the first place to point drones at encampments. Sacramento County’s probation department [began using drones last year](https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/sacramento-county-drones-homeless-probation) to contact homeless people on probation along the American River, drawing accusations from advocates of surveillance that would "traumatize, intimidate and further destabilize" people already on the margins. A Colorado sheriff’s office [used a drone in 2020](https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/arapahoe-county-homeless-camp-drone) to gauge the size of a camp outside Denver.
It’s unclear how many Malibu encampments the drones have located so far, or whether the flights are now routine.