On May 25, 2026, the Hong Kong Free Press reported that the city's police force bought roughly 700 drones for HK$25 million in the past financial year, with 56 more budgeted at HK$4.8 million for 2026–27. In January 2026 the force expanded aerial patrols to Lamma Island, Cheung Chau, the Peak, Central, Yuen Long and Tsuen Wan. The drones, fitted with lenses that one industry figure said can "zoom in from a great distance, such as seeing what is inside a vehicle," have aided 54 arrests since the pilot began — at least half for non-violent offences such as immigration violations, illegal gambling and prostitution. None of this is governed by a statute written for the purpose. That gap, not the hardware, is the story.
From three arrests to 54 in ten months
The speed of the scale-up is documented in the government's own statements. The pilot scheme launched on May 23, 2025, covering the Border District and West Kowloon, justified by the police as addressing risks in "rooftops, alleys, scaffolding, and construction sites." On July 30, 2025, Secretary for Security Tang Ping-keung told the Legislative Council that drones had detected four cases and produced three arrests, and assured lawmakers that flight paths were "carefully planned to avoid unnecessary proximity to the public and residential areas."
Ten months later the tally is 54 arrests, drones launch from automated rooftop docks at police stations, and patrols cover Central's business district. One operation produced 19 arrests for immigration infractions and prostitution; another netted eight people for illegal gambling. A capability sold to legislators as a tool for inaccessible terrain has become general-purpose street policing of petty offences. That migration happened without any new vote, statute or published framework — only an expanding pilot.
The strongest case for the drones
The police rationale deserves a fair hearing. Patrolling outlying islands like Cheung Chau and Lamma is genuinely labour-intensive; an automated docked drone covers in minutes what a foot patrol covers in hours. Rooftops, hillsides and scaffolding are dangerous places to send officers. The drones have helped locate at least six wanted individuals, and HK$25 million is a modest sum against the personnel costs of equivalent coverage. Police forces across the UK, the US and Europe fly drones for the same reasons. Aerial cameras are a legitimate, cost-effective policing technology — and a publication that backs innovation should say so plainly.
Guidance is not law
The problem is what sits underneath the deployment. The only instrument that specifically addresses drone-mounted cameras is the Privacy Commissioner's Guidance on the Use of Video Cameras on Drones and Vehicles, issued on October 27, 2025, alongside updated CCTV guidance. It is sensible: it tells operators to disable facial recognition and individual-tracking functions absent a "clearly justified and compelling need," to choose lower-resolution recording where detail is unnecessary, and to run privacy impact assessments weighing intrusion against effectiveness.
But PCPD guidance notes are advisory, not binding. And the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (1995) that sits behind them contains, in section 58, broad exemptions for data used in the prevention and detection of crime. The government's answer to LegCo in July 2025 was that disciplined services would exercise "stringent control and supervision" under internal guidelines — self-supervision, in other words. There is no published retention schedule for drone footage, no statutory purpose limitation, no independent audit, and no requirement to report deployment statistics. The numbers Hongkongers do have arrived via budget documents and journalists' digging.
The facial recognition multiplier
This matters more because of what comes next. In February 2026, Police Commissioner Joe Chow said facial recognition could be added to the SmartView CCTV network "as soon as this year," as the system grows toward 60,000 cameras by 2028 under a roughly HK$4 billion expansion — up from about 4,000 police SmartView cameras in late 2025. Police have not said whether drones will carry the same capability, but mainland vendors already market drone systems that identify people, behaviours and even protest banners. Fuse a mobile aerial camera fleet with a fixed biometric identification grid and Hong Kong has real-time tracking of faces in public space — with no dedicated legal framework governing either layer.
Other jurisdictions have concluded this is exactly the use case that needs legislation first. The EU's AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 5) prohibits real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces by law enforcement except for narrowly enumerated, independently authorised purposes — a prohibition in force since February 2, 2025. Even in the United States, where police technology adoption is permissive, the fight documented by the EFF in April 2026 over automated licence-plate reader records shows that public transparency about mass surveillance is treated as the minimum price of deploying it.
Legislate before you scale
The pro-innovation position here is not to ground the drones. It is to insist that capability and constraint scale together: statutory authorisation with explicit purpose limits; published deployment, retention and arrest statistics; independent — not internal — authorisation before any biometric identification function is switched on; and audit powers for the Privacy Commissioner over law-enforcement systems. Buying 700 aircraft a year while the rulebook remains a set of internal memos and advisory leaflets gets the sequence backwards. A city marketing itself as a stable international business hub should be able to tell residents precisely when a camera overhead may identify them — before the network reaches 60,000 lenses, not after.