It Started on a Scooter
In 2021, Brian Johnson left his position at Zillow and found himself with more time to explore his Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood with his children. But walks and scooter rides kept getting rerouted — past mattresses on sidewalks, construction debris in the gutter, trash heaps on corners that seemed to regenerate as fast as they were cleared.
"I found that it was really stressful," Johnson told The San Francisco Standard. As a software engineer, his instinct was to systemize the problem. He started by riding his bike through the neighborhood, photographing dumpsites and filing 311 reports by hand. When he began tracking how quickly reports were resolved, he was pleasantly surprised: the city's illegal dumping cleanup crews were actually meeting their SLAs — 4 hours for bagged debris, 48 hours for loose material. The problem wasn't that the city couldn't clean up dumpsites. It was that nobody was finding them all. Then he started using a drone.
"I thought to myself, 'I'm an engineer. How can I systemize this?'" he said. "I went up with the drone, and within two weeks, I had trained a little model with about 30 data points that kind of worked. I've spent the last two years working on this."
What he discovered confirmed what residents already knew: the official 311 data dramatically understated the problem in their neighborhood. Heat maps based on complaint data made the Mission and Tenderloin look like San Francisco's worst dumping areas. Johnson knew from flying his drone daily that Bayview had "a whole other level" — but because fewer complaints were being filed, the data didn't reflect it.
When Johnson reached out to the District 10 Supervisor's office and to DPW leadership, the gap became even clearer. Neither had solid numbers — or even a real understanding of the scale, volume, or location of dumping in the neighborhood. What struck Johnson most was watching officials talk past each other, unable to ground the conversation in real data. The city was spending millions on cleanup but couldn't quantify what it was cleaning up, where, or how fast it was coming back.
What Johnson found wasn't apathy — everyone involved cared. But the parties felt helpless in several ways: overwhelmed with the sheer volume of cleanup, then blind to the true scale and afraid of how big the problem really was, and then unable to gather any real support to change things. The reasons were a tangle of politics, policies, lack of data, and stakeholders who had vastly different ideas about the reality on the ground. That was the moment the mission crystallized: the problem wasn't just garbage — it was the absence of information that could bring everyone to the same table with the same facts.
Taking It to the Neighborhood
From the beginning, Johnson understood that the technology would only matter if the community was behind it. Drones over a neighborhood — even ones pointed at garbage — raise legitimate questions about surveillance, privacy, and trust. Those questions deserved answers, and they needed to come in person.
Johnson held community meetings at local venues, including a well-attended session at the Gratta Wine and Market on Quesada Avenue, where he introduced the drone program to his neighbors. He walked through exactly what the system could see (waste on public roads and sidewalks), what it couldn't see (anything the AI wasn't trained to detect), and what it would never do (facial recognition, license plate reading, surveillance of individuals).
The meetings weren't just informational — they were collaborative. Residents shared which streets and corridors were the worst affected, which dumping patterns they'd observed, and what they wanted from the city's response. That local knowledge directly shaped where flights were conducted and how the reporting system was designed.
What Neighbors Said
Chula Camps, owner of Dogfork Lamp Arts on Quesada Avenue, had watched people dump garbage outside her 10,000-square-foot building for a decade. "It's frustrating because it doesn't look good for our business," she told The San Francisco Standard. "It's a challenge as it is to get customers to come out to us." She added: "If we see something, we should say something."
The Neighborhood Presentation Tour
While the drone was flying daily and 311 reports were being filed, Johnson and co-founder Matthew Stevens hit the road — presenting the program to neighborhood organizations across San Francisco's southeast districts. Between May and August 2022, they presented to the District 11 Excelsior Action Group, the Bayview-Hunters Point Citizens Advisory Committee, the Bayview Merchants Association, the Glen Park Association, the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, and others.
The reception wasn't always instant buy-in — and that made the eventual support more meaningful. Julie Christensen, Executive Director of the Dogpatch & NW Potrero Hill Green Benefit District, initially pushed back: "Save the money on drones, footage analysis, reporting... just increase human response in the first place." But after Johnson explained the cost-effectiveness — the drone consumed 0.05 kilowatt hours for an entire neighborhood patrol, took 30 minutes, and covered ground no truck crew was actively patrolling — other board members came around. One noted the drones were "orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, and less polluting than having more humans in trucks driving up and down the streets."
Other organizations didn't need convincing. The Glen Park Association sent formal letters of support to supervisors and DPW leadership. The Bayview CAC offered unanimous, enthusiastic backing. The Bayview Merchants Association connected with the program through a community member who introduced Johnson directly to the group's leadership.
Meanwhile, Vincent Yuen of Refuse Refuse — the leading citizen cleanup organization in San Francisco, with over 3,800 cleanups and 13,000 volunteers since 2021 — became one of the program's most vocal advocates. Yuen lobbied Supervisors Walton and Safai's offices directly, writing to their staff: "I've seen the drones in action and it is the most cost effective way to address many of these issues."
Working with 311
The community engagement wasn't just about getting neighborhood support — it was happening simultaneously with a direct technical partnership with SF 311. By June 2022, Johnson was working with Carson Chin, Deputy Director of the 311 Customer Service Center, and Business Analyst Carlos Alfonso on direct API access to programmatically file and track reports. They reviewed submission quality, discussed photo resolution improvements, and developed deduplication workflows together.
The numbers told the story: in just three months of the Bayview pilot, the system had filed over 1,500 reports to SF 311 — 525 large piles of loose garbage, 264 piles of bagged garbage, 98 furniture piles, 26 mattresses, 21 toxic liquid spills, 16 appliances, and 6 overflowing public trash cans. Every single one was tracked to cleanup confirmation.
The Signature Campaign
The signature campaign didn't come after the pilot proved its results — it happened in the midst of it. In June 2022, while dumpsites in the coverage area were dropping from 180 to just 5, residents launched an organized push urging the city to fund the program through the FY2022-2023 budget cycle.
Using a template hosted on the project website, dozens of Bayview residents, business owners, and community leaders sent emails to Supervisors Shamann Walton and Ahsha Safai, DPW Director Carla Short, and their aides. Each letter referenced "Ask M333: Automatic Trash Reporting Pilot" and made the case that the self-funded program was already delivering results the city should invest in.
The signers weren't just names on a list — they were people with skin in the game. A Bayview restaurant owner wrote that she "suffers greatly from illegal dumping" and that "this dude had created some really cool technology to automatically report all the garbage." A local contractor. An arts nonprofit director. Residents from Potrero Hill and Dogpatch. One Dogpatch resident wrote to Supervisor Walton and Director Short that he could "monitor on a daily basis the positive impact being made by this self-funded project." The emails came from residents and business owners across multiple neighborhoods who could see the difference the program was making in real time.
For a community that had spent years feeling underserved by the city's complaint-driven system — where neighborhoods that report more get cleaned up more, regardless of actual need — the campaign was a statement: this is working right now, and we want the city to fund it.
The Numbers in Real Time
On June 29, 2022 — in the middle of the signature campaign — Johnson reported just 5 piles of garbage in the coverage area, down from 180 piles two months earlier. "Today is the lowest number of piles detected in three months," he wrote. "I've had several people tell me today while I was out on a bike ride that Bayview feels clean today." The residents writing to their supervisors weren't arguing for a theoretical program. They were defending one they could see working outside their windows.
Partnership with BHNA
The organizational backbone of the community effort was the Bayview Hill Neighborhood Association (BHNA), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 1990 with a mission to combat neighborhood deterioration. BHNA brought three decades of community organizing experience, established relationships with city agencies, and the kind of trust that can't be manufactured.
As the program's community partner, BHNA provided:
- Local legitimacy — residents knew BHNA; an outside tech company showing up with drones would have been received very differently
- Community outreach — BHNA's network helped spread awareness and participation in meetings and the June 2022 signature campaign
- Advocacy infrastructure — when the pilot produced results, BHNA helped translate data into policy conversations with the city
- Accountability — the partnership ensured the program remained responsive to community priorities, not just technological capabilities
This model — technology company plus established community organization — became the template for how Aerbits approaches new cities. The technology provides capability; the community partnership provides direction and trust.
IDCon: Taking It Statewide
Beyond the Bayview, Aerbits brought its community-centered approach to the statewide stage through participation in IDCon — the annual Statewide Conference on Illegal Dumping, hosted by Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley and the Illegal Dumping Task Force.
The conference brings together municipal leaders, public works departments, environmental agencies, and community organizations from across California — essentially every decision-maker working on illegal dumping in the state. Johnson presented the Bayview pilot results at IDCon23, including the controlled experiment data showing the 118-to-5 dumpsite reduction.
The IDCon Connection
The relationships built through IDCon directly contributed to Aerbits' expansion beyond San Francisco. Erin Armstrong, Senior Policy Advisor to Supervisor Miley and a key organizer of the conference, helped connect Aerbits with Oakland leadership — a connection that ultimately led to the current Oakland pilot proposal now before the city's Public Works and Transportation Committee.
IDCon5, the latest edition of the conference, is scheduled for April 30–May 1, 2026, at the Alameda County Training and Education Center in downtown Oakland. The conference continues to serve as a critical networking and knowledge-sharing venue for the illegal dumping community statewide.
The Community Engagement Timeline
Why Community Engagement Matters
It would have been easier — and faster — to skip the community meetings, the neighborhood presentation tour, and the signature campaign. Just fly the drone, collect the data, and pitch the city directly.
Johnson took the longer path deliberately. In his words, the program exists because a neighborhood had a problem, and the technology emerged from that neighborhood's frustration. The community wasn't a stakeholder to be managed — it was the reason the whole thing started.
That approach paid off in ways that pure technology never could:
- Privacy concerns were addressed proactively — by the time questions arose at the city level, the community had already vetted the program's privacy protections
- Results had advocates — when the pilot showed a 94% reduction, it wasn't just Aerbits making the claim. It was residents, business owners, and BHNA backing it up
- The signature campaign created political cover — dozens of constituent emails to city leadership during the pilot made it clear there was demand for the program, while residents could see results happening in real time
- The model was replicable — Oakland's engagement process follows the same community-first template, ensuring local voices shape how the technology is deployed
The lesson from Bayview is that drone technology for illegal dumping detection works best when the community it serves is part of the process from day one. The technology provides the capability. The community provides the mandate.
For more on the Bayview pilot results, read The Bayview Pilot: 94% Reduction in Illegal Dumping in 26 Days. For the current Oakland proposal, see Oakland Proposes Aerial Detection Pilot to Combat Illegal Dumping.