It doesn't bode well. Drones make poor substitutes for properly trained law enforcement. And for all we know, it could be a ruse. He may have done what he did to make them lose manpower protecting the city that might be otherwise used to search for him. Of course, I might be overthinking it, and forgetting to weigh the sheer number of LEOs in LA and in the surrounding area, not to mention federal involvement in the case.
As for what happens when drones target the wrong people? HEY, let's ask the bystanders' families, you know, the ones in the middle east whose family members had been blown up because the intel got it wrong =D [/sarcasm]
This fear would be more applicable if these were drones armed with missiles and they were planning on finding his shack out in the woods and blowing it to smithereens. These drones are definitely NOT armed, and will only serve to help track him much like the modern equivalent of a helicopter with a searchlight. They'll still need guys on the ground to follow directions given by the drone operators to reach the target location and make an arrest or kill.
In actuality, the drones may not help at all. They're not magic; if he gets inside a building or cave or even just has the right terrain around him, he'll be blocked completely from the thermal cameras. They can't magically see through walls or hills or trees. They can really only spot him if he's outdoors and exposed, and they work best mostly by making the heat sources high contrast against camouflage. I'm also not sure how the snow will affect the cameras: common sense tells you that they should be black as ink while the guy they're hunting shows up perfectly bright white against it, but I fear that the snow's easy reflection of sunlight may make it even more difficult to locate him outdoors.
And this is all assuming that they can, you know, identify an individual from a thermal camera image. For the record, you
can't. Anyone who's looked through a thermal cam (you can go on Youtube and find Apache and AC-130 gunsight footage if you want to see for yourself) can tell you that you can see their silhouettes perfectly fine, but there's no way to identify someone except by extremely obvious signs (like telling the guy with the AK apart from the guy with the RPG, and even then they've mistaken large cameras for weapons before). They'll basically need to scour the area he's in and send a full team of heavily armed and armored soldiers (and probably dogs) out to every single human being they spot in the area and have each one of them individually checked out. Hopefully they won't accidentally shoot anyone, or end up scaring a trigger-happy hunter or camper by showing up with assault rifles and screaming at him.
Yes a smart phone...with a built in GPS that you really can't disable....yep.
Ironbite-even if he doesn't....there's always a newspaper.
Assuming they're even able to track it. No phone can be tracked if the phone is turned off. Most likely, the most they'd be able to get even if they had the necessary equipment specifically tracking his number is an hour or two of location before he shuts his phone off to conserve the battery.
Seeing as how they haven't used it to find him yet, though, he's either being smart and keeping his phone off most of the time or it hasn't even occurred to them.
One other thing I should point out (unrelated to the above) is that he's not necessarily spending his days freezing his ass off in the mountains, hiding under a bush and waiting for a SWAT patrol to walk by so he can blow them up with pipe bombs. Assuming the locals have his face memorized (and are sure enough to call the cops if they spot him), it's not difficult to disguise yourself or act in a way that puts you beneath notice.
AND he still has targets, at least one of which refuses to leave his house. I don't think he's just going to spend the rest of the manhunt sitting in his forest lair. He's got people to kill.
