I mean this theoretically works until the gangs decide to start putting small bombs in the drones that detonate on impact. I bet they can build drones faster than people can breed and train the birds.
Well yeah then you have a counter swarm of exploding drones. The government can always afford more than the criminals because they can just squeeze their tax cattle a little harder.
"Lasers." (although, line of sight, point-to-point communication is admittedly less trivial to interfere with)
The point being that, if "criminal gangs" are up to no good, but they're parting their equipment with off-the-shelf Best Buy and Radio Shack products, they probably aren't programming DSP interfaces, aren't encoding and decoding raw bit streams, aren't masking binary objects with base64 blobs, aren't rolling their own encryption.
Or, if they are rolling their own encryption, they're using Excel spreadsheets to do it. [0]
There's a pretty bright light on between sunrise and sunset, doesn't affect free air optical transmission at all unless the sun happens to align with the sender or the receiver.
The biggest limitations are water vapor in the air, precipitation and dust. Also, the distance is rather limited compared to radio.