AI drones are America's newest cops

State of play: Some 1,500 police and sheriff's departments were flying drones by late 2024 — a 150% jump since 2018, per Police1.com, a law enforcement news site.

• Just this year, Miami, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina have announced new drone programs. Other departments are expanding their fleets.
• Drones cost a fraction of human-flown helicopters, and federal grants and state budgets are increasingly footing the bill for equipment and training.

Between the lines: Concerns about officer safety and excessive force after George Floyd's 2020 murder are also fueling demand for tech that reduces direct encounters while increasing crime scene data collection.

• For example, agencies in Minnesota, where Floyd was killed, spent more than $1 million on drones in 2023, a 44% jump from the year before, according to the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Zoom in: An Axios analysis found that almost every major metropolitan area in the U.S. has a law enforcement agency with a drone system, even if the largest city has yet to adopt the technology or publicly announce its use.

• Seattle, for example, doesn't currently have a police drone program, but the Washington State Patrol and police departments in Everett, Redmond, and Renton use them.

How it works: Police deploy drones for surveillance, search and rescue, incident documentation, and crime scene investigations — giving them real-time aerial views and data.

• Drones are powered with AI and equipped with cameras and sensors, which means they can interpret footage and act on it.
• Tasks include helping police locate missing persons, reading license plates, monitoring crowds, reconstructing accident scenes, and assessing active shooter events or natural disasters.
• They're dispatched in response to 911 calls and act as a new kind of first-responder unit, collecting vital information and even dropping off Narcan or other supplies and medicine.

The technology is far more powerful than your standard human-operated drone.

• These machines can track everything from ground radar to air quality — and even measure a person's heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and oxygen levels from 500 meters away, Cameron Chell, CEO of Canadian drone-maker Draganfly, told Axios.

Case in point: In Albuquerque, police are using drones to catch car thieves.

• Albuquerque police were one of the first agencies to get a waiver from the FAA to use drones without line of sight, he said.
• Drones give officers "more situational awareness and will provide more opportunities to identify suspects immediately after a crime," Albuquerque police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos Jr. told Axios. "All of our air support (has) helped address auto theft, which has been key in the dramatic decrease in auto theft over the past eight years."

Reality check: These drones are effective only if they're linked to a system that can help police with the data, Mauricio Kleinburg, director of technology at Mexican-based security tech company Seguritech, told Axios.

• "Basically, the drone is just flying, taking all the information ... the real firepower comes with what you do with analytics, with image AI, or all the sensors in the police central or in the data center."

But it's unclear what police are doing with that data or what's happening to the data in the hands of private companies, Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Axios.

• "This idea that they're collecting such detailed biometric information —information that one would not even have about themselves, and there aren't very good restrictions around it, is scary."
• Lipton said not only could police be violating existing laws regarding the gathering of images from private property without a warrant, but laws also haven't kept pace with the technology's capabilities to collect and store data.

What we're watching: The ACLU Foundation of Northern California is going after Sonoma County in a lawsuit that's being closely monitored as a test case that could set limits of police drone use.

• The suit was filed over allegations the county is using drones to collect images of residents' backyards, swimming pools and homes through windows without warrants. It claims that, after drone flights, residents have received citations about code violations and warnings about too many hemp plants on properties.