About the data
This site republishes drone flight logs that police and public-safety agencies have already made public. It does not change them, and it does not obtain anything that was not already published.
Where it comes from
There is no national register of police drone flights and no law requiring one. What exists is a scattering of dashboards, each run by a different vendor, each publishing a different subset of a different set of fields. This site gathers data from multiple sources though it is not inherently an authoritative collection of data on all law enforcement drone flights.
Skydio transparency dashboards — 102 agencies. Agencies that fly Skydio drones can publish selected flights to a public dashboard. Skydio hosts those dashboards as a public map service and this site reads those dashboards directly. Only flights on Skydio aircraft appear there, so an agency that also flies other manufacturers’ drones may not have all data represented here.
Flock Aerodome community dashboards — 68 agencies. These carry the most detail of any source: the type of call, the agency’s own case number, the priority assigned to it, and a block-level address.
Motorola CAPE transparency portals — 5 agencies. Each agency chooses how much history to expose. Three agencies publish everything while the rest publish only the last thirty or sixty days. The site holds flight data the original portal can no longer show for those agencies.
AirData public flight logs — 20 agencies. The oldest records collected here reaching back to 2019 for Sacramento and 2021 for Chula Vista. AirData publishes no flight duration time, so those agencies have flight counts but no hours.
San Francisco Police Department open data — 1 agency. SFPD publishes open data regarding its drone program. SFPD’s log covers its whole fleet regardless of manufacturer. It records a date but no time of day so its page has no hour-of-day view.
What is not here
- Agencies decide which flights to publish. It is unclear whether all flights are being reported for any specific agency.
- Several sources publish the full track of every flight as a list of coordinates though no flight paths are stored here. Each agency’s page links to that agency’s own official map – where available.
- Stated purposes appear exactly as the agency recorded them. Agencies use different vocabularies — some write a statute citation, some an incident type, some nothing at all — so purposes may not be comparable between agencies.
- There are no national totals or national trends. Aggregate counts across agencies mostly reflect when each agency started publishing rather than how much anyone flies, so a rising national line would say more about dashboard adoption than about drones.
The map
The dot for each agency is a single coarse point — where the department operates, not where any drone went. For agencies on Skydio it is the center of the extent that agency’s own dashboard publishes. For the rest it is the municipality, looked up once through OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service and then cached, so nothing is geocoded twice. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. State outlines come from the US Census Bureau via us-atlas.
Refreshing and corrections
This is a monthly snapshot, not a live feed. The date above is when the data was last collected, and each collection is committed to a public repository, so any past version can be reconstructed. Just because an agency’s drone data has not been updated in days, weeks, or months does not inherently mean there have been no drone flights over that time.
How a refresh behaves depends on the source. Skydio and San Francisco are re-read in full each time, so a flight an agency later removes disappears here too. Flock and Motorola publish only a recent window, so those are additive: once a flight has been collected it is kept, even after the original portal stops showing it.