By Sam Mcaughlin
The Arizona Daily Sun
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Leaders of the Flagstaff Police Department, the Flagstaff Fire Department and other city departments participated in multiple community meetings last week on the topic of a possible drones as first responder (DFR) program.
There is not currently a DFR program in the city, nor has one been formally proposed or voted on. (Multiple agencies in the area use drones in a more limited capacity, generally flown by someone on scene.)
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“Right now, we haven’t dedicated pilots to this yet. We don’t have the technology yet,” deputy police chief Collin Seay said during the first of the three meetings. “We haven’t created the policy yet. We want to do that together with the community.”
The Arizona Daily Sun attended two of the three meetings — at the Market of Dreams on Tuesday and at the Murdoch Community Center on Thursday — to learn more about what agency officials envision and to gauge public reception.
Although the technology is being pitched as a multifaceted tool with potential applications across the field of “public safety,” from firefighting to flood response, police chief Sean Connolly and his command staff did the vast majority of the talking at both of those meetings. Most of the audience questions — and concerns — were related to the use of drones by police.
Multiple leaders stated that the decision to conduct proactive community outreach was recommended by the city’s Technology Privacy Task Force. That group was created last year, after public backlash to the unannounced installation of Flock Safety automated license plate readers led the Flagstaff City Council to cancel the contract with Flock. The task force is intended to provide input on the potential adoption of new technologies and “protect the privacy and civil liberties of [ Flagstaff ] residents.”
Connolly said near the conclusion of Thursday’s meeting that the departments will continue to consult with the task force as they prepare a more concrete proposal to bring before the city council later this year. For the moment, here’s a look at what a DFR program might look like in Flagstaff.
What’s being proposed?
Police, fire and emergency management leaders are proposing a system of three Skydio X10 drones docked at three different locations around the city. One would likely be housed at the police and sheriff building on Sawmill Avenue. Locations for the other two have not been confirmed.
The Skydio X10 drone is a quadcopter model, about two feet wide and weighing roughly five pounds. It has a battery life of approximately 30 to 40 minutes, a flight range of roughly 7.5 miles, and a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour. It is typically equipped with two visual-spectrum cameras (one wide lens, one telephoto lens) and a thermal camera.
Officials said repeatedly at the meetings that these drones would not possess facial recognition capability or function as license-plate readers. (Although the drones may not be intended for use as license-plate readers, Skydio does advertise the X10 as being capable of reading a license plate from 800 feet away or recognizing a car from up to three miles away.)
Many DFR programs use drones that are capable of autonomous or semi-autonomous flight: the drone can take off, fly to a designated location and remain at that location without a human pilot needing to manually manipulate a controller. Skydio advertises these capabilities as part of the X10 platform: it states that the drone is capable of autonomous flight using AI-powered obstacle avoidance, both during the day and at night, and that it can also track people or vehicles automatically. However, Connolly said during Thursday’s meeting that Flagstaff’s DFR program would have human pilots controlling the drones at all times.
Geofencing would restrict the drones from flying too close to areas of restricted or crowded airspace, like the Flagstaff Pulliam Airport or the Flagstaff Medical Center. While the Skydio drones also have automated aircraft avoidance systems, it’s not clear whether or how city-operated drones would be visually distinguishable from privately operated models, either from the air or the ground.
The three drones would be flown and monitored by pilots and analysts working in conjunction with dispatchers at the Consolidated City of Flagstaff / Coconino County Emergency Communications Call Center, which is the unified dispatch center for police, sheriff, fire and emergency medical services in this area. It is not yet clear how many personnel would be needed to staff the program.
Department leaders said repeatedly that a drone would be able to arrive on scene quicker than a police or fire vehicle, without the complications of road traffic, and allow dispatchers to assess situational needs more accurately.
Authorized personnel would be able to assume control of the drone or view its footage in real-time, allowing someone such as a deputy police chief or a fire department battalion chief to see the same video being broadcast to the dispatch center.
According to police, the drones would not be recording while in transit to or from an incident. All footage captured by the drones would be subject to the same privacy, redaction and retention requirements as body camera footage. (Seay said footage from routine or non-criminal calls is retained for one year; footage from misdemeanor incidents for three years; and footage from felonies or suspected felonies for seven years.)
According to Connolly, the cost of the drones themselves and accompanying software would be about $12,000 annually as part of a package deal with Axon Enterprises. Axon already provides body cameras, Tasers, digital evidence storage and additional digital services — including automated translation through officer body cameras and its “Draft One” transcription product for generating written police reports from body-camera footage — to the Flagstaff Police Department under a five-year, $3.5 million contract.
The cost of additional training for program personnel, possible modifications to the dispatch center or other auxiliary expenses has not been confirmed.
Connolly said the police department would dispatch drones to situations involving “Part I” violent crimes or property crimes. “Part I” is a Federal Bureau of Investigation classification that includes homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson and human trafficking.
The drones could also be dispatched to assist firefighters in verifying smoke reports.
“We get calls for smoke in an area quite often,” said Matt Turner, logistics and support services captain for the fire department, on Tuesday. “Sometimes they’re real, sometimes they’re not. But as you can imagine, it’s difficult to find wildfires, even in the city, because to the eye it’s often difficult to tell how far away it is, exactly where it’s at.”
Operations battalion chief Eric Caputo said Thursday that drones could also help the fire department respond to and verify automated crash alerts or potential medical emergencies.
“I’m in the lifesaving business, guys, and that’s what I want to do. And I know that seconds count,” Caputo said.
Daniel Kelly of the Emergency Management department said a drone could be used to help determine the extent of a flood event — like the one that left Leroux Street underwater last week — or other potential large-scale emergencies.
Questions remain about how the use of the drones would be prioritized if multiple agencies were simultaneously requesting drone launches for different incidents. That may be codified in a proposed policy, but may also be left partially to the discretion of a dispatch supervisor.
Given the drones’ limited range and flight time, they likely could not be used to assist regional law enforcement partners outside the city limits. However, Seay said it was possible the drones could be dispatched to nearby incidents at the request of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office or the Northern Arizona University Police Department, if those requests met the police department’s criteria for use.
Police said the drones could be used at large events where law enforcement already has a presence, like the Pickin’ in the Pines music festival or Northern Arizona University’s graduation. On Thursday, an audience member asked if the drones would be used to monitor protests. Connolly replied, “We will not be using those drones as first responders to be overhead monitoring First Amendment assemblies” — unless there is a violent incident or the situation gets “out of control.”
Questions, concerns and unknowns
The discussions held last week covered a lot of ground. Unsurprisingly, one of the key points of contention was whether or not a DFR program should be seen as a form of surveillance. Police leaders stated emphatically that the drones would not be used for “randomized surveillance,” for policing low-level “quality-of-life” offenses like public intoxication or for (in the chief’s words) “just going out and looking for things.”
Connolly promised transparency in the program’s operations, if it comes to fruition.
“You have my commitment that every flight that this thing takes is auditable, it will be audited, and we hope to be able to put that — be patient with us, we’re very upstream with this — on a public-facing dashboard,” he said.
However, some audience members expressed fears that the department’s policy could shift after the technology was acquired, or that individual personnel might abuse the system’s capabilities. One referenced Flock, saying the Flagstaff community had “resoundingly” rejected that system, and added that drones appeared to them to be just another form of surveillance.
Another area of concern was data-sharing and data security — something that was a crux of the public discussions about Flock last year. Connolly, Seay and deputy police chief Ryan Beckman stressed that the department has been using Axon’s body-worn cameras since 2014 with “zero data integrity issues,” calling the contact with the company “a proven partnership” with “an impeccable record.”
Connolly said bluntly that he would not share any DFR footage with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless directly ordered by a court.
“I’m not going to violate court orders. But in my 33 years [in law enforcement], I’ve never had that type of request or court order,” he added.
Unlike Flock cameras, Skydio drones would not be part of a nationwide (or even regionwide or statewide) network. Axon has been in existence much longer than Flock and operates with a different business model. Still, not everyone present seemed satisfied or reassured by the department’s faith in the company.
Others questioned whether Skydio was an appropriate partner for the city. They noted that Skydio is a major defense contractor, and advertises its drones as “military surveillance technology.” (In July, the Minneapolis City Council rejected a DFR pilot program with Skydio over the company’s contracts with ICE and the Israeli military. Those connections were not specifically referenced at the Tuesday or Thursday meetings.)
Connolly responded that other suppliers of law enforcement equipment, including Glock and Motorola (makers of handguns and radios, respectively) also have military ties, and that the Flagstaff Police Department cannot control those contracts.
“Even though Skydio may have a relationship in military defense contracts, this is not that application,” he said.
A few people appeared skeptical about the necessity of the program. One person on Tuesday questioned whether Flagstaff really had enough incidences of violent crime to justify the new system, and another person on Thursday suggested the DFR program might be “a boondoggle more than a solution.” Someone else asked if drones were more than a band-aid solution for larger problems of staffing and infrastructure.
That said, there was nobody in attendance at either of the two meetings attended by the Daily Sun who said out loud that they were wholly opposed to the concept.
In a different vein entirely, some attendees worried about potential conflicts with aircraft — particularly, the medical transport helicopters that frequently land at and take off from Flagstaff Medical Center. There is no air traffic controller at the hospital, and helicopter pilots from Guardian Air, Native Air or other companies fly by sight on their final approach. Multiple people referenced the 2008 incident in which a Guardian Air helicopter and a Classic Lifeguard helicopter collided over McMillan Mesa, killing seven.
Department leaders stressed that they have been in contact with Guardian already and are incorporating that risk into their planning.
“All of those steps are being taken now to mitigate any kind of threat to a helicopter,” Beckman said.
No date for a formal presentation to the city council has been confirmed. It is possible that the police department (or other city departments) may host additional meetings on the subject in the interim.
“In that gap, we want to make sure we’re continuing to engage,” Connolly said.
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