By admin 
The Sacramento Police Department is plans to purchase 52 new drones next year, eight of which will be part of a pilot program experimenting with using the technology to respond to 911 calls.
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Under Assembly Bill 481, law enforcement agencies are required to obtain approval prior to the purchase or use of military equipment, along with an annual report of how the technology has been deployed in the previous year. Drones are considered military equipment under the law.
The City Council will be the ultimate decision maker when it comes to approving , but in the meantime the police department is seeking community feedback on its draft through an online survey. The city’s Police Review Commission will also be discussing the draft plan at its August meeting.
The department currently possesses about $4.8 million in military equipment, including rifles, specialized firearms, robots, chemical agents and several armored vehicles. This year police are hoping to procure about $186,000 worth of equipment.
Police are hoping to procure around $110,000 worth of new uncrewed aerial systems, more commonly known as drones. Training and maintenance costs related to the drones amount to another $47,000. The department currently possesses 49 drones, but an unspecified number are set to be retired and replaced by the new acquisitions.
Many of these would be used in the city’s emerging Drone as First Responder program, which dispatches automated or remotely piloted aerial drones directly to the scene of 911 emergency calls. Sacramento PD is one of many law enforcement agencies across the country exploring the technology which is most commonly sold by companies such as Axon and Flock Safety, more commonly known for their increasingly controversial license plate reading networks.
The department is looking to buy eight Skydio X10 drones from Axon, the same company the department contracts with to surveil cars in the city. Skydio was the subject of a recent controversy when three hours of San Francisco Police Department drone footage was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet via Skydio’s website. Skydio claims that the drone videos were exposed as a result of a misuse of its software by SFPD.
According to the Skydio website, the X10 model is capable of recognizing people from a 2,620-foot distance and reading license plates from 800 feet away. Thermal imaging tech and sensors can detect people on a roof in complete darkness and can “seamlessly” track people and vehicles even when they move out of view.
“Ultimate control becomes second nature,” the product description on the Skydio website reads.
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Though police launched a DFR pilot program in 2024, Capt. Clayton Buchanan said that the program could not be fully tested with the equipment available to them at the time.
The other $76,000 would primarily go toward replenishing blasting caps, flash bang rounds, rifle ammunition and smoke grenades.
Community meeting on military equipment
At a Wednesday community meeting with representatives from the police department and the Police Review Commission held in Oak Park, many expressed their concern about the use of military equipment and surveillance technology in the wake of the city’s renewed commitment to its partnership with a federal fusion center which shares local data with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.
Sacramento PD has maintained that it follows Sacramento’s sanctuary city policies and that it does not share information to be used for civil immigration enforcement, but critics of the department have expressed doubt that the policies are being upheld by local and federal agencies.
“We own the data,” Buchanan said at the community meeting. “We only share it with the people that we determine to share it with.”
Buchanan also refuted concerns that the department would follow in the footsteps of the county sheriff and use drone technology to locate and contact homeless people and encampments.
“That is not the purpose of this program,” he said. “The purpose of the DFR program would be to have faster police response to people calling for service, for help.”
The 2026 military equipment use report draft is available to view . The department is seeking feedback through a community survey which will be available through Aug. 7.
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