LAPD Skydio Drones Orbited No Kings Protest for Seven Hours, Flight Records Show

The Los Angeles Police Department used its Drone as First Responder program to surveil two major protests this year, flight records show. The department’s Skydio X10 drones began circling the March 28 No Kings rally in downtown Los Angeles at 2 p.m., more than three hours before the 5:30 p.m. dispersal order, and kept flying until 9 p.m. Thirty-two drone launches are documented for that day. Nine of those flights launched before police issued any order to disperse.

Software engineer and flight data researcher John Wiseman identified the flights using publicly available data shared by the LAPD and Skydio. A heat map he built from that data shows the aircraft concentrated over the Metropolitan Detention Center and the intersection of North Central Avenue and East Temple Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. The demonstration drew tens of thousands of attendees. Local ABC News described a largely peaceful march before police issued the dispersal order at dusk.

The LAPD later arrested 75 people. Seventy-four of those arrests were for failure to disperse.

The DFR Program’s Stated Purpose

The LAPD launched its Drone as First Responder (DFR) program with a clearly stated mandate: dispatch a drone to a 911 call before officers arrive, assess the scene from the air, and reduce unnecessary police presence. As DroneXL reported in February 2026, the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners unanimously approved a $2.1 million donation from the Los Angeles Police Foundation for a three-year Skydio contract, expanding the program to 23 rooftop docking stations across eight LAPD divisions. The department also built a public transparency website logging every deployment, including flight paths, as proof of accountability.

That same website became the data source for this story.

The LAPD’s program page states the system “prioritizes the protection of individual privacy” and tells the public that officers using the drone are not interested in recording anyone “unless you are in the commission of a crime or under criminal investigation.” When the Los Angeles Police Commission approved the program’s expansion to routine emergency calls in June 2025, Commissioner Teresa Sanchez Gordon asked directly about demonstrations. “I just want to make sure that the recording of these activities will not be used against individuals who are lawfully exercising their rights,” she said at the time. Officials told the Commission that drones would not track lawful demonstrators.

63 Launches Across Two Protests

January 31 came first. LAPD drones launched at least 31 times over the “ICE Out” protest in downtown Los Angeles, where thousands marched against immigration enforcement raids and street violence in Minneapolis. The Los Angeles Times described the event as mostly peaceful before demonstrators refused to disperse after dark, at which point police deployed tear gas.

The March 28 No Kings rally followed the same pattern at larger scale. Flight data shows the drones were operational three and a half hours before any dispersal order existed. At 5:30 p.m., police ordered the crowd to leave. The drones had already been in the air since 2 p.m. and continued until 9 p.m.

Together, the two protests account for 63 documented DFR drone launches. In both cases, the aerial presence preceded any criminal activity by hours.

The LAPD’s Explanation

LAPD Lt. Matthew Jacobs told The Intercept the department does not record unless a crime is occurring. On the question of protest monitoring, he said drones are deployed “at the request of the Incident Commander” and characterized the purpose as identifying specific individuals, not documenting First Amendment activity. He added that 99 percent of protest deployments occur because commanders report a crime in progress, and acknowledged that at times the department simply “wants to see how big a crowd is.”

When asked why drones were circling the No Kings rally more than three hours before any dispersal order, Jacobs said the department “cannot provide deeper insight into specifics of a single flight.”

Any recorded footage is retained indefinitely. The LAPD did not answer questions about how much protest-related data it has collected to date or who monitors live feeds during demonstrations.

The Skydio X10 Can Identify a Person From 2,500 Feet Away

The aircraft the LAPD deployed is the Skydio X10. According to Skydio, the drone can detect a person from more than 8,000 feet (approximately 2,438 meters) and identify an individual from more than 2,500 feet (762 meters). License plate reading is possible from 800 feet (244 meters).

In 2025, Skydio CEO Adam Bry demonstrated DFR Command software allowing two officers to operate eight drones simultaneously, automatically tracking license plates and following people of interest. In March 2026, the FAA approved Skydio to let a single pilot operate up to four drones at once under a new multi-drone BVLOS waiver pathway, with 12 public safety agencies already holding that authorization. As Skydio disclosed alongside its $110 million Series F this month, 16 million Americans now live within two miles of a Skydio DFR dock.

The LAPD’s transparency portal, designed to show that the technology is being used responsibly, gave Wiseman the data he needed to show it circled a peaceful assembly for seven hours. That is not a failure of the transparency system. It is the transparency system doing exactly what it was built to do.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve stood on Manhattan streets during New York No Kings marches and watched NYPD Skydio drones work overhead. DroneXL reported in November 2025 that the NYPD conducted 6,546 drone flights in the first half of that year, a 3,200 percent surge since 2022, and that drone footage from an October 2025 No Kings march was used to identify and arrest protesters. The Los Angeles data confirms the same operational pattern in a second major city, with a transparency record that is harder to argue against.

The ACLU named this pattern in a March 2026 whitepaper that cited DroneXL’s own protest surveillance reporting as documented evidence. ICE was running the same approach with Skydio X10D drones capable of identifying individuals from nearly a mile away. The agencies are different. The aircraft are the same. The constitutional question is identical.

What’s absent is any federal standard defining when a DFR drone may fly over a lawful assembly, what authorization level is required, and how long footage may be retained when no crime was recorded. LAPD’s answer to that last question is indefinitely. The Los Angeles City Council approved the $2.1 million Skydio contract that funds this program. Whether it will now ask Lt. Jacobs to explain a seven-hour flight timeline over Little Tokyo before approving the next round of funding is the question the LAPD’s own transparency data has put on the table.

Source: The Intercept and John Wiseman

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.