St. Petersburg PD Puts Skydio X10 Drone Hive on Its Rooftop

The St. Petersburg Police Department has activated a rooftop Drone Hive at its headquarters — three Skydio X10 drones docked and ready to launch within seconds of a priority call. Chief Anthony Holloway announced the expansion this week, and the numbers behind it are already making a case for what comes next, as reported by WUSF.

What the Drone Hive Actually Does

The Drone Hive sits on the roof of SPPD’s headquarters and connects directly to the department’s newly built Real Time Intelligence Center.

When a priority one or two call comes in, pilots inside the RTIC can launch a drone before the first patrol car leaves the lot. The aircraft covers up to 3 miles from its docking station, flies at 46 mph, and gets eyes on a scene within five minutes or less.

“After a person has called in with a description, now we have eyes on the scene,” Chief Holloway said. “So we can give officers information on how they can drive into the scene safely or how they can set up the perimeter.”

The live feed streams to pilots at the RTIC and can be pushed directly to command staff watching remotely. The drones carry thermal imaging for nighttime operations and enough optical zoom to determine whether a suspect is armed and, according to Holloway, what type of weapon they’re carrying.

The system isn’t autonomous. Florida law requires a human pilot for every flight, and Holloway noted that state law also prohibits using the airborne cameras for surveillance unless a crime has already been committed. The RTIC is staffed by a sergeant, two sworn pilot officers, and civilian analysts who also monitor several hundred city-owned cameras across St. Petersburg.

A Program Seven Years in the Making

SPPD’s drone program didn’t start with a Drone Hive. It started in 2019 with a handful of aircraft supporting SWAT operations and traffic investigations. Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 pushed the department to use drones differently — when flooding made roads impassable, aerial footage became the only reliable way to report conditions to the Emergency Operations Center.

That pivot led to a formal Drone as First Responder initiative in March 2025, when SPPD began dispatching drones to active police calls. The Hive launched earlier this year after a testing period. Since March 2025, the program has been deployed to more than 860 priority calls.

Sergeant Robert Long, who oversees the program, said the focus stays on the highest-stakes work. “With our setup and the amount of drones we have, we focus on our priority one and two calls, which are higher level, if you think felony level calls typically,” he said.

The Hive drones don’t replace the department’s existing handheld fleet. Officers still carry drones in their patrol vehicles for calls where the Hive’s 3-mile radius doesn’t cover the location.

Between the rooftop system and car-deployed units, SPPD now runs 11 drones total across 37 certified pilots. Every pilot clears FAA Part 107 certification before entering the department’s internal training program.

The Skydio X10 and Florida’s Procurement Reality

SPPD’s Drone Hive runs Skydio X10s, the platform that has become the default choice for Florida law enforcement operating under the state’s DJI and Autel procurement ban.

Florida law bars government agencies from purchasing drones manufactured by foreign countries of concern, which removes the two most cost-competitive platforms from the market entirely and leaves agencies buying from an approved list that currently includes Skydio, Parrot, Teal, Altavian, and Vantage Robotics.

The Skydio X10 is a purpose-built public safety drone that carries EO and thermal sensors, omnidirectional obstacle avoidance, and the dock-based autonomous launch capability that makes a Drone Hive possible.

It tops out at 46 mph — matching exactly what SPPD confirmed in public statements — and streams live video to remote command centers via encrypted link. It’s a capable platform. It’s also one that runs $16,000 to $25,000 per unit, before software subscriptions and infrastructure costs.

Nearby Clearwater PD is piloting a Skydio-based DFR program of its own. St. Cloud PD launched a full Skydio X10 DFR operation in November 2025. Port Richey paid $25,000 per X10 — the maximum reimbursable under Florida’s FDLE grant program.

Orlando approved 11 Skydio drones across nine docking stations for $6.83 million in February. SPPD is now one of the more ambitious deployments in the state, with plans to add four more Hives across the city over the next two years and grow the fleet beyond 20 aircraft.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I actually think: the operational numbers here are the real story. Over 860 priority calls in roughly 14 months is not a pilot program anymore — it’s a functioning infrastructure layer. SPPD didn’t just buy three drones and park them on a roof for the press photos.

They built a staffed intelligence center, trained 37 pilots, connected the Hive to a live call dispatch workflow, and have been quietly running it through the kind of real-world call volume that tests whether a program actually works. It does.

The harder question is the one that follows every Florida DFR story: what is this costing, and what would the same capability cost without the state’s procurement restrictions? Holloway said the department is focused on “maximizing the program’s impact while remaining within their allotted budget.”

That’s a polite way of acknowledging that Skydio X10s at up to $25,000 a unit are expensive tools to scale across a city. Four more Hives, 12 additional drones, ongoing software subscriptions, and the infrastructure to dock them citywide adds up fast. The program is working. The price tag is the part of the press release nobody reads aloud.

Photo credit: St. Petersburg PD