Fresno’s Skydio X10 Drones Catch Dick’s Sporting Goods Thieves

Fresno Police arrested two suspects last week after a Skydio X10 drone tracked their getaway car from a Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Northwest Fresno, marking another high-visibility win for the city’s recently launched Drone as First Responder program, as reported by ABC 30.

According to Fresno PD, the case unfolded near Shaw and Valentine avenues. Store employees spotted a man concealing merchandise in his clothing while a woman accompanied him through the store.

As the pair left in a gray Honda Pilot, a police Skydio X10 drone launched from the rooftop dock at the Northwest district station and tracked the vehicle from the air. Officers on the ground used the live feed to coordinate and intercept the SUV, conducting a traffic stop near Brawley and Weber avenues.

The suspects, a 39-year-old man and a 43-year-old woman, were identified, arrested, and charged with grand theft. Investigators later linked the same pair to a second theft at a Dick’s Sporting Goods location in Northeast Fresno earlier that same day.

This wasn’t a lucky catch. It’s the kind of outcome the program was specifically funded and positioned to deliver.

Why the Program Was Built for Exactly This

Fresno PD launched its DFR program on March 23, 2026, and the placement of the drones tells you everything about the agency’s priorities. Two of the Skydio X10 units sit on top of the Northeast and Northwest district stations, the areas Police Chief Mindy Casto has identified as having the most retail theft in the city.

A third drone covers downtown from headquarters. The funding mix reinforces that focus: one of the three X10s was purchased through a donation to the Fresno Police Chief’s Foundation, while the other two were funded with Organized Retail Theft grant money.

The Dick’s case is exactly the use case those grant funders had in mind. A drone in the air before officers arrive on scene means the suspects don’t get to fade into traffic. They get followed in real time, with continuous video evidence, while patrol units close in from a position the suspects can’t see.

The Hardware Behind the Catch

The aircraft doing this work is the Skydio X10, an American-made platform purpose-built for DFR operations and one of the few enterprise drones that’s both NDAA compliant and capable of fully autonomous flight. Each Fresno unit lives on a rooftop dock that keeps it charged and ready to launch in under 20 seconds, with autonomous flight pathing that gets it on scene in under 90 seconds.

Its operational radius runs about three miles (4.8 km) from the dock, which is how Fresno PD planned its coverage zones across the city. The X10 carries a 64-megapixel telephoto camera, a wide-angle color sensor, and a radiometric thermal payload, giving pilots the ability to identify vehicles, read plates, and track subjects through low light or smoke.

Once airborne, the X10 streams live encrypted video back to the Real Time Crime Center, into patrol car computers, and to officers’ department-issued phones, so everyone in the response chain sees the same picture at the same moment. Footage uploads automatically into the department’s Axon evidence system, maintaining chain-of-custody for prosecution. None of this is theoretical capability sitting in a brochure.

As of mid-April, the program had run 275 service calls, identified persons or vehicles of interest on 148 of them before ground units even arrived, and cleared roughly 20% of calls without sending an officer at all.

That the platform is US-built also matters in 2026. With ongoing federal restrictions on DJI procurement for public safety agencies and the broader push toward Blue UAS-compliant hardware, Skydio has become the default choice for departments running DFR programs at scale. Fresno isn’t an outlier on that front. It’s part of a national pattern.

What This Means for Retail Theft

Organized retail theft has become an expensive problem for big-box chains, and traditional response has been slow. By the time a 911 call gets dispatched and a patrol unit arrives, the suspects are usually gone. Drones flip that math.

A unit that can be airborne in less than a minute, with a three-mile (4.8 km) radius and high-resolution optics that can track a single vehicle through residential streets, turns “they got away” into “we tracked the gray Honda Pilot from the parking lot to Brawley and Weber.”

That’s why retail theft grant programs are paying for these aircraft. The return is measurable in arrests like the Dick’s case, and equally measurable in the deterrent effect once organized theft crews realize a specific city has eyes in the sky on a three-mile radius around the stores they were planning to hit.

DroneXL’s Take

The takeaway: this is what DFR looks like when it actually works. Not the marketing pitch, not the press conference, just an arrest report that says the drone tracked the vehicle until officers on the ground caught up. That’s the entire value proposition in one sentence.

Privacy advocates will (correctly) push back on expanding aerial surveillance, and that debate isn’t going away. But the Fresno case isn’t a fishing expedition. It’s a Skydio X10 responding to an active theft call, following a specific vehicle leaving a specific crime scene, and handing off to ground officers for a traffic stop based on probable cause.

That’s well within the lane these programs were designed for, and frankly, it’s the kind of case that’s going to make it harder for opponents to argue against expansion.

The broader story is that DFR is no longer experimental. Skydio’s DFR Command platform recently crossed 10 million processed calls for service across the US. Hundreds of agencies are running or planning programs.

Fresno is one data point in a national pattern, and the pattern is clear: drones are becoming part of standard police response, the same way body cameras did a decade ago. The Dick’s Sporting Goods arrest isn’t going to be the last drone-assisted retail theft case to make local news, and at this rate, soon it won’t be news at all. That’s the real shift. When drone-tracked arrests stop being headlines, the technology has won.

Photo credit: Fresno PD, Skydio.