Wyoming PD Goes from One Drone to Three on $26K Vote

The Wyoming Police Department is going from one drone to three. The Wyoming City Council approved $26,226 for two new aircraft on May 18 in a 5-1 vote, with one council member dissenting on surveillance grounds.

The department flew its existing drone 131 times in 2025, and command staff say the additional units will close coverage gaps and keep officers out of blind alleys during pursuits.

What the Council Approved

The vote came at the May 18 Wyoming City Council meeting. Council members backed the purchase 5-1, with At-Large member Robert Arnoys citing internal tracking and accountability as the reason he’s comfortable signing off. Second Ward councilmember Marissa Postler cast the only no vote.

City Manager John Shay framed the spend as an officer safety expense first. “We’re not out there just eavesdropping on people,” he told the council, arguing the drones keep officers from chasing suspects “in back alleys completely blind.”

The $26,226 figure covers both aircraft together. That works out to about $13,100 per unit. The price point matters, and we’ll come back to it.

What the Drones Actually Do

Lt. Aaron Brooks runs point on the program. He told the council the department uses drones to locate fleeing suspects and map fatal traffic crashes, and called the technology a “game changer” for officer safety and scene reconstruction.

The 2025 deployment log gives that pitch some teeth. Wyoming PD flew its existing drone 131 times last year. Brooks cited the apprehension of multiple hit-and-run suspects and the location of a subject wanted for attempted homicide who was hiding in a neighbor’s backyard.

The current drone is four years old and approaching end of life. Brooks said operating a fleet of three solves the battery gap problem too. When one aircraft runs down mid-incident, another lifts off without a coverage break.

Twelve officers are currently certified to fly. Ten more are in training. That’s a deep bench, and it signals Wyoming intends to keep drones in routine rotation, not lock them in a closet for special events.

The Surveillance Question

As MLive reported, Postler didn’t argue with the operational case. She trusts the department. Her concern was cultural drift. “I know we’ve had a drone for a few years now, but our culture, our society as a whole, has dramatically changed in those few years,” she said.

Capt. Eric Wiler walked the council through the policy guardrails. Officers can’t use drones to harass, intimidate, or discriminate. Department policy prohibits recording any location where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, like a fenced yard or a home interior.

There’s one carve-out: exigent circumstances during pursuit of a suspect. Brooks compared it to canine deployment. If a suspect flees a felonious assault and jumps a backyard fence, officers (and now drones) can follow.

Footage and flight logs route through Axon, the same vendor handling Wyoming’s body-worn cameras. Every flight path and altitude is recorded. That centralization is a real audit advantage. It’s also a single point of failure if the policy ever loosens, because the data ecosystem is already built.

The Hardware Question Nobody Asked

The reporting didn’t identify the make or model of the new drones, and the council memo doesn’t appear to either. At roughly $13,100 per unit, the math narrows the candidates considerably.

Skydio’s X10, the standard American DFR option right now, typically runs higher than $13,100 once payloads and ground stations are bundled in. That doesn’t rule it out at a stripped configuration, but it’s tight.

DJI’s Matrice 4T, released this cycle, sits in the $9,000 to $15,000 range depending on payload and is the cleanest fit for the price. The Mavic 3T Enterprise is cheaper but a weaker pursuit aircraft.

The existing Wyoming drone, purchased four years ago, would have been bought during the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise and Matrice 300 era, when DJI was effectively the only serious option for a department this size. Continuity tends to favor the incumbent platform.

The model is not confirmed in the source material. Wyoming PD would need to confirm directly. But the price tag tells a story the agenda item doesn’t.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud. The Michigan House passed two of the 15 SHIELD drone bills on May 14, both aimed at restricting state and public-entity spending on Chinese-made aircraft. Four days later, Wyoming City Council approved a drone purchase at a price point that, in 2026, almost certainly points to a Chinese-made airframe.

Both things can be true. The bills aren’t law yet, and Wyoming PD acted entirely within current rules. The timing is a clean snapshot of where American municipal drone procurement actually sits: departments buy the hardware that flies best for the money, and the political layer is running behind operations, not ahead of them.

The 131 deployments in 2025 is the number worth keeping. A drone that flies that often is no longer a special-events toy. It’s infrastructure. Tripling the fleet doesn’t triple the surveillance footprint by itself, but it removes the last operational excuse for not flying.

From here, the only check on use is the policy Capt. Wiler outlined and the Axon flight log behind it. That’s a reasonable set of guardrails. It’s also entirely dependent on the next chief, the next council, and the next Axon retention policy holding the line.

Postler’s no vote doesn’t read like obstruction. It reads like someone naming the temperature of the water before everyone else notices it’s warm.

Photo credit: Wyoming PD