Michigan Drone Operator Fined $575 in Jury Conviction

A Bay County District Court jury has convicted Bay City digital creator Ray A. Rocha of interfering with a police search by flying his drone over the same airspace where Sheriff’s deputies were running their own search on November 10, 2024.

The six-person jury delivered the verdict on May 1, 2026, and Judge Timothy J. Kelly fined Rocha $575 on June 16 under the Michigan Unmanned Aircraft Systems Act of 2016, the first reported jury conviction under the statute.

The November 2024 Incident That Led to the Charge

The underlying operation was a foot pursuit. Bay County Sheriff’s deputies were searching for suspects who had stolen a vehicle, abandoned it, and fled on foot into a wooded area near the intersection of West Arnold and South Warner streets in Bay County. The sheriff’s office launched its own drone to run aerial search-and-locate on the suspects from above. While that operation was active, Rocha launched a civilian drone over the same area and began livestreaming the scene to Facebook.

The deputy operating the sheriff’s drone noticed the second aircraft in the airspace and began tracking it as a hazard rather than as press coverage. That deputy’s testimony at trial was the prosecution’s spine. Two drones, no coordination, no Notice to Air Missions, and a manned ground operation underneath both of them.

The Collision Hazard and the Livestream That Did the Damage

Two specific pieces of evidence pushed the case from civil complaint to jury conviction. The first was an avoided mid-air collision. The deputy testified that if he had activated the sheriff’s drone’s automated return-to-home function during the operation, the two aircraft could have collided in flight. The presence of an uncoordinated second drone in the operating volume took an automated safety feature off the table for as long as Rocha was airborne.

The second was the livestream content itself. Rocha’s Facebook broadcast did not just frame the scene from the air. According to the deputy, Rocha zoomed in on the sheriff’s drone to demonstrate to viewers how far away the civilian operator was from the police aircraft.

That zoom on a live public feed showed the position of the sheriff’s drone and, by extension, the search corridor the deputies were running on the ground. Prosecutors argued, and the jury agreed, that the broadcast had the potential to reveal officer positions to anyone watching, including the suspects.

The Defense Argument the Jury Rejected

As MLive reported, Attorney Joseph M. Albosta built his defense on two constitutional pillars. The first was the First and Fourteenth Amendments, framing Rocha’s drone footage and livestream as protected journalistic activity from a digital creator covering a public-safety incident.

The second was preemption: that exclusive authority over US airspace rests with the Federal Aviation Administration, not with local sheriff’s deputies, and that a county-level law-enforcement officer could not lawfully treat a civilian drone flight as interference.

The six-person jury rejected both arguments. The legal mechanism is worth noticing. Michigan’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Act of 2016 does not regulate airspace itself, which is what would trigger an FAA preemption fight.

It criminalizes specific conduct on the ground and in the air that interferes with public-safety operations. The First Amendment question was harder, and the case will probably draw an appeal from defense, but at the trial level the jury concluded that interference with an active police operation is not protected speech.

What sits with me on this case is the gap. The pilot was broadcasting at the standoff distance his hardware allowed, and his public channel documents use of the DJI Air 3 and the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, the latter delivering 7x to 28x optical zoom. He was not breaking any FAA rule.

The jury’s answer was that operational interference with a police search counts as a crime even when the camera itself is flying within federal rules. The question that stays open for appeal is whether the collision risk the deputy maintained under oath looks the same on the tape the operator himself recorded.

Inside the Michigan UAS Act of 2016

The Michigan Unmanned Aircraft Systems Act, passed in 2016, was one of the earlier state-level UAS statutes in the United States. It contains a specific offense titled “having an unmanned aircraft interfering with public safety” that defines interference broadly enough to cover what Rocha did: flying near, recording, or transmitting from the airspace around an active emergency-response or law-enforcement operation in a way that obstructs or hinders it.

The offense is a misdemeanor with a statutory cap of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. Rocha’s $575 sentence includes court costs above the base fine.

The conviction sets a Michigan precedent. Until last month, the statute had been enforced mostly through civil dispositions and warnings. A jury verdict at the district-court level is a stronger position for prosecutors elsewhere in the state who have similar cases sitting on their desks.

DroneXL’s Take

The part that doesn’t make the headline, this case is not really about a $575 fine. It is about a six-person jury looking at a livestreamed Facebook video of a sheriff’s drone in flight, listening to a defense attorney argue First Amendment protection for the operator who shot it, and deciding that the interference was the thing that mattered, not the speech. That is the precedent. The fine is incidental. The criminal record is what travels.

The case also fits inside the broader story DroneXL has been tracking this week. The Texas Department of Public Safety has seized eight drones at the Houston World Cup TFR and is pursuing a felony case on one of them.

A Michigan jury has just convicted a digital creator under a six-year-old state statute. Different statutes, different airspace contexts, different operator profiles, same direction of travel for civilian operators who fly into the working volume of an active law-enforcement operation without coordination.

The line to respect in this specific case is operational safety. Drones will always be a risk to the people standing underneath them, but as long as the rules are respected, the operator has every right to broadcast what happens in his city.

Photo credit: Facebook, Cole Waterman.