Sacramento Sheriff Used A $999 DJI Avata 2 To Disarm A Suspect, And The Politics Are Sharper Than The Knife

A Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office pilot flew a consumer FPV drone into a garage, found a barricaded parolee holding a knife, and pulled the blade out of his hand with a magnet before any deputy stepped into the room. The agency calls it a nationwide first. The aircraft that did it is a DJI Avata 2, a $999 cinewhoop sold to hobbyists for flying through skate parks, not a purpose-built police platform. That detail reframes the whole story.

The standoff happened June 18 on Goya Parkway in south Sacramento, after Folsom police tracked 30-year-old Austin Carter, a parolee-at-large with a weapons history, to the residence and requested help from the Sheriff’s Special Enforcement Detail. Deputies say Carter had been seen earlier with a firearm and stopped responding to negotiators. They surrounded the home, sent the drone inside, and located him in the corner of a garage. One hand was hidden under his body. The other held a knife. He was alive but motionless, which left deputies with the worst kind of question: dead, or waiting.

Rather than rush the corner, a pilot attached a powerful magnet to the aircraft and flew it in to lift the knife clear. A robot dog named “Buster” moved debris to open the garage. A police canine finished the arrest. Carter was taken into custody without a shot fired. The video the Sheriff’s Office released on June 22, scored to the “Mission: Impossible” theme, shows the knife spinning through the air as the drone carries it back to deputies.

The DJI Avata 2 Is A Consumer Toy Doing A SWAT Job

The DJI Avata 2 is a cinewhoop, a small first-person-view drone with integrated propeller guards built to bump off walls and fly indoors at low speed. It weighs roughly 377 grams (13 ounces), runs about 23 minutes per battery, shoots 4K, and starts at $999 for the Fly More Combo with goggles. DJI markets it for immersive content creation. It is the kind of drone you hand a teenager, not the kind a city council line-items into a public safety budget.

That is exactly why it worked here. The ducted guards let a pilot fly into a cluttered garage and bounce off door frames without crashing, and the airframe is light and nimble enough to maneuver a magnet up to a suspect’s hand with the precision the footage shows. A 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) dock-based DFR cruiser built to orbit a freeway could not have done this. The job called for the cheapest, smallest aircraft in the building, and a skilled pilot flying in goggles made it look easy. That skill is the part the “Mission: Impossible” edit undersells. Flying a magnet into a knife held in a man’s hand, inside a dark garage, without injuring him, is not a maneuver you pull off on your first week in FPV goggles.

Sacramento Has Flown Cheap Indoor Drones For Years

The “nationwide first” is the magnet, not the tactic of flying a small drone into a structure during a standoff. Sacramento has been doing the harder version of that for half a decade. Back in 2020, I wrote about the Sacramento Police Department flying a roughly $93 cinewhoop FPV drone through a partially open door to clear an apartment, a job no DJI Matrice or Skydio platform of the day could do because they were too big and too fragile to bump walls. The Avata 2 is the same idea with a better camera and a magnet bolted on. A region that figured out the value of cheap, nimble indoor drones six years ago just used one to take a weapon off a suspect.

Other departments have reached the same conclusion. Wilmington PD flies a DJI Avata for building searches and barricaded-subject calls precisely because the ducted FPV airframe slips through tight indoor spaces larger drones cannot enter. The cinewhoop has quietly become the tool of choice for the one mission profile the expensive autonomous fleets cannot handle: inside a structure, in tight quarters, where a crash into a wall is expected rather than catastrophic.

A Chinese Drone Just Did The Thing Washington Is Trying To Ban

Here is where the model number stops being a spec and starts being the story. A California sheriff pulled off a headline-grabbing public safety win using Chinese-made hardware, at the exact moment the federal government is working to push DJI out of the U.S. market entirely. In December 2025 the FCC added foreign-made drones to its Covered List, and DJI has told the Ninth Circuit the action blocks 25 planned 2026 product launches and threatens a $1.56 billion loss this year. The whole policy push rests on the premise that police should be flying American-made Skydio aircraft instead.

The Avata 2 itself sits in regulatory limbo. Units already authorized before the December 22, 2025 cutoff remain legal to buy and fly, which is why a department can still acquire one off the shelf today. But no new DJI drone is getting authorized through retail channels in 2026, which means the platform Sacramento just used to such effect is one the federal government would prefer no agency could buy. The procurement debate has a clean talking point now, and it is flying a Chinese flag.

The Magnet Brushes Up Against DJI’s Own Anti-Weapon Policy

There is a second wrinkle the disarm raises. DJI has spent years insisting its drones are not for combat or weaponization. The company says it was the first drone maker to publicly denounce combat use of its products and pledges to uphold policies prohibiting military use. A magnet that removes a weapon is not a weapon, and a sheriff’s disarm is not combat. But it is a payload modification on a consumer DJI airframe used in a tactical law enforcement operation, which is squarely the gray zone DJI’s public messaging tries to stay clear of.

The irony is that DJI’s chief American rival has moved the other direction. Four days before the Sacramento standoff, Skydio CEO Adam Bry went on a podcast and walked back his company’s own no-weapons pledge, calling the impulse to draw ethical red lines around drone technology “dangerously misguided.” So the Chinese company maintains a no-weaponization stance while its American competitor abandons one, and the drone that disarmed a suspect in Sacramento came from the company still holding the line. Whatever the FCC Covered List is protecting against, this incident does not fit the script.

Drone As First Responder Programs Are Multiplying Across California

This incident lands inside a broader buildout. About 1,500 police agencies across the U.S. run drone programs, 58 of them in California, according to figures the Los Angeles Police Department has cited. The Chula Vista Police Department established the first Drone as First Responder program in 2018 and built the operational template the rest of the country copied. Fremont developed its own DFR program as far back as 2022 and got City Council approval to deploy in 2024.

The pace in 2026 has been relentless. San Bernardino County’s Yucaipa station launched a DFR pilot on May 28 using Skydio aircraft, and within weeks reported responding to more than 100 calls, arriving before deputies on 71% of them. That first-arrival figure mirrors what I covered at Dallas PD, where a Skydio drone reached a man walking into Interstate 45 traffic a day after the program went live. The same month, Orlando brought up an 11-drone Skydio network and Port St. Lucie logged 17 missions on day one. Closer to the Bay Area, Alameda County stood up a DFR program in 2025.

Almost all of those programs share a profile: large autonomous American-made aircraft launching from rooftop docks to provide overwatch on open-air calls. The Sacramento disarm is a different animal on every axis. A consumer Chinese drone, flown manually in goggles, indoors, used as a physical tool rather than a camera in the sky. The DFR headlines and the Sacramento clip point at the same future from opposite ends of the hardware catalog: the drone gets there first and does the part that puts a human at risk.

DroneXL’s Take

I have been writing about Sacramento flying drones into buildings since 2020, when the tool was a $93 FPV quad nosing through a doorway and the rest of the industry was still arguing about whether a Matrice could do search and rescue. Six years later the same region used a $999 DJI Avata 2 to physically remove a weapon from a suspect’s hand. That is a straight line, and it runs through the cheap end of the hardware catalog, not the expensive autonomous fleets that get the press releases.

What I keep coming back to is the politics sitting inside the airframe. Washington spent the better part of a decade building a case that DJI is a security threat American police should not touch, and the FCC finally put foreign drones on the Covered List in December. Then a California sheriff used a Chinese consumer drone to pull off the kind of clean, no-injury arrest every department wants on its highlight reel. The hardware that delivered the win is the hardware the policy is trying to remove. That contradiction does not resolve itself, and it is going to keep showing up every time a DJI airframe does something a Skydio dock cannot.

The thing I want answered, and the Sheriff’s Office did not address it, is whether this was one pilot’s improvisation or a sanctioned tactic with a policy behind it. That matters more than it sounds. A magnet that lifts a knife can lift other things, and a department flying a consumer DJI drone with a custom payload into a barricaded-subject call is operating in a space neither DJI’s own usage policy nor California’s drone law clearly covers. Watch for whether Sacramento releases an after-action detail or a written payload policy. If it does, other agencies copy the playbook and the Avata 2 quietly becomes a SWAT tool. If it does not, this stays a viral video, and the next pilot who tries it will be improvising in the same gray zone with less skill and a worse outcome waiting to happen.

Sources: SFGATE, CBS Sacramento, ABC10, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

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