St Paul Police Logged 472 DFR Flights in Four Weeks

The St Paul Police Department’s new dock-based Drone as First Responder program flew 472 missions in its first four weeks, already passing the 436 patrol-drone flights the department logged in all of 2025.

The three rooftop Skydio X10 drones went live on May 30 and now reach calls in under 90 seconds, a number St Paul published this week with a list of arrests and rescues to back it. Minnesota now has at least five cities running or building DFR programs, and every one of them so far runs on Skydio. St Paul is the proof that once a department turns on the docks, the flight count does not creep up. It explodes.

The system put a Skydio X10 over each patrol district

St Paul mounted one Skydio X10 on a rooftop in each of its three patrol districts. DroneXL identified the aircraft from footage released by the department.

Each drone covers a two-mile radius from its dock and stays in the air 20 to 30 minutes per flight depending on conditions, according to the department. The X10 carries both color video and thermal imaging cameras, the standard pairing for night calls and rooftop pursuits.

Senior Commander Ryan Murphy framed the goal in simple terms. “Our goal is to provide officer awareness, real-time information to better prepare them,” he told KSTP. Murphy also pointed to the cases the program has already closed. “The drone has found people within seconds and led officers to help that person.”

The aircraft do not fly alone. A real-time information center staffed by 14 officers runs 21 hours a day, watching feeds, routing coordinates to patrol units, and deciding which calls earn a drone in the first place. The drone is the visible piece. The staffed center is what turns a video feed into a tactical decision.

The Skydio choice puts St Paul squarely inside the Minnesota pattern. Minnetonka built its DFR program around six Skydio drones. Brooklyn Park approved a 4.6 million dollar Skydio deployment in late 2025. Bloomington began testing the Skydio X10 in May. Every public DFR rollout in Minnesota so far has gone to the same vendor.

472 flights in four weeks beats the entire 2025 patrol total

The number that makes this a story is the flight count. St Paul logged 472 DFR missions between May 30 and the late-June update, more than the 436 patrol-drone flights the department flew across all of 2025. That is a single month outpacing a full year.

The arrest numbers move in the same direction. The DFR program has located 33 people during its first weeks of operation, including missing children, individuals in mental health crisis, and criminal suspects. Those rescues and contacts contributed to 36 arrests.

Two cases the department highlighted give a feel for the response curve. A copper wire theft call drew a drone in one minute and 40 seconds. A search for a missing nine-year-old child put eyes overhead before patrol units finished staging.

If it were not for the price tag, I would call the Skydio X10 the perfect platform for a department just standing up its DFR program. The autonomy is mature, the thermal pairing is dialed in, and the dock-based deployment runs without a pilot babysitting the launch. So far, every department in Minnesota is voting with its checkbook for the same airframe.

Minnesota is becoming a Skydio test bed

As KSTP reported, St. Paul is not flying in isolation. Minnesota has quietly become one of the most active DFR clusters in the country over the last 12 months, and the cluster has a clear vendor.

Minnetonka launched its rooftop-based program in 2025 with Skydio aircraft staged at fire stations and a 60-second average response time. Brooklyn Park approved its 4.6 million dollar Skydio deployment in November 2025, accelerated after the killing of a state legislator that year.

The Minneapolis Police Department brought a DFR pilot proposal to its city council in May 2026, planning to launch two drones marked as police vehicles out of a north Minneapolis fire station. Bloomington began testing the Skydio X10 in mid-May for first response.

That cluster matters for two reasons. First, it is shifting Minnesota from a state with occasional drone use to a state where most major metro departments either fly DFR or are about to. Second, Skydio is running the table. Every Minnesota department that has gone public with a DFR rollout has picked the same vendor, which gives Skydio a regional density few American drone makers can match outside of Chula Vista’s California cluster.

The cost is still missing from the public record

The KSTP report and the department’s own update leave one gap worth flagging. St Paul has not published a total program price, ongoing operating budget, or staffing cost breakdown for the 14-officer real-time information center. Departments comparing programs need that number to do the math. Brooklyn Park put 4.6 million dollars on the table and got debated for it. St Paul has not put a number out yet.

The transparency questions that hit Chula Vista in California will hit Minnesota too. A 2025 court order forced Chula Vista to release drone videos, setting a precedent every DFR agency in the country now plans around. Minnesota’s records law is its own beast, but the pattern repeats. Once departments rack up hundreds of flights, civil rights groups start filing records requests, and the questions about retention, access, and disclosure stop being theoretical.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud: the 472 flights in four weeks is not a story about drone enthusiasm. It is a story about what happens to demand once the launch friction disappears.

The old model meant loading a case into a vehicle, driving to the scene, and setting up a flight. Most calls did not justify the round trip. The dock model removes the trip. The decision shrinks to “is this call worth 90 seconds of someone watching a screen,” and the answer is yes more often than anyone predicted.

That is what the Minnesota cluster keeps proving. Minnetonka, Brooklyn Park, Bloomington, and now St Paul are all running the same experiment with the same Skydio aircraft on different rooftops, and the result keeps coming back the same. Flight counts do not creep up after deployment. They jump by an order of magnitude in weeks.

Skydio owns Minnesota outright. And every week that passes, the thesis gets validated a little harder: drones are here to stay, and on balance they do more good than harm. The arrests, the rescues, the kids found before the search line forms, all of it stacks up on the same side of the ledger.

The thing to watch in St Paul is the second number, not the first. The 472 flights are the easy headline. The harder number is how many of those flights produced an arrest, a recovery, or a closed call, versus how many turned into a flight that watched something it did not need to.

Right now St Paul is reporting 33 located people and 36 arrests against 472 flights, which means most flights did not end with a stat. That is normal at this stage. What is worth tracking is whether that ratio improves as dispatchers learn which calls to send a drone to, or whether the department starts launching for everything because the cost of launching is so low.

Photo credit: ABC 5