Redmond Police Buy Six Skydio Drones on a 5-Year Plan

Redmond, Oregon, is replacing its DJI police drones with six Skydio aircraft, and paying for them the way a city buys a fleet of patrol cars: on a five-year financed contract.

The city council approved the $410,762 deal with Axon on June 23. The department calls its old fleet obsolete, but the bigger force behind the swap is the federal ban that pushed American police off Chinese-made DJI drones. The contract even schedules a full replacement of all six new drones at the 30-month mark.

The city is buying drones the way it leases patrol cars

The structure of the deal says as much as the price. Redmond is not writing one check for six drones and calling it done. It committed to a five-year contract with Axon worth $410,762, seeding the first two years with $100,000 saved from construction on its new public safety building.

The part that stands out is the replacement clause. At 30 months, the contract swaps all six drones for new ones, which tells you how fast the department expects this hardware to age out.

April Huey, the department’s public information officer, was blunt about why the current fleet is on the way out. She said the existing drones will soon be obsolete and framed the purchase as keeping pace. “Drones are a tool of technology and staying up to date is critical,” Huey said.

Financing it this way has an upside for a small budget. Instead of one painful $410,000 hit, the cost spreads across five years like a lease, which is easier to slot into an annual budget. The tradeoff is commitment: the city is tied to Axon and to the replacement schedule whether the technology pans out or not.

Here is the part the obsolete line skips. The component that actually wears out on a drone is the battery, and a battery is cheap to swap. Age is not what is really grounding this fleet.

Redmond has been flying DJI. The department’s own drone pages show a DJI aircraft lifting off a DJI dock on a rooftop, the automated box that sends a drone to a call with no pilot standing next to it. That is the setup being retired.

The reason is political. Since the federal ban took hold in December, American police have been pushed off Chinese-made DJI hardware and onto NDAA-approved gear like Skydio. DroneXL laid out what that ban is costing Oregon back in March.

The switch is not cheap. Nationwide, a DJI that ran about $7,000 gets replaced by an American drone closer to $25,000, and increasingly one a city finances rather than owns. A rule written in Washington turned cheap hardware Redmond owned into pricey hardware it rents.

Sixty-five missions carried the program last year

As Bend Bulletin reported, Redmond has flown drones since 2019, but the scale is small. The department put its aircraft in the air 84 times in 2025, 65 of them on real missions and the other 19 on training, according to figures Huey gave the council.

Those missions are the kind that make the local news. In June, officers used a drone to search for a missing juvenile. In an earlier case, a drone found a suspect hiding in a Dry Canyon rock wall. Three school resource officers are trained to fly.

Huey told the council the drones are the best tool for patrolling the public lands in and around Redmond, terrain that eats up patrol time on the ground. The pitch is reach: one operator overhead can cover ground that would take several officers on foot.

Central Oregon gives that pitch some teeth. Redmond sits in high desert cut by canyons and ringed by open public land, the kind of terrain where a person can vanish fast and a ground search burns hours. An aircraft that gets overhead in minutes changes the odds on exactly the missing-person and suspect cases the department keeps citing.

One detail sets Redmond apart from the departments now fighting their own residents over surveillance. Its published drone policy says the city keeps no UAS footage in third-party storage and holds no data-sharing agreements with outside agencies.

Axon and Skydio are the machine behind the buy

The contract does not go straight to a drone maker. It goes to Axon, the company better known for Tasers and body cameras, which now packages Skydio’s autonomous drones into a drone-as-first-responder system for police departments. Skydio says it works with more than 600 public safety agencies.

That bundling is the trend across American policing. Axon has spent the last few years turning drones into one more line on the same contract that already covers a department’s cameras and evidence software. For a buyer like Redmond, one vendor relationship is simpler than stitching together three.

That simplicity is also the hook. Once a department runs its cameras and its drones through the same company, switching either one gets expensive and complicated. Axon has built that pull on purpose, and Redmond just stepped further into it.

The reporting did not name which Skydio model Redmond is getting, and the department did not break out a per-drone price. What is clear is the direction: the same company that sold the city its body cameras is now selling it the eyes in the sky.

DroneXL’s Take

The payment plan is the real story in Redmond, more than the drones themselves. A five-year contract with a hardware swap at 30 months is a subscription, not a purchase.

Redmond is locking into a cycle where the drones are always aging, always getting replaced, and always billed. That is how patrol cars and radios already work, and now drones have joined them.

A small city is spending $410,000 on six drones to fly 65 missions a year. Somebody caught a case of tech fever and financed it for five years. And the expense is not even the worst part. Redmond will not fully own these drones, and it did not fully choose them either. The ban made the call.

It also shows a third way to pay for this stuff. Some departments chase federal grants. Others pass the hat to a police foundation. Redmond just financed it out of the general budget with leftover construction money. Every route ends at the same place: a drone in the air and a bill that keeps coming.

The 30-month clock is the thing to watch. When it runs out and Redmond swaps six working drones for the next generation, that will show whether police drone programs have become genuine tools or permanent subscriptions with a built-in upgrade tax.

Photo credit: Redmond PD