The Kent County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan has wired its deputies’ body cameras into its drone fleet. When a deputy presses a button on the camera, the nearest rooftop-docked Skydio X10 launches and flies straight to that officer’s location.
The agency stages three of the drones on rooftops across West Michigan, in Cutlerville, Comstock Park and Grand Rapids. Roon says the aircraft beat deputies to the scene about 90% of the time.
It’s the second Skydio X10 story I’ve covered this week, after the Pasco County thermal rescue in Florida, and the two of them together say more about where police aviation is heading than either does alone.
A Button on the Vest Now Launches a Drone
The new feature ties each deputy’s body camera to Kent County’s docked drone network: one press sends an alert to the county’s Real Time Intelligence Center and prompts the nearest rooftop dock to launch its aircraft directly to that officer’s position.
“It tells the users in this room to jump into that body camera stream to see what’s happening,” Roon said of the intelligence center inside the sheriff’s office, where the fleet is monitored and controlled. The same alert cues the closest docked aircraft, which launches and heads to the deputy, as Roon describes it.
Once airborne, the X10 covers calls within a typical response radius of about 3 miles (4.8 km) and reaches speeds up to 45 mph (72 km/h). Skydio lists dock launches at as little as 20 seconds from alert to airborne, which is how a drone ends up over a scene while the backup unit is still blocks away.
As WWMT reported, Kent County has flown Axon body cameras since a $2.2 million county purchase in 2020. The mechanics Roon describes track with the body camera to drone dispatch Axon and Skydio unveiled as partners in June 2024: a double press on an Axon Body 4 flags the officer’s position and cues the nearest available aircraft.
The sheriff’s office won’t named the vendor behind the new feature.
The detail worth sitting with is the compressed decision. In a standard drone as first responder setup, a launch begins with someone at a console sizing up the call. In Kent County’s model the deputy in trouble is the trigger, and whatever human review remains happens in the seconds between the button press and liftoff.
The Skydio X10 Brings Thermal and Night Autonomy
The aircraft flying these calls is the Skydio X10, the American-made autonomous drone from San Mateo, California, carrying a Teledyne FLIR Boson+ thermal camera at 640 by 512 resolution and a 48-megapixel zoom camera as part of its VT300-Z sensor package.
The thermal sensor reads heat instead of light, which is what turns a hidden suspect or a missing person into a bright shape on a dark screen. The zoom lets the operator confirm what that heat signature actually is before anyone commits resources to it.
Skydio’s NightSense attachment gives the X10 obstacle avoidance in total darkness, so the aircraft can work low over trees and rooflines at night instead of holding a safe, useless altitude. The drone stays aloft up to 40 minutes on a charge in ideal conditions.
Two Cases That Sold Kent County on Drones
Kent County’s drone case file keeps growing: a suspect who gave up because he knew he couldn’t outrun the aircraft over his head, and a thief the thermal camera found hiding in the Grand River.
Last October, according to WWMT, deputies responding to a domestic violence call in Kentwood put a drone up and caught the suspect walking along Division Street. The arrest came quickly, and the suspect’s own review of the technology did the marketing for the sheriff’s office: “I’m not that dumb, I saw a drone over me, how can you run away from a drone?”
“You can almost look at it like a deescalation tool in that sense,” Roon said. “We’ve deescalated a situation where someone’s actually given up.”
Unfortunately for the suspect, he’s right. A drone over your head is the last thing you want on a bad night: it doesn’t blink, it doesn’t get tired, and it sees your heat.
On April 7 of this year, a 39-year-old wanted for felonious assault led deputies on a chase that ended when he drove straight into a pond near the Celebration Cinema in Kentwood and climbed out of the sinking car with his hands up. A drone had located his vehicle before the pursuit began, per WWMT, and local outlets reported deputies found several firearms and methamphetamine inside it.
The thermal story Roon reaches for is older, from October 2021. A man who ran after stealing a catalytic converter in Comstock Park jumped into the Grand River to hide, and the water covered everything except his head, which showed up on the drone’s thermal feed as a small white dot. WZZM 13 covered the arrest at the time.
Kent County Flew DJI Before It Flew Skydio
Three years ago this corner of Michigan was DJI country. DroneXL reported in August 2023 that Grand Rapids police spent about $100,000 on eight DJI aircraft, six Mavic Enterprise models and two Matrice 30Ts, while the Kent County Sheriff’s Office was already flying drones of its own.
Today the county’s front-line aircraft is an American-made Skydio living on a rooftop, and the switch mirrors the rest of the state. Dearborn launched Michigan’s first citywide drone as first responder program in February, and Warren stood up a Skydio X10 fleet across six fixed sites in March.
Kent County isn’t done either. The office plans four more X10s between Plainfield and Cutlerville by the end of the year.
DroneXL’s Take
The button is the story here, not the drone. Last week I wrote about California residents pushing police drone programs back, and days later about this same aircraft walking a lost man out of the Florida woods at 3 a.m.
Kent County is both stories at once: a tool that protects the deputy having the worst minute of his shift, and a dispatch decision compressed from a console conversation to a button on a vest.
Nobody is stopping this one. These drones help far more than they hurt, and every flight leaves an audit trail, a point Kent County itself stressed when it pitched its intelligence center to the public. There’s no reverse gear here.
This technology wins over another police department every week. Kent County alone plans to go from three docks to seven by January. The suspects already understand what that means. The policy debate is still catching up.
Photo credit: DJI, Port St. Lucie Police Department, Autumn Pitchure.
