Minnesota just published something no other state hands its residents: an itemized receipt for every police drone program inside its borders.

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s 2025 Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles report counts 9,080 warrantless flights across 135 agencies, up 38% in a year, and the Rochester Police Department leads them all.

Rochester flew 1,009 of those missions, roughly one of every nine police drone flights in the state, while spending $50,760.45 on training and technology. The Minnesota State Patrol came second at 633 flights, and Minnetonka, whose program I covered when it launched last August, flew 611.

I’ve been following this ledger since the ACLU-backed law that created it passed in 2020. Six years later, it’s the clearest picture anywhere of what police drone adoption actually looks like.

One in Nine Minnesota Police Drone Flights Was Rochester’s

Rochester’s numbers come from a drone as first responder program that is barely a year old. The city council approved a $467,290 contract with Axon Enterprise in July 2025, funded almost entirely by a $467,000 Mayo Clinic Community Engagement Grant, for two permanently docked drones covering about two thirds of the city with a response time under three minutes.

“There’s no reason to spend all that money if you’re not going to do anything with it,” Detective Alex Kendrick, who has piloted for the department’s drone unit since its early days, told the Post Bulletin.

Nearly half of Rochester’s flights were to collect information over public areas with reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Another 227 covered training, public relations or private areas with written consent, about 135 were pre-event threat assessments, and 127 came after incidents.

Captain Jon Turk points to a quieter benefit: real-time video lets dispatchers downgrade responses when the emergency turns out to be smaller than the call. Fewer lights-and-sirens runs means less risk on the road for everyone.

The program publishes its flight data to a public transparency portal, and video that doesn’t document a crime is deleted after seven days.

The Law That Makes These Numbers Exist

Minnesota Statute 626.19 requires a warrant for police drone use by default, carves out enumerated exceptions like emergencies and training, and forces every agency to report each deployment and every program dollar to the BCA by January 15. The bureau publishes the statewide tally each June.

The series that law has produced tells the adoption story better than any press release. Warrantless flights went from 3,076 in 2022 to 6,603 in 2024 to 9,080 last year, nearly tripling in three years, while reporting agencies grew from 99 to 135.

The money moved the other way. Statewide spending fell 33% in 2025, to $1.31 million from $1.97 million the year before. Minnesota agencies flew 38% more missions for a third less money, which is what happens when the dock-based model stops being a capital purchase and starts being a routine.

Lawmakers also rewrote the authorized-use list mid-year, effective July 1, 2025, so the report itself straddles two legal regimes, with flights logged under the old codes through June and the new ones after. No local coverage picked that up.

The Spending Table Tells Its Own Story

Divide the dollars by the flights and the report separates departments that fly drones from departments that own them.

Rochester’s 1,009 flights work out to about $50 each. The State Patrol’s 633 came in near $48. Minnetonka’s 611 ran about $64. Down in southeast Minnesota, the Wabasha County Sheriff’s Office spent $32,473 to fly 15 times, which is roughly $2,165 per flight, and the Austin Police Department reported four flights against $15,945, a one-time equipment purchase its new chief says was grant-funded.

The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office logged 26 flights and reported zero dollars, which is its own kind of accounting mystery.

My advice to those departments: start flying the things. Paying for that gear to use it four times a year? St. Paul put its drones up 472 times in its first four weeks.

Minnesota’s DFR Wave Keeps Building

As Govtech reported, Rochester was only the state’s second city with a drone as first responder program. Minnetonka launched Minnesota’s first last August with six Skydio X10s on four fire station roofs, Brooklyn Park approved a $4.6 million program with Skydio in November, and St. Paul logged 472 DFR flights in its first four weeks this June.

Rochester’s contract runs through Axon Enterprise, whose DFR stack is built around the Skydio X10, though the department hasn’t published which aircraft sits on its rooftops. Its data will show up either way in next June’s report, itemized, dated and public.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I actually think: the number everyone will quote is 9,080, and the number that matters is $1.31 million going down while flights nearly tripled. The technology got cheap enough to become routine, and routine is exactly when oversight starts to slip.

Except in Minnesota it can’t slip quietly, because a 2020 law the police lobby never wanted makes every flight and every dollar public, every June.

Minnesota is the only state that shows its receipts. The other 49 fly blind on the public’s side of the ledger, and the ledger just proved something: transparency didn’t slow adoption one bit. Flights tripled with the law watching.

So ask the old question: who watches the watchman? A drone is neither good nor bad. The pilot is, and ethics has to outrank every skill on the controller. Does transparency restrain the police drone or legitimize it? Minnesota is the only state collecting the data to find out.

Photo credit: Rochester police