The Minneapolis City Council deadlocked 6-6 on Thursday, July 16, 2026, killing a no-cost, 75-day Drone as First Responder trial with Skydio and turning Minneapolis away from a program model at least five other Minnesota cities already run. Council Vice President Jamal Osman, a co-sponsor of the measure, switched sides and cast the deciding no vote, citing Skydio’s equipment sales to the Israeli military and its work with the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement.

The timing is hard to ignore. Four days before the vote, DroneXL reported on the Minneapolis Police Department’s release of thermal footage showing one of its drones locating a missing 82-year-old veteran in nine minutes after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search found nothing. That video was released while the council weighed this exact proposal. It didn’t move the six votes that mattered.

The failed pilot would have stationed two Skydio dock units on the roof of Fire Station 14 in north Minneapolis, streaming live video to 911 dispatchers and officers en route. The city pays nothing, evaluates for 75 days, and walks away if it doesn’t like it. Half the council said no anyway.

A Free Trial Died Over Who Built The Drones

The council rejected a zero-cost evaluation, and the opposition barely touched the technology itself. Council members who voted no pointed at Skydio’s customer list: the Israeli military, and a $25,000 AI-powered drone sale to ICE in September that Forbes first reported. The vendor, and what happened in Minneapolis last winter, decided this vote.

That context is Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation that swept the Twin Cities over the winter and left two Minneapolis residents dead. DroneXL covered the surveillance fears it created among local pilots and residents back in March. Those fears showed up in the council chamber on Thursday. As KSTP reported, Osman told colleagues that “Skydio is basically working with ICE that terrorized my community.”

Council Member Aurin Chowdhury called the proposal “an abysmal mistake, and nothing is free,” arguing the real price was resident trust, according to the Minnesota Reformer. Council Member Soren Stevenson said he believed it was naive to assume ICE would never get access to data generated by Skydio aircraft flying over Minneapolis.

Osman’s position deserves a careful read, because he didn’t oppose the program. He co-sponsored it. He told police leadership after the vote that he wants to keep searching for other technologies and expects the conversation to return. His objection was the vendor, full stop.

Supporters Had The Numbers And Still Lost

The data case for the pilot was unusually specific. Police response times in north Minneapolis average 7 minutes and 48 seconds. Skydio’s proposal claimed its drones could have reached 4,643 of the area’s highest-priority calls within two minutes, roughly 17% of total calls in the coverage area, according to figures reported by the Minnesota Reformer.

Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw, the other co-sponsor, represents that part of the city. She accused colleagues of being “focused on events halfway around the world” instead of the residents calling her office, as Fox 9 reported. Mayor Jacob Frey backed the pilot and argued that refusing it sends no message to Israel while making it harder to protect Minneapolis residents right now. Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette said the city missed a chance to evaluate the technology with real local data instead of assumptions.

None of it flipped a vote. Roughly 40 residents had testified against the proposal at the committee stage last week, most of it centered on surveillance fears and Skydio’s military contracts, and six council members held that line.

Minneapolis Is Now Surrounded By The Program It Rejected

At least five Minnesota cities already operate or are building Drone as First Responder programs, and every one of them runs on Skydio hardware, leaving Minneapolis as the metro’s holdout. St. Paul, Minnetonka, Rochester, Brooklyn Park, and Duluth all committed to the same vendor the Minneapolis council just turned away.

Minnetonka launched first in August 2025, and its drones reached scenes ahead of officers 65% of the time. St. Paul’s dock-based program flew 472 missions in its first four weeks, passing the department’s entire 2025 patrol drone total. Brooklyn Park approved a $4.6 million program in November after the Hortman manhunt exposed the limits of its existing fleet.

The technology question was settled locally too. The same MPD drone unit that would have staffed this pilot found a missing 82-year-old veteran in a creek ravine in nine minutes this May, using a thermal camera after hours of ground searching failed. Nobody in the chamber on Thursday argued the drones don’t work.

DroneXL’s Take

Skydio just got a taste of its own medicine, and every American drone maker should be paying attention. For years, the case against DJI has been built on who the vendor is rather than what the aircraft does. Skydio benefited from that framing more than any company in the industry. On Thursday, the exact same logic ran in the other direction. Six council members looked past a free trial, past a 7 minute 48 second response time, past a rescue video from their own police department, and voted against the customer list.

DroneXL has covered every Minnesota DFR launch since Minnetonka’s in August 2025, and the pattern repeats in each city: the drones arrive first, and the programs keep expanding. That’s why this outcome stings. The people who lose here live in north Minneapolis, waiting nearly eight minutes for a squad car while five neighboring cities get overhead eyes in under two.

Osman says he wants a different supplier. Which one? The American DFR field is small, and its viable players, including Skydio, BRINC, and Flock Safety’s Aerodome, are built on government demand, because that is where the money went once Washington pushed DJI out of the market. Any U.S. drone company big enough to run a citywide DFR program will carry government contracts somewhere on its books that some constituency opposes. If the standard is no contracts with agencies the council opposes, as Vetaw warned her colleagues, that standard filters out the entire domestic industry. Watch whether MPD comes back with a new vendor proposal this fall, and watch whether that vendor survives the same scrutiny. My bet is that the objections resurface no matter whose logo is on the dock.

Sources: Fox 9, KSTP, Minnesota Reformer

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