Spokane’s four Skydio X10 drones flew roughly 400 missions in their first three weeks on the job, and this week one of them took over a pursuit that had become too dangerous for patrol cars to continue. The fleeing pickup slowed down, the suspect went into custody, and nobody chased anybody through a neighborhood. When I covered Spokane’s purchase of these aircraft in April, the pitch was World Cup security. Three months later, the pilot program’s numbers land in front of city administrators on Monday.

A Chase Too Dangerous To Continue Ended In An Arrest

Stevens County deputies were pursuing a black Chevrolet Silverado southbound on Monroe Street on Tuesday night when the chase approached Spokane city limits and became too dangerous to continue, so the police department put a drone overhead and tracked the truck without a single patrol car applying pressure.

Sergeant Craig Hamilton, who oversees the Spokane Police Department’s Air Support Unit, walked KXLY through the mechanics. The drone sat overhead while the suspects had no idea it was there, feeding live updates to patrol units staged nearby.

“We end up with more arrests and it’s safer for everybody,” Hamilton said.

The physics of it deserve a pause. A vehicle pursuit is a feedback loop: the driver speeds because someone is visibly chasing him. Take the cruiser out of the mirror and the reason to flee evaporates, while the thermal camera keeps the truck in frame from 400 feet up.

One suspect went into custody during the operation. No spike strips, no intersections cleared at 90 mph, no lawsuit waiting at the end of a bent guardrail.

Four Skydio X10s Flew 400 Missions In Three Weeks

The Drones as First Responder pilot put Spokane’s four Skydio X10 aircraft through roughly 400 flights in three weeks, the vast majority tied to live police calls rather than training hops, with launch pods loaned to the department by Skydio at no cost for the trial period.

Run the arithmetic and that’s about 19 flights a day across four aircraft. For a program measured in weeks, that’s not a demo. That’s a working shift.

Skydio X10 drone type used by Spokane Police during its DFR pilot
Photo credit: Skydio

The hardware explains some of it. The X10 carries a Teledyne FLIR Boson+ 640x512 radiometric thermal sensor and a 48 MP telephoto camera that reaches about 128x system zoom, flies for 40 minutes at up to 45 mph (72 km/h), and keeps 360-degree obstacle avoidance running while it works.

Spokane’s city council approved the four aircraft in a 6-1 vote on April 20, purchased through Axon, with security for the city’s turn as Team Egypt’s World Cup base camp doing much of the selling, The Spokesman-Review reported. The pursuit work came as a bonus.

The department has history here too. A Spokane police drone with a thermal camera found a missing woman with night blindness in a wooded area back in 2024, when the unit was still flying one expensive aircraft at a time. The Spokesman-Review priced that single machine at $164,000 in 2024. The current approach spreads the mission across four smaller airframes instead of betting everything on one.

Spokane Decides Monday Whether The Drones Keep Flying

The department presents the pilot program’s data to city administration on Monday, July 27, a review that will determine whether Spokane commits to a permanent remote launching system and turns a four-week experiment into standing infrastructure for the city’s police response.

The remote launch question is the one that matters. Docked drones that lift off without a pilot standing on scene are what separate a gadget program from a true Drone as First Responder operation, and they’re also the piece Spokane currently borrows rather than owns. KHQ reported the department could expand coverage across the city if administrators move ahead with the program.

Skydio X10 drone type used by Spokane Police during its DFR pilot
Photo credit: Skydio

Spokane isn’t deciding in a vacuum. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned in July that hundreds of DFR programs could launch across the country in the coming years, and privacy advocates are watching how cities write the rules as fast as departments write the purchase orders.

The national wave gives Spokane’s Monday meeting more weight than a routine budget item. Whatever the city decides, some other department will cite it.

DroneXL’s Take

The real product Spokane tested this month isn’t response time. It’s de-escalation by invisibility.

Every DFR pitch deck talks about getting eyes on scene faster. The Silverado pursuit shows something more interesting: the drone worked because the suspect never knew it existed. The pressure came off, the speedometer came down, and the arrest happened at walking pace. In my BRINC Reno reporting last week I wrote that DFR renewals get sold at 2 a.m. on a live video feed. Spokane just showed the daytime version: a pickup truck slowing down on Monroe Street because nobody appeared to be chasing it.

Skydio X10 drone type used by Spokane Police during its DFR pilot
Photo credit: Skydio

Here’s the wrinkle the pilot data can’t answer yet. The invisibility effect works precisely because the program is new and quiet. A permanent operation with docks on rooftops becomes public knowledge fast, and at that point the mechanism flips: fewer drivers flee because everyone knows the city has eyes overhead. Deterrence replacing stealth might produce even better numbers. It might also change how residents feel about the sky over their neighborhood. The pilot’s 400 flights can’t tell us, and I won’t pretend they can.

Watch the July 27 presentation for one thing: whether Spokane commits to permanent remote launch infrastructure. Everything else in the program is reversible. Docks on rooftops rarely are. Sources: