The Bellingham Police Department in Washington is running its new Drone as First Responder program on Skydio, a detail left out of both the City Council’s agenda bill and the Bellingham Herald’s report on it. The vendor shows on the program’s public flight dashboard, which runs on Skydio’s cloud under a “Powered by Skydio” footer.

A $475,417 state grant pays for it through 2028. Police Chief Rebecca Mertzig briefed the council’s Public Health, Safety, Justice, and Equity Committee on Monday. The drones sit at the police station, the city’s Pacific Street Operations Center and Bellis Fair mall.

When I pulled the dashboard on October 6, it listed 23 flights since August 19. One of them is tagged as an incident response.

A $3.7 Million State Award Pays for Bellingham’s Drones

The $475,417 is one line in a $3.7 million award Bellingham Police received from Washington’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which the city announced in May. The money traces to House Bill 2015, the 2025 state law that created a $100 million public safety grant program for cities and counties.

The drone line works out to about 13 percent of the total. Among other items, the city’s May 28 announcement lists refilling three officer positions frozen in 2025, a new warrant officer, dashcams for every patrol car and new tools to stop pursuits.

The agenda bill for Monday’s meeting says the grant “fully funds” the program and lists the source as “CJTC House Bill 2015.” It does not say who pays after 2028. The same law lets cities adopt a 0.1 percent public safety sales tax by council vote until June 30, 2028, after which voters must approve it, according to the Association of Washington Cities.

The FAA Cleared Bellingham Police for DFR in February

FAA records released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation under FOIA show Bellingham Police received a public safety waiver for BVLOS flights on February 18, 2026, the same day the agency logged the application, covering the 200-foot shielded tier through February 28, 2030.

Bellingham is one of 20 Washington agencies on that list, alongside Everett and Bellevue police, Whatcom County Fire District 5 and Redmond police, who first flew a docked DJI drone to 911 calls in 2024. DroneXL went through the full list in August: more than 1,000 agencies cleared in ten months under the FAA’s expedited process.

The Herald cited EFF for “more than 1,000” DFR programs operating across the U.S. EFF’s report counts waivers, not launched programs, and Bellingham is the example. It held its waiver for six months before the first flight on the dashboard, and the state money was only announced in late May.

Bellingham’s Flight Log Shows a Program Still in Training

Twenty-two of the 23 logged flights are labeled as training or carry no purpose label. The only incident response came on September 30: a 12-minute Public Works assist. Mertzig told the Herald the program starts with four operators, and staffing it around the clock will take time to train more.

Flights so far run from two to 23 minutes, and October 1 was the busiest day, with six training flights. Across the state, Spokane’s four Skydio X10s flew about 400 missions in the first three weeks of its pilot.

The city’s DFR page promises a drone over the scene in two minutes or less and sets out the privacy terms. The camera stays level with the horizon in transit and tilts down only at the scene. The drones carry no license plate readers and never fly without a human pilot. Video goes into the same evidence system as body-camera footage, and the city says its vendor agreements bar Skydio from accessing it.

Other city departments will get the video, but “Only BPD officers will pilot the drones,” Mertzig told the Bellingham Herald. She pointed to the 2023 Harris Avenue fire as a case where a thermal camera could have located people inside the building. The department has flown drones under a separate program since 2019.

DroneXL’s Take

Bellingham did the most useful thing a city can do with a police drone program: it published the flight log before the program went fully live. That log shows a training operation with one real job on the books, and it is the only city record I found that names the vendor. Drones that reach a 911 call before a patrol car are drones for good, and a city earns the public’s patience for them by answering questions before anyone asks. I’d call Bellingham most of the way there. Two of the August 21 flights still carry no purpose. The city should label every flight and put the aircraft’s name on its DFR page.

Source: The Bellingham Herald, City of Bellingham agenda bill 25079, City of Bellingham DFR program page, Bellingham Police DFR flight dashboard, Electronic Frontier Foundation FAA waiver records.

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