Police in Upper Darby and Bensalem, two suburbs on opposite sides of Philadelphia, now send drones to calls before a patrol car gets there, and The Philadelphia Inquirer published the trend on October 20 under a headline that says drones are getting “cheaper and easier to use.” Upper Darby’s aircraft is a Skydio X10 launching from a Skydio dock on the roof of police headquarters, per Skydio’s own case study. In a photo published with the story, a screen on the wall of Bensalem’s command center reads “SkydioX10.”

The story runs through a June car-theft arrest in Upper Darby and a 29% drop in retail theft that Bensalem credits to its drones. It never names a drone maker and never gives a price for anything the two departments fly.

The one dollar figure in it is Lower Merion’s: $375,000, over five years, for a program built around a single docked drone.

Upper Darby Broke Off a Chase and Let a Docked Skydio X10 Finish It

Upper Darby Police called off a high-speed pursuit of a reportedly stolen Nissan Maxima in June and tracked the driver from 400 feet (122 meters) instead. Officers arrested David Graham minutes later on a side street, where he had stopped to work on the car, the Inquirer reports.

Graham was charged with receiving stolen property, fleeing police and related offenses, the Inquirer reported, and the case is pending trial. Superintendent Tim Bernhardt says the department had been warned a car thief from Maryland was coming through the township, and that the drone is what let his officers stop chasing without losing him.

“They don’t hear or see the police coming,” Bernhardt said of suspects watched from above, and the arrest happens without the fight or the flight. Upper Darby stood up a crime intelligence center and a Drone as First Responder program this summer, and Skydio’s own case study on the department names the hardware: the X10 and the Dock for X10. The department has eight drones and more than 20 fixed cameras at intersections, 6abc reported in July, and credited the setup with 15 arrests at a July 4 street takeover.

Bensalem Says Retail Theft Fell 29% Since Its Drones Started Tailing Thieves

Bensalem Township police have flown drones at retail theft calls since 2024. Director of Public Safety William McVey told the Inquirer retail theft is down 29% since then. The closure rate on retail cases has climbed to 75%, so three of every four reported retail thefts are now closed.

McVey cited a thief who stole from a Target in the township, fled on foot, changed clothes, and was still arrested nearby because the drone never lost him. The drones belong to the Bensalem Secure Theft Reduction Taskforce, which also wires frequently hit retailers directly to his officers.

When DroneXL covered Bensalem’s program in May 2024, the aircraft 6abc filmed on the detectives’ table was a DJI enterprise drone. The live feed on the command-center wall in the Inquirer’s photo this week is labeled “SkydioX10.” Bensalem has not said publicly what it replaced or when. The department doubled its drone unit in March with 12 newly trained pilots, and 6abc reported in May that it runs two drones from separate launch points with state money, with a third due this summer and 22 pilots working out of its real-time crime center.

McVey hears that retail theft is too minor to chase with a drone, and his answer is that the store owner would disagree.

Skydio’s 2025 Price List Puts a Docked X10 at $50,547 Before Setup

The only support in the story for the headline’s “cheaper” is one sentence paraphrasing police-tactics scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, that the debate is spreading “as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to use.” Skydio’s February 2025 price list for the NCSA cooperative contract puts numbers on what these departments fly.

That price list puts the Dock for X10 alone at $36,000 MSRP and the X10 Dock Bundle, one dock plus one thermal-equipped X10, at $50,547. Deploying one dock site is a separate $35,250 line. Dock maintenance and repair is $9,900 a year, and the DFR Command license that streams the feed to a dispatcher, with T-Mobile data, lists at $9,960 with no term stated. A handheld X10 Ready Kit, with controller and three batteries, lists at $16,192.

Cincinnati’s Axon contract, which DroneXL broke down in November, works out to about $62,343 per Skydio drone with its dock and support package. Lower Merion’s $375,000 ask covers one Axon-supplied drone and five years of its program, which Superintendent Andy Block pitched at a September budget workshop, the Inquirer reported, citing Bensalem as the model. No vote was taken.

The drone that is cheaper exists, and it is Chinese. A DJI Dock 3 with a thermal Matrice 4TD listed at $23,418 to $26,412 across six US dealers in a September 29 price survey, roughly half the Skydio bundle’s list price before Skydio’s deployment fee, and agencies on the NCSA contract pay 6% under list. DJI’s spec sheet gives the Matrice 4TD 54 minutes of flight; Skydio’s gives the X10 40. Police departments can still buy that Dock 3 today because the FCC authorized it before it put every foreign drone on its Covered List in December, but a 100% tariff on imported thermal drones and docking stations has applied since September 3, and the FCC’s pending Docket 26-189 would stop further imports of docking stations outright.

That is the choice the Inquirer’s headline skips. My read is that these departments are not buying because drones got cheap. They are buying the American drone Washington left them, at American prices, and at least two have moved to Skydio docks: Bensalem, which showed 6abc a DJI in 2024 and now has a Skydio X10 feed on its command-center wall, and Montgomery County, Maryland, which rebuilt its program around docked X10s in July.

Philadelphia Flies 21 Drones More Than 8,000 Times With No Independent Oversight

Philadelphia Police have 21 drones. They had flown nearly 8,000 missions by April, more than 8,000 by this week, and unlike Boston or Los Angeles the city has no independent oversight, the Inquirer found in April. Nine of them were donated by the Philadelphia Police Foundation, Councilmember Rue Landau says.

That donation is how the program skipped Council, in Landau’s account. The department says drone footage was the primary evidence in 15 arrests but has declined to identify any of those 15 arrests or the people arrested. Commissioner Kevin Bethel agreed in April to produce an annual drone report for Council after Landau and Kenyatta Johnson pressed him at a budget hearing. The April investigation identified one of the city’s aircraft as a Skydio X10.

Ferguson, author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You, told the Inquirer the pattern repeats nationally: departments adopt the technology first and set limits only after residents find out. “I think it feels both practical and dystopian at the same time,” he said. Lower Merion’s commissioners split the same way in September, with Maggie Harper Epstein calling it “a tough thing to communicate to the residents” and Charles Gregory calling it a no-brainer.

Bernhardt and McVey both say the answer is the flight log. “Everything we do is categorized and documented,” McVey said, inviting anyone who suspects his drones fly over houses to ask the department. Bensalem told 6abc in May it does not fly over homes and uses thermal mostly at night to find people.

DroneXL’s Take

The Inquirer wrote a good story about two police departments and hung a headline on it that its own reporting does not support. Drones did get cheaper and easier to use, but the drone that got cheaper is the DJI, and these departments are flying Skydio at twice the price and 14 minutes less flight time. In May 2025 an NYPD X10 crashed onto a Brooklyn precinct roof after a worn battery connector failed, and its ejected battery caught fire. The story does not say what Upper Darby paid. I would have asked, because the answer tests the headline.

Skydio’s dock and its autonomy software are what make a program like Upper Darby’s run without a pilot standing on the roof, and that is worth paying for. It is not cheap, and no one should tell Lower Merion’s taxpayers it is. The $375,000 their superintendent wants for a program built around a single docked drone is the real price of American drone policy: the FCC shut the door on new foreign models and proposes shutting it on dock imports, the tariff put a 100% duty on what still comes in, and Skydio’s February 2025 list prices were already there before either policy. I think that is why Skydio can hold them. If a reporter wants to test the “cheaper” claim, the public records request is one line long: the purchase order.

Sources: The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 2026, The Philadelphia Inquirer of April 13, April 14 and September 11, 2026, 6abc, Patch, Skydio NCSA price list, Dronebundle price survey of September 29, DJI Enterprise, Skydio.

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