Utica, New York is starting a 90-day Drone as First Responder trial for its police and fire departments, with two docked drones supplied through Axon and Skydio, the Utica Police Department said in a statement reported by the Observer-Dispatch on October 28. The drones would launch to 911 calls and fire scenes, often ahead of the officers or engines, the statement says.
Four months ago the same department announced the same program with a different company. On June 10 police spokesman Captain Michael Curley told the Rome Daily Sentinel that Flock Safety would supply two drones for a free six-month pilot and that the department hoped to have them in the air by August.
The new statement does not mention Flock, and it does not say whether a Flock drone ever flew in Utica.
Utica’s June Pilot Was a Free Six-Month Flock Deal Due in August
Utica’s June announcement aimed to have the Flock drones flying by August. Captain Curley said the aircraft take about 12 weeks to build and that one dock would sit at the police station on Oriskany Street West. Flock was to carry the cost for the six months.
The department hoped grant money would pay for the drones after the pilot. Flock already ran a gunfire-detection pilot in the city, the Sentinel reported. Curley said the drones would fly at 200 feet (61 meters) or higher, carry night-vision cameras, never be weaponized, and respond to calls such as fights and disorderly groups, which he said are often dispersed by the time officers arrive. He put the share of calls a drone could close without an officer at 20 percent or more, and said a public dashboard of flights was being developed.
The police department has flown drones for searches before, and the Utica Fire Department has never had one. Flock’s Drone as First Responder business has had a mixed year in city halls. Bridgeport, Connecticut’s council committees killed its Flock drone contract five days after the launch event in January, while Edison, New Jersey bought a Flock drone with forfeiture money in September.
The Axon and Skydio Trial Keeps the Two Drones and the 20 Percent Claim
The October statement cuts the trial to 90 days and names Axon and Skydio as partners in what it calls a continued partnership. The hardware plan is unchanged, with two drones in docking stations placed around the city, flown by police and fire. Neither start date nor cost is given.
The word “continued” suggests Utica already uses Axon products, and the statement does not say which. Much of the rest of it is the June statement reissued: WKTV carried the same 20 percent sentence, the same hot-spot language and the same surveillance disclaimer on June 10. “Statistics show that roughly 20% of calls can be handled without patrol resources,” the department said, tying the figure to staffing pressure and rising call volumes. For the fire department, the drones’ night vision and thermal cameras are meant to find hot spots and tell the commander on scene how to attack a working fire.
Axon has sold Skydio’s docked drones as its Drone as First Responder package since the two companies announced their partnership in June 2024, and the trial model is standard for Skydio: Nashville began a trial of up to 45 flight days on loaned Skydio aircraft in May, and Minneapolis’s council voted down a no-cost 75-day trial in July. Lakeland, Florida put its Axon drones inside a ten-year, $22 million bundle this month.
Utica promises flight logs, mission reports, public dashboards and community input on when drones launch and what triggers a flight, according to the Observer-Dispatch. The department said “transparency and accountability will be the guiding principles.” Fifty miles west, Syracuse bought Axon drone hardware in November 2024, and a year later its Common Council had still not approved the software to launch the program.
DroneXL’s Take
I want Utica’s drones in the air. A drone over a house fire or a fight in progress two minutes after the call is the best use of this technology, and the fire department has been working without one. But a free trial is a sales call, and Utica has now announced two of them from two competing vendors in four months without telling residents what happened to the first. The department changed the vendor and the clock and kept the press release. That tells me the 20 percent figure was never Utica data. The department owes the public a short account of whether the Flock drones ever arrived, why the program moved to Axon and Skydio, and what the city’s existing Axon relationship covers. Bellingham, Washington published its flight log before its program went fully live. Utica should do that on day one of the 90 days, not at the end, because the end is when the sales contract arrives.
Sources: Utica Observer-Dispatch (October 28, 2026 and June 11, 2026), Rome Daily Sentinel (June 10, 2026), WKTV (June 10, 2026).
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
