Police, fire, and search-and-rescue teams putting drones to work when minutes matter.
A St. Cloud police drone found 73-year-old Ronald Statz alive in a Stearns County cornfield after a dozen agencies, including a State Patrol plane and a DNR helicopter, searched for hours.
A Minneapolis police drone's thermal camera located 82-year-old veteran Bob Stewart in a creek ravine in nine minutes, after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search came up empty — footage the department released as the City Council weighs a 75-day Skydio Drones as First Responders trial.
A cargo drone lifted a stranded truck driver off the top of a fuel tanker and flew him over raging floodwater to dry ground in southern China. The rescue happened on July 6 in Yunbiao, a town in Guangxi that Typhoon Maysak had put underwater. A rescue worker strapped the man into a harness, and…
Montgomery County, Maryland, is pulling the human spotter off the rooftop. The county police department said on July 6 that it is rebuilding its Drone as First Responder program around docked Skydio X10 aircraft at six sites, and flying them beyond visual line of sight without the observer the old setup required. This was the…
Colorado Springs police put a drone over a knife fight before a single patrol car arrived, and this week they released the video to prove it. On June 21, a 911 call reported two men fighting at the A1 Mobile Home Park near Cimarron and I-25, with a possible gun in the mix. The department’s…
A child was injured by a drone during the July 4 fireworks at Big Bang Boom in Norfolk, Nebraska, the show billed as the state’s largest, on the night of its 50th anniversary. Event organizers, Madison County deputies and Norfolk police identified the aircraft with specialized drone identification equipment before anyone approached the operator, Sheriff…
Minnesota just published something no other state hands its residents: an itemized receipt for every police drone program inside its borders. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s 2025 Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles report counts 9,080 warrantless flights across 135 agencies, up 38% in a year, and the Rochester Police Department leads them all. Rochester flew…
The Kent County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan has wired its deputies’ body cameras into its drone fleet. When a deputy presses a button on the camera, the nearest rooftop-docked Skydio X10 launches and flies straight to that officer’s location. The agency stages three of the drones on rooftops across West Michigan, in Cutlerville, Comstock Park…
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