Police, fire, and search-and-rescue teams putting drones to work when minutes matter.
The Corman Park Police Service in Saskatchewan has deployed its DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise drone 37 times since receiving it in April 2025, and one of those deployments involved finding an intoxicated man who had crawled into a dumpster on Highway 41 in -20°C (-4°F) temperatures. The thermal camera on the aircraft picked him up.…
Russ from 51 Drones breaks down where local drone bans stop and FAA airspace authority begins, with real examples from NYC, Lakewood, and Lakeville.
The Fulshear Police Department launched a Drone as First Responder program on April 6, 2026, and the platform doing the work is the DJI Matrice 350 RTK rather than the U.S.-built Skydio X10 that has become the default for many other municipal DFR programs. The choice matters because it cuts against the broader U.S. public…
The City of Bloomington, Minnesota, will spend the next two weeks running a Drone as First Responder pilot using Skydio X10 aircraft and the Skydio Dock, the city announced on May 15. The testing period begins the week of May 18 and is intended to give city staff a working view of what DFR technology…
The Dallas City Council approved a $10.3 million FEMA grant Wednesday that expands the city’s existing Axon contract to cover counter-drone detection, tracking, and mitigation ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, as reported by Kera News. The grant moves the city’s total 10-year Axon agreement from roughly $267 million to more than $277 million.…
Portage County Sheriff’s Office deputies located a missing 91-year-old woman with a thermal-equipped drone at 11:51 p.m. on May 5, roughly 43 minutes after the initial call came in. She’d walked away from a residential care facility in Plover, Wisconsin sometime after 9:45 p.m. and ended up in a wooded area, as Waupaca Now reported.…
The FBI will field roughly 60 specially trained state and local police officers across FIFA World Cup 2026 venues to detect and electronically disable hostile drones, according to a Bloomberg report published May 15. The bureau takes direct command of counter-drone operations in three U.S. host cities. Department of Homeland Security components cover the other…
The Chula Vista Police Department announced this week that its Drone as First Responder (DFR) program has surpassed 25,000 missions since launch, making the agency that pioneered the entire model in 2018 the clearest proof yet that drone-led emergency response works at scale, as FOX 5 San Diego reported. The milestone matters because CVPD isn’t…
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