CityCouncil Sep 15, 2026 Drone Updates Police Presentation

Our Take

Credit to Ed McKervey for filming this City Council session and getting the police department's first public update on its Drone as First Responder program on the record. That's exactly the kind of local footage that keeps residents informed when the meeting minutes alone won't cut it.

We've seen this script before with license plate readers: a program launches quietly over the summer, gets framed entirely around officer safety and 911 response times, and only later do questions surface about retention policies, who can pull footage, whether it's shared with other agencies or fused with ALPR data, and how "mission creep" gets defined once the cameras are already in the air. A one-month-old program getting its first update is the moment to ask those questions publicly, not eighteen months in when the policy is already baked in and hard to unwind.

If you're in a community where a drone or ALPR program is being introduced under the banner of "first responders," don't wait for the second update to start asking for the actual data-sharing agreements and audit logs. Check whether your city already runs Flock cameras on our map, and see what you can do locally at take action.