Orlando City Council on Monday will vote on whether to amend the city’s existing contract with defense manufacturing company Axon to allow the police department to purchase 11 new drones from the company as part of an effort to respond to 911 calls more quickly.
The drone program, building on a pilot program of the Orlando Police Department, would cost the city $6.83 million over the next eight years, or $759,322 annually, according to city documents. The initial term of the city’s contract with Axon would be four years, with an option to renew it for another five years after that.
According to a city memo, Axon’s Skydio drones would be used as part of a “Drone as First Responder” program within the Orlando Police Department, specifically its crime center. The drones would be dispatched by a federally licensed, sworn police officer pilot in response to 911 calls that are believed to be life-threatening, involve major property damage, or be otherwise time-sensitive, according to Bungalower.
The Orlando Police Department, per city documents, has an existing multimillion-dollar agreement with Axon for body-worn cameras for its officers, in-car cameras for police vehicles, and taser devices. According to a Feb. 3 memo from OPD Chief Eric Smith, sent to the city’s chief procurement officer, David Billingsley, Axon’s drones — unlike those made by Axon competitor Brinc — “can respond directly to our body cameras and 911 calls as they come in.”
The goal is to have a response time to 911 calls of under three minutes, according to the memo, so drones can provide information to OPD even before an officer is able to arrive on-scene. The amended contract between the city and Axon would allow for the department to purchase the drones, as well as accessories (such as drone parachutes) and “ongoing support,” per the memo.
Smith’s memo to the city’s procurement department indicates that OPD had also reached out to Flock Safety, a controversial police technology manufacturer, but notes that Flock “failed to provide us with a product to evaluate” — hence the decision to move forward with Axon’s product.
Orlando Weekly reached out to the city and OPD for more information about this proposed drone program, but did not immediately receive a response.
A controversial ‘eye in the sky’
Police drone programs have sparked privacy concerns in other parts of the country. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties watchdog group, police drone programs can, in practice, lead to the oversurveillance of neighborhoods that generate higher concentrations of 911 calls and end up “collecting information on anyone who happens to be in the drone’s path.”
According to Skydio, the drones can be integrated with Axon body cameras worn by officers so that officers can request a drone at the push of a button. The drone would be dispatched to the officer — offering a live video feed of its journey from above — from a dock location, although it’s unclear from city documents where in Orlando those dock locations would be placed.
As of December Skydio’s drone products are in use by more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, according to the blog DroneLife, including the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
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The autonomous technology hasn’t been welcomed by all, however. According to Spectrum News, Skydio drones have been at the heart of a roughly year-long back and forth in Syracuse, New York, over civil liberty and privacy concerns voiced by critics. “They should not be approved for remote use without a lot more clarity and articulation of appropriate limits on their use,” one resident told the Syracuse City Council in October.
Drone technology has also been flagged by watchdog groups over concerns they’ll be used to surveil vulnerable populations like immigrants and people seeking abortion care. These concerns come at a time, of course, where abortion access has become severely restricted legally in GOP-controlled states like Florida, and the Trump administration is partnering with local law enforcement agencies like OPD to detain people accused of being in the country illegally.
The “drone as first responder” program first originated in 2019 in Chula Vista, California, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which released a critical report of DFR programs in 2023. The use of drone technology by police departments, it notes, was made easier through a deregulatory move by the Federal Aviation Authority in 2016.
According to the Washington Post, the FAA further streamlined the process of developing a DFR program for law enforcement this past spring. Agencies are required under federal regulation to get a waiver from the FAA in order to use autonomous DFR drones, the Post explained, since the drones don’t need to be in direct view of an officer for it to be used.
Police departments, including Orlando, like to tout this kind of program as an effective way for them to have “eyes in the sky.” Law enforcement leaders have described it as a “lifesaving” technology. A police lieutenant in Laredo, Texas, told the Post their department equips drones with Narcan so that the drone can drop the opioid overdose reversal medication off suspected overdose cases where time is, critically, of the essence.
Civil liberties advocates, however, have cautioned against allowing surveillance technology into communities without guardrails for exactly how and under what circumstances they will be used.
“It’s important that we don’t sleepwalk into a world of widespread aerial surveillance, that communities think very carefully about whether they want drone surveillance, and, if they decide to permit some operations, put in place guardrails that will prevent those operations from expanding,” the ACLU report notes.
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