On a late September evening, Philadelphia police officers chased a suspected car thief through Kensington to Hilton and G Streets, where the driver ditched the car and slipped into a steel-colored rowhouse. It could have been a situation fraught with danger — but the cops didn’t need to blindly follow the man inside.
“Got a drone unit available,” one officer said over police radio.
A Skydio X10 drone, about the size of a large pizza box, buzzed over the area, recording the suspect as he darted across rooftops and tried to hide. The device continued monitoring as a half-dozen officers closed in and apprehended the man.
Few Philadelphia residents might realize it, but drones have quietly become a staple of daily police work in the city since 2024, when the department launched a drone first responder program in Kensington, following other big cities that were already using the devices. The drone program has since expanded to police districts in North Philly and the Lower Northeast.
Sgt. Eric Gripp, a police spokesperson, said the department’s 21 drones have been deployed nearly 8,000 times on assignments that ranged from shooting investigations and fugitive arrests to drug busts and stadium district traffic jams.
While the drones have given the police department an aerial fleet of modern equipment that can increase officer effectiveness and public safety, an Inquirer examination found the program has largely operated without the type of independent oversight and transparency that other cities rely on to guard against misuse of powerful surveillance technology.
Gripp said the drones have been “the primary source of information” in 15 arrests as of mid-February but declined to provide additional information about the cases, including the names of those arrested or their alleged crimes.
As with most other forms of Philadelphia police evidence, the public has little insight into whether drone footage has been shared with other agencies, such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The police department also has yet to disclose any information about the flight paths its drones travel, data that police in other cities, like Los Angeles, routinely publish.
Police officials have said their drone policy was developed with input from prominent civil rights and defense attorney David Rudovsky, who confirmed in an interview that he was asked several years ago to be part of an advisory committee. He said he agreed to participate.
“And that,” Rudovsky said, “was the last I heard from them.”
Deputy Commissioner Francis Healy said the police department remains interested in collaborating with Rudovsky.
“We’re continually working together to make this the best policy it can be,” Healy said.
Two different versions of the department’s drone directive have been posted online, but one is littered with strikethroughs and redactions, giving the appearance of an incomplete draft.
Gripp said the department is creating a “public-facing drone transparency dashboard” to share flight data, and that drone footage is uploaded to the same digital evidence system used to store officers’ body camera footage. Defense attorneys can obtain footage through discovery when recordings are used as evidence in a prosecution, he said.
ICE or any other law enforcement agency that seeks access to police drone footage would have to first submit a formal request for information, which would then be reviewed by the city’s law department, he said.
Surveillance footage, whether from police body worn cameras or the city’s network of real-time crime cameras, is rarely made public, and the department will likely be just as selective about releasing drone footage. However, it did allow California-based Skydio to use footage of the Kensington rooftop chase for a promotional video on the company’s website.
Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said in an interview that the drones provide a tactical advantage in an era of smaller police forces and won’t be used to patrol neighborhoods.
“It’s a great force multiplier, versus me having cops on roofs with binoculars,” Bethel said. “I know that some folks don’t like the idea [of drones], but it’s not surveillance. We don’t have drones sitting there all day.”
Other cities have stringent accountability policies for police drones. Boston requires its police department to prepare annual reports for the mayor and city council on all of its surveillance technologies, including drones. Illinois law compels any police department that owns a drone to submit an annual breakdown of drone usage to a state criminal justice authority. And in Los Angeles, a civilian oversight board had to approve plans for a drone first responder program there.
City Council has placed no such restrictions on Philadelphia police.
Oversight is especially relevant for a department that has faced issues with improper surveillance techniques. Just last year, the district attorney’s office had to dismiss more than 100 drug and gun convictions — with hundreds more in jeopardy — because narcotics officers allegedly didn’t disclose to prosecutors or defense attorneys that they had used crime cameras to monitor drug suspects in real time.
Councilmember Rue Landau, chair of council’s Technology and Information Services Committee, said the department was able to begin operating a drone program without independent oversight because a nonprofit, the Philadelphia Police Foundation, donated nine drones to the department.
But the police department plans to expand its drone program citywide and expects to deploy drones often this summer to monitor crowds at World Cup matches, semiquincentennial celebrations, and Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.
The department has also had officers trained for drone mitigation, giving them the technical know-how and permission from the federal government to strike unknown drones from the sky if officials believe the devices pose a threat.
Landau said she wants council and independent experts to have more input in how the devices are used.
“Drones are a powerful new technology,” she said. “That power requires real responsibility, which can only be achieved with clear oversight, transparency, and common-sense guardrails that protect people’s civil liberties, and ensure real accountability.”
She added: “How many people in Philadelphia even know that the police department has drones?”
How drones are used
Police officials selected Kensington’s 24th and 25th Districts — the focal point of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s plan to disrupt open-air drug markets and homeless encampments that had long burdened the area — as the initial test site for the department’s drone first responder program.
Those districts were chosen because of their high volume of 911 calls for serious offenses, Gripp said. Similar dynamics led the department to expand the pilot program last year to North Philadelphia’s 22nd District and the 15th District in the Northeast.
Bethel said the drones fly autonomously from fenced-off docking stations in police districts to crime scenes, based on information that callers relay to 911 operators.
Once the device reaches its destination, one of the department’s 13 Federal Aviation Administration-certified drone pilots can assume control and direct its movements.
“We think they’ll have an impact on police-involved shootings,” Bethel said. “A drone can respond to the location and see that there’s a guy on a roof, and the drone operator can share that with the cops.”
During one recent 30-day period, police drones averaged nearly 32 flights per day, Gripp said. They assisted firearm recoveries, vehicle and foot pursuits, and domestic assault investigations.
According to police sources, the department used drones last October to help search for 23-year-old Kada Scott, who was found buried in a shallow grave near a shuttered middle school in East Germantown, and earlier in 2025 in West Philadelphia, where U.S. Marshals apprehended an alleged murder suspect.
Gripp said the department has engaged in “extensive outreach” with the DA’s Office and the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and held more than 20 community meetings in the neighborhoods where the drones operate.
Paul Reddel, the head of the Dangerous Drug Offender Unit of the DA’s Office, said he has seen drone footage used in cases in his unit only twice so far.
Because they are small, quiet, and easy to navigate, Reddel said the drones could become valuable tools in monitoring drug activity across the city — from locating a dealer’s stash to tracing a buyer’s movements and monitoring a property during a raid.
Neither the public defender’s office nor the DA’s Office has created policies governing drone evidence.
“The greater concern, as this becomes more available, is what are the boundaries the courts are going to set?” Reddel said.
The police department’s directive prohibits drones from being used on routine patrol, from being outfitted with weapons or used to perform facial recognition, and from deterring First Amendment activities such as protests or demonstrations.
But drones can be used to gauge crowd sizes, Gripp said, or identify safety concerns.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at George Washington University Law School and author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, warns of the consequences of living in an era when much of civilians’ daily lives are recorded the moment they step outside.
“These new technologies are reversing the default that we have always lived under,” Ferguson said, “which is that we’re not supposed to be under surveillance unless we’ve done something wrong.”
‘Why won’t you show us the footage?’
In 2018, the police department in Chula Vista, Calif., became the first in the U.S. to obtain a FAA waiver to fly drones beyond an operator’s line of sight — permission the Philadelphia Police Department has also obtained — and launched a drone first responder program.
Three years later, the newspaper La Prensa San Diego requested a month’s worth of recordings to examine how drones were being used in Chula Vista. The city denied the request, arguing that the footage amounted to investigative records exempt under state open records law.
The newspaper’s publisher sued the city, igniting a years-long legal battle in California courts. The city spent more than $1 million in legal costs but was ultimately ordered by a judge to turn over dozens of videos to La Prensa.
Most of the footage showed run-of-the-mill police work, said Cory Briggs, a San Diego attorney who represented the newspaper’s publisher.
“On a certain level, people are used to being under surveillance,” Briggs said. “But our question for the police was, if you’re not using these drones for improper surveillance, why won’t you show us the footage?”
It was against this backdrop that Chula Vista officials visited Philadelphia in September 2023 to discuss their drone program with City Council.
That day, Healy publicly shared for the first time that the department’s SWAT Unit had possessed four drones since 2018 and used them to gather tactical information during standoffs with barricaded suspects.
Healy said the department had first consulted with law department attorneys to address privacy concerns that those first drones might provoke, CBS3 reported at the time.
Rudovsky said police officials told him around that time that they had a draft of a drone policy and wanted to know if he was willing to offer feedback.
He said had they followed up, he likely would have had suggestions based on past experience with improper police surveillance. In 2011, Rudovsky and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a landmark federal class action lawsuit against the city in response to thousands of pedestrian stops that officers made, often in minority communities, without reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed.
Rudovsky said the police department did not share its current drone policy with him. He recently reviewed the directive at The Inquirer’s request and said it contained multiple “red flags.”
There are references throughout the policy to following the Constitution, he said, but no mention of whether officers are required to obtain judicial warrants to use drones in certain scenarios, such as following specific individuals.
The language concerning drone usage for narcotics investigations is also broad, Rudovsky said, and doesn’t specify how much evidence officers would need to gather before a device could be deployed.
Landau acknowledged that there are scenarios when a drone would be helpful to police, such as following a fleeing suspect through traffic.
“But I think the question is,” she said, “what is the benefit of this technology? Will it reduce crime? Will it protect vulnerable communities?”
Drone mitigation
While law enforcement officials assure the public that they have nothing to fear from police drones, they are simultaneously preparing for the possibility that a bad actor could use one of the devices to harm civilians at events that Philadelphia will host this summer.
Gripp said the department will receive $7 million in federal funding to support drone mitigation training, preparedness and equipment.
While those concerns focus on intentional harm, privately owned drones have at least twice nearly caused mid-air disasters in the city due to operator negligence.
In February 2025, a medical helicopter was on approach to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, 600 feet above Philadelphia’s busy downtown streets, when its pilot and two passengers felt a large object strike the 6,000-pound Airbus Eurocopter EC135.
“I heard and felt the impact of something above our heads,” the pilot later told the National Transportation Safety Board. “I announced the strike, initially saying that we hit a large bird. Due to the sound of the impact, the crew was aware of the strike at the same time.”
But it wasn’t a bird.
“I saw a small, black, spherical object fall down the right side of the windscreen.”
A real estate photographer later told the NTSB that while flying a drone, he heard an approaching helicopter but lost signal to his drone as the helicopter flew by overhead.
The midair collision left the helicopter grounded on the helipad of the hospital, with damage to the cowling above the cockpit and marks on three of its main rotor blades.
Nearly a decade earlier, while monitoring a protest against then-President-elect Donald Trump, a Philadelphia Police Department helicopter hovering above 18th and Walnut Streets was forced to veer suddenly to avoid a fast-approaching drone that managed to pass underneath it.
The drone pilot, a then-20-year-old college student, was charged with risking a catastrophe. He was later found guilty of recklessly endangering another person, and sentenced to two years of probation.
There are now more than 837,000 registered drones in the U.S., and some can be purchased for as little as $32.99 at Walmart.
That the police department would want the capability to disable a rogue drone isn’t surprising, but it is another dimension of the drone program that the department’s leaders did not share with City Council.
“The technology has improved, and the use cases have expanded,” said Ferguson, the law professor. “And yet the laws and the regulations haven’t really kept up.”
Acknowledgment
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