St. Paul PD Drone-as-First-Responder Program Logs 472 Flights in Four Weeks, Surpassing Full-Year 2025 Patrol Total

St. Paul PD DFR Program Logs 472 Flights in Four Weeks, Eclipsing Full-Year Record

The St. Paul Police Department's newly launched rooftop-based Drone as First Responder (DFR) program completed 472 missions in just four weeks — already surpassing the department's full-year 2025 patrol drone flight total of 436.

Three Skydio X10 drones deployed on rooftops went live on May 30 and are now reaching call locations within 90 seconds. The City of St. Paul released the figures this week alongside a list of arrests and rescues the program has supported. Minnesota now has at least five cities operating or actively building DFR programs, and every one of them has so far chosen Skydio. St. Paul reinforces a pattern that has held elsewhere: once a department activates a pad-based system, flight volume does not grow gradually — it surges.

One Skydio X10 Per Patrol District

St. Paul has stationed one Skydio X10 in each of its three patrol districts, mounting each unit on a building rooftop. DroneXL identified the aircraft from footage released by the department.

According to the department, each drone can cover a two-mile (approximately 3.2 km) radius from its pad, with individual flights lasting 20 to 30 minutes depending on weather. The X10 carries both color and thermal imaging cameras — a standard configuration for night calls and rooftop pursuits.

Senior Commander Ryan Murphy explained the program's objective plainly in an interview with KSTP: "Our goal is to give officers real-time situational awareness and information so they can be better prepared." Murphy also cited specific cases the program has helped close: "The drone found the person within seconds and directed officers to render aid."

The drones do not operate alone. A real-time information center staffed by 14 officers on rotating shifts runs 21 hours a day, monitoring footage, relaying coordinates to patrol units, and determining which calls warrant a drone dispatch. The drone is the visible element; the manned operations center is what converts video into tactical decisions.

Choosing Skydio places St. Paul firmly within Minnesota's emerging unified ecosystem. Minnetonka built its DFR program with six Skydio drones; Brooklyn Park approved a $4.6 million Skydio deployment in late 2025; Bloomington began testing the Skydio X10 in May. Every publicly announced DFR program in Minnesota has selected the same vendor.

472 Flights in Four Weeks — More Than the Full Year

The headline figure here is flight volume. St. Paul recorded 472 DFR missions between May 30 and the late-June update, exceeding the 436 patrol drone flights the department logged across all of 2025. One month outpaced a full calendar year.

Arrests tell a consistent story. The program located 33 individuals during its initial weeks — including missing children, persons in mental health crisis, and criminal suspects — and the rescues and contacts that followed contributed to 36 arrests.

Two cases highlighted by the department illustrate what response speed means in practice: a copper-wire theft call had a drone on scene within 1 minute 40 seconds; a search for a missing 9-year-old provided aerial coverage before ground units were in position.

Absent cost considerations, the Skydio X10 is close to an ideal platform for a new DFR program: mature autonomous flight, solid thermal integration, and pad-based deployment that removes the need for a pilot to manually supervise each launch. Every department in Minnesota has so far voted for the same airframe with its purchasing decisions.

Minnesota Is Becoming Skydio's Proving Ground

As KSTP reported, St. Paul is not operating in isolation. Over the past 12 months, Minnesota has quietly become one of the most active DFR clusters in the United States — and the cluster has a clearly recognizable vendor profile.

Minnetonka launched a rooftop program in 2025 with Skydio drones housed at a fire station, achieving average response times of 60 seconds. Brooklyn Park approved its $4.6 million Skydio deployment in November 2025, a decision accelerated after a state legislator was killed. The Minneapolis Police Department brought a DFR pilot proposal to the city council in May 2026, planning to dispatch two badge-marked drones from a north Minneapolis fire station. Bloomington began mid-May testing of the Skydio X10 for first-responder use.

The cluster carries two implications worth noting. First, it is moving Minnesota from occasional drone use to a state where most major metro-area police departments are flying or will soon fly DFR. Second, Skydio has effectively locked out competition here. Every publicly announced DFR program in the state has chosen the same vendor, giving Skydio a concentration of deployments in this region comparable to what Chula Vista, California, represented for the broader DFR conversation nationally.

Program Costs Have Not Been Disclosed

There is a gap in both the KSTP reporting and the department's own updates worth noting explicitly. St. Paul has not published the program's total cost, its ongoing operating budget, or a breakdown of personnel costs for the 14-officer real-time information center. Departments seeking to benchmark this program need that number to calculate accurately. Brooklyn Park released its $4.6 million figure and drew public debate; St. Paul has yet to put any number on the table.

The transparency questions that surfaced around Chula Vista will eventually recur in Minnesota. A 2025 court order compelled Chula Vista to release drone footage, setting a precedent every DFR agency in the country must address. Minnesota has its own public records framework, but the pattern is the same: once a department accumulates hundreds of flights, civil liberties organizations begin submitting records requests, and questions about footage retention, access, and disclosure move from theoretical to operational.

Analysis

One thing that goes unstated: 472 flights in four weeks is not a story about enthusiasm for drones. It is a story about what happens to demand when deployment friction disappears.

The old model meant loading equipment into a vehicle, driving to the scene, and setting up for launch — most calls simply were not worth the round trip. The pad model eliminates that transit entirely. The decision compresses to: "Is this call worth having someone watch a screen for 90 seconds?" The answer turns out to be "yes" far more often than anyone predicted.

That is precisely what the Minnesota cluster keeps confirming. Minnetonka, Brooklyn Park, Bloomington, and now St. Paul are all running the same experiment on different rooftops with the same Skydio airframe, and the result keeps repeating: flight volume does not climb slowly after deployment — it jumps by an order of magnitude within weeks.

Skydio now dominates the Minnesota market comprehensively. And each week, the underlying argument gains more supporting evidence: drones are becoming normalized, and on balance the benefits are outweighing the costs. The arrests, the rescues, the child found before a search formation was assembled — all of those sit on one side of the ledger.

The second number coming out of St. Paul is the one worth tracking, not the first. 472 flights makes a clean headline; the harder number to interpret is how many of those flights produced an arrest, a rescue, or a case closure — and how many were flights where the drone "saw some things it probably didn't need to see."

St. Paul's current reporting shows 33 individuals located and 36 arrests across 472 flights, meaning the majority of flights did not produce a recordable outcome. At this stage, that is normal. The question worth following is whether that ratio improves as dispatchers learn which calls merit a drone — or whether, because the cost of a deployment is so low, departments begin sending drones to everything.

Image credit: ABC 5

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