Normal, Illinois Police Department Adds Flock DFR Drone, Expanding Fleet to Seven

Normal PD Adds Flock DFR, Bringing Fleet to Seven

The Town of Normal Council in Illinois voted on June 15 to approve a $50,000 procurement authorizing the Normal Police Department to add a Flock Drone as First Responder (DFR) system to its existing six-drone fleet, with a one-year pilot period.

The seventh drone marks the department's first Flock platform and its first unit designed specifically for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) autonomous flight — formally placing Normal in the DFR product category that Skydio CEO Adam Bry recently and publicly criticized.

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The Existing Six and What the Seventh Changes

The Normal Police Department currently operates six non-Flock drones, all flown under FAA Part 107 visual line of sight (VLOS) rules, which require a pilot or visual observer to maintain direct sight of the aircraft at all times. The new Flock unit fundamentally changes that operating model.

The Flock platform combines detailed urban mapping with an automated docking and dispatch station, enabling autonomous flight along pre-mapped, obstacle-cleared corridors to incident locations without real-time manual control from an operator.

That operational shift — not the headcount increase — is the real story. The existing six VLOS drones are already in active use for tactical support, search and rescue, traffic accident reconstruction, and event monitoring, reflecting a mature UAS capability within the department. Adding one autonomous DFR unit transitions the department from a reactive deployment model to a call-triggered, arrive-before-the-patrol-car posture.

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Chief Petrilli's Presentation to Council

Police Chief Steve Petrilli framed the proposal to council in the language familiar to Flock's customer base. "DFR is about getting there, getting there fast, and having eyes on the situation in real time," Petrilli said at the meeting.

He described the dispatch logic as a quick triage decision on every incoming 911 call — "Is this a drone call?" — with the drone deployed only when an aerial perspective saves time or helps reduce risk, not on every incident.

According to MSN, Petrilli cited industry benchmarks from other cities already running Flock DFR, noting that departments using the system arrive first approximately 75% of the time. Normal's deployment is expected to achieve roughly a 70% first-on-scene rate, a figure that will serve as the primary metric when the department returns to council for renewal after the one-year trial.

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The Privacy Framework Attached to the Approval

The privacy protections accompanying this proposal are notably more detailed than those seen in most DFR deployments of comparable scale. A public transparency portal will display drone flight paths and the category of calls to which the drone responded, allowing residents to review weekly flight logs — though specific addresses and personally identifiable information will be redacted.

Onboard and dispatch-side footage will be retained for 30 days, with extensions applicable in criminal proceedings. Chief Petrilli described privacy as "the first consideration in the entire program design," and the council approved the purchase without dissent.

This privacy framework will likely serve as a reference template for the next wave of cities considering DFR adoption. The transparency portal in particular goes beyond what most departments currently offer, and it makes the political case for renewal in twelve months considerably stronger.

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The Broader Industry Debate

Normal's decision lands in the middle of an active industry argument. On June 8, Skydio CEO Adam Bry posted a lengthy thread on X (formerly Twitter) criticizing the trend toward larger DFR drones — without naming names, but widely understood as a reference to Flock — as solving the wrong problem. His core argument rests on physics: doubling the distance at which a drone can read a license plate causes the airframe mass to scale roughly by the cube, driving up noise, kinetic energy under parachute, and cost per flight minute. Bry's position is that more small autonomous drones handling more calls beats fewer large drones observing from distance.

Why Normal chose Flock over Skydio or DJI is not difficult to explain: DJI is politically off the table for most U.S. law enforcement agencies, and Skydio's acquisition cost is prohibitive for many municipal budgets.

Flock's deployment model takes a different path. The large quadcopter — derived from the Aerodome platform — carries a more capable camera and is designed to fly farther and loiter longer, which is precisely the system Normal's dispatchers will be using on live 911 calls. Normal's pilot is one of dozens of U.S. municipal deployments happening this year, and its renewal decision in twelve months will be one small data point in a much larger industry question about procurement direction — a question that will not be resolved in 2026.

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DroneXL Perspective

The most significant number in this story is not the $50,000 price tag or the projected 70% first-on-scene rate — it is six. Normal Police Department already operated six drones before this vote.

Adding a seventh is not a city entering the drone space for the first time. It is a department with deep UAS operational experience, after years of VLOS missions, upgrading to an autonomous platform for a specific mission set: call-triggered first response. The Flock pilot will be evaluated against that baseline, not from zero.

What remains to be seen is whether the existing fleet stays intact or whether this pilot is the opening move in a broader platform transition. Six VLOS drones represent a substantial investment in a different vendor's hardware.

Watching whether Normal PD's next UAS budget request expands the Flock footprint or sustains the current platforms will tell the industry something important: whether DFR autonomous flight becomes a distinct mission category layered on top of existing fleets, or eventually replaces them.

For residents who will soon see this drone operating over Normal: a police DFR unit triggered by a 911 call and fully logged in a dispatch system is more useful — and considerably less intrusive — than a neighbor flying recreationally with no accountability. Police flights are regulated; recreational flights often are not.

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