Overview: Transparency and community trust
Contributing Writer Clint Combs previews the St. Paul City Council vote on expanding the city’s Docked Drone Program. As local law enforcement highlights the technology's success in search-and-rescue operations, local advocates and council members raise critical questions regarding privacy, municipal budget priorities, and global corporate ties.
The St. Paul City Council will vote Sept. 9 on whether to accept a $200,000 Justice Department grant that would expand the city’s Docked Drone Program with Skydio through the end of 2028.
The city currently operates three drone docks:
The Central District Dock at police headquarters on Grove Street, covering the central and downtown core.
The Western District Dock at the Western District Station on Hamline Avenue near Interstate 94, covering western neighborhoods and transit corridors.
The Eastern District Dock at Fire Station No. 7 on Ross Avenue near East Seventh Street, covering the city’s east side.
The drones are part of a $350,000 suite of Axon equipment that also includes body cameras, dash cameras and tasers. Deputy Chief Kurt Hallstrom told the council the technology does not come cheap.
“There’s no budget to expand this program. These devices are quite expensive to operate and utilize,” Hallstrom said Sept. 2. “Each drone can fly for 20 minutes up to a two mile radius, so we don’t provide coverage to the full city.”
Flight data and council pushback
St. Paul began deploying the Skydio drones for first responders on May 30. In the program’s first 24 days, the city recorded 472 flights that led to 36 arrests and helped locate 33 people who were reported missing or experiencing a health crisis. As of this month, the department reports 1,500 total flights, 75 arrests, and the location of four suicidal individuals and one missing 3-year-old.
Council members HwaJeong Kim and Molly Coleman said they plan to vote against accepting the grant.
“I’m not planning on supporting our application of this contract,” Kim said.
“I will be voting no on this grant application,” Coleman said. “We have been having, over the last several months, but really in a very intense way over the last several weeks, a big conversation within the city and really within the country more broadly about how we balance our policing needs with our surveillance and our privacy and our civil rights.”
Corporate connections and local budget priorities
The Minneapolis City Council rejected a separate 75 day free trial contract with Skydio in a 6-6 vote earlier this year, amid concerns over the company’s contracts with Israel’s military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Sima Shakhsari, an Iranian immigrant who teaches in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and is a member of the Free Palestine Coalition, opposes extending the grant. Following the Oct. 7 attacks, Skydio supplied more than 100 short range military drones to the Israeli Defense Forces during a bombing campaign the United Nations has described as a genocide against Palestinians.
“Our organizations are against a company that has contracts with the IDF and ICE to be operating in Saint Paul,” Shakhsari said.
Shakhsari also questioned the timing of a six-figure grant request while Mayor Kaohly Her’s budget proposal includes closing the Dayton’s Bluff Library.
“Our unhoused neighbors are being pushed out of Pig’s Eye and so there’s no money for housing. There’s no money for education or affordable healthcare, but somehow we are spending money on more drones as the chief said himself, these equipments are extremely expensive,” Shakhsari said.
Calls for public transparency
Hallstrom said the department has no alternative funding source if the council rejects the grant.
“We would be looking for additional resources, grant funding sources that we would try to utilize,” he said. “There’s no means for us to do this without grant funding.”
Coleman said she is concerned that accepting the grant could set a piecemeal precedent for future agreements.
“It’s really critical to me that we don’t make these decisions kind of one after the other, this contract, that contract, this grant application, that grant application, but have a much bigger understanding of how we want to approach this decision-making in the future,” Coleman said.
Anna Madison of the Free Palestine Coalition criticized the decision to place the grant proposal on the consent agenda, which limits public comment.
“This is an important topic that we’ve been trying to push to have more transparency, more disclosure from our elected leaders and the police department, and we are certainly glad that they’re starting to pay attention to some of our concerns,” Madison said. “But there needs to be more transparency, and they need to do a much better job of engaging the public on this. It can’t just be a conversation between the police and the city council.”
Cedar Larson, also with the Free Palestine Coalition, called on the city to disclose its full agreement with Skydio.
“We demand the city reveal the contracts with Skydio that till now have remained hidden,” Larson said. “Residents have a right to know how many taxpayer dollars have been spent on drones while libraries are being closed and services cut.”
The council is scheduled to vote on the grant Sept. 9 at 3:30 p.m.
Clint Combs is a freelance reporter and contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at combs0284@gmail.com.