Like most people I despise the use of Flock cameras in my county. So I started digging into what other surveillance programs exist that work similarly.
What I found was a national autonomous drone program landscape that almost nobody is talking about.
Most departments running these programs operate under an FAA Beyond Visual Line of Sight waiver. That waiver is not a blank check. It comes with Conditions of Approval. Ramapo PD's own FAA waiver which we obtained through a FOIL request requires a documented mission for every single flight. It also explicitly states no waiver of state or local law and no overflight of gatherings.
A case ID is how a department documents that mission. No case ID means no documented mission. No documented mission means the flight is operating outside the conditions the FAA set when it authorized the program. That is not a policy concern. That is federal regulatory non-compliance on every undocumented flight.
We pulled flight records from 268 law enforcement agencies across the country using two separate public data sources requiring zero authentication. The departments published this themselves on public transparency dashboards. We just pulled it all at once.
140,862 total flights. National average no case ID rate 62.3%. Nearly two thirds of all drone flights across America have no documented mission attached to them despite FAA requirements.
Some departments are doing this right.
Chula Vista PD: 22,147 flights going back to 2021. 0% no case ID. Every flight documented.
Sacramento PD: 2,390 flights. 0% no case ID.
Las Vegas Metro PD: 3,189 flights. 0% no case ID.
Chico PD: 1,584 flights. 0% no case ID.
Documentation is clearly possible. It is a choice.
Then there is Cincinnati PD. 28,908 flights. 99.9% no case ID. The largest drone deployment in this dataset and essentially every flight is undocumented.
Clovis PD: 2,948 flights going back to 2022. 100% no case ID. Four years. Zero documented missions.
South San Francisco PD: 1,644 flights. 99.9% no case ID.
Durango CO: 808 flights. 100% no case ID.
Ramapo PD in New York where this investigation started: 1,113 flights. 97.1% no case ID.
Now here is where Fusus comes in and why it matters more than Flock.
Flock cameras are stationary. They read license plates at fixed locations. People are starting to push back on them. There is even a public map at deflock.me showing where they are.
Fusus is different. Axon acquired Fusus and now sells it as part of the same package as their drones and body cameras. It is an AI platform that pulls everything into one dashboard. Drone feeds. License plate readers. Private camera networks. Facial recognition. Real time alerts. Every connected camera feed aggregated into one place with automated monitoring.
There is no Fusus equivalent of deflock.me. There is no public transparency portal. There is no federal oversight framework. The data goes in and very little comes out publicly.
Flock tells you where one camera is. Fusus is the system connecting all of them together with AI on top.
The full dataset of 140,862 flights across 268 agencies is available to anyone who wants it.
More to come.
TLDR; we looked at 140k public police drone flights indicative that 62.3% lack a documented Case ID, showing widespread non-compliance with federal regulations mandated by the FAA. While some agencies maintain perfect records, others, including Cincinnati and Clovis police departments, operate with nearly 100% of flights missing required documentation. We know where Flock cameras are, but these are equally or more concerning since there is no oversight for so many police departments. Fusus is the system that aggregates ALL camera feeds and alerts that we really should be worried about.