Emails reveal how some police officers have become superfans of autonomous drone company Skydio and regularly help to sell or promote its products to colleagues
A drone company called Skydio has managed to get autonomous drones into dozens of police departments by turning cops into their biggest fans. Tweets: @loteck , @hypervisible , @mjgault , and @jason_koebler Tweets: Seth Hall / @loteck : More coverage on Chula Vista's drone program highlights how for-profit surveillance companies like @SkydioHQ are capturing California police departments and putting them to work selling surveillance equipment. Police should serve the public, not surveillance tech vendors. https://twitter.com/... @hypervisible : “The tactics deployed by Skydio are similar to those we've seen from Amazon's Ring, which has sought to convince cops of the utility of their product and then turn those cops into evangelists or, in some cases, employees.” https://www.vice.com/... Matthew Gault / @mjgault : lots of great and wild emails in this story, but my favorite is Skydio trying to butter up a cop “Will have you looking like Brad Pitt, but understand if you can't do that. Would love to have a uniformed officer in the video somehow.” https://www.vice.com/... Jason Koebler / @jason_koebler : NEW: Autonomous drones are flying above farmers markets, street fairs, monitoring unhoused people and mental health episodes all over the country. This started more or less as a pilot project in Chula Vista, California. We have thousands of docs that show https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Skydio's path into dozens of police departments runs through a single origin point: the Chula Vista program that later drew scrutiny over millions of logged flight coordinates seeded the deployments and, per these emails, a corps of officer-advocates who pitch the drones to peer agencies. The playbook has a direct precedent — [[a:944172|Ring's Lakeland arrangement requiring police to advertise its cameras in exchange for free products]] — but Skydio's version is more organic: no disclosed quid pro quo, just enthusiastic users doing the selling.
First-order effects
- Police officers become an unpaid, trusted sales channel inside other departments, letting Skydio bypass formal procurement review with peer-to-peer endorsement.
- Departments adopting on a colleague's recommendation inherit the monitoring practices documented in the related coverage — tracking vehicles, people, public events, and unhoused residents — often before any privacy framework exists.
Second-order effects
- Rival autonomy vendors face pressure to replicate the officer-evangelist model rather than compete on specs alone, since the deciding factor in adoption is intra-police trust, not procurement scoring.
- Civil-liberties researchers and journalists respond by tracing deployment footprints back to the source programs, as the flight-coordinate investigation did, shifting scrutiny from individual departments to the vendor's expansion strategy.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-cultivated police advocacy becomes the norm, public-safety procurement effectively routes around civilian oversight, pushing regulators toward disclosure rules for how surveillance tools enter departments.
- The pattern extends beyond policing: the same autonomy stack Skydio sells to departments sits alongside military-focused efforts like Anduril's self-piloted drones, pointing toward a domestic-security market where government buyers are also the distribution network.
The trend: Surveillance and autonomy vendors are converting their government customers into their sales force, making police enthusiasm — not procurement process — the gatekeeper for which technologies enter American policing.