Alameda County Sheriff | Drones

Seven hundred and fifty-six flights

The number comes from the office’s own annual report to the Board of Supervisors, covering September 2024 through August 2025. Three models account for most of what is named: a DJI Matrice 30T flew 203 times, a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise 153, and a DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced 121. The report does not say what the remaining 279 deployments used, and neither will we.

The stated purposes are overwatch during operations, search and rescue, and scene documentation and mapping. The office also states that it does not possess weaponized aircraft.

For the year, the report records no policy violations or misuse of equipment, and no complaints.

The rooftop system the Sheriff asked to buy

In July 2025 the office asked the Board to approve an agreement with Flock Safety for a system called AeroDome, at a cost not to exceed $600,000 for an initial year.

What it does, in the office’s words: “drones are launched directly from fixed rooftop bases strategically placed throughout the unincorporated area of Alameda County. The DFR system will allow deputies to deploy drones to the scene of an emergency within seconds, often arriving before ground units.” It would be run by the Real Time Information Center at the Eden Township Substation, and the office is explicit that it would sit alongside rather than replace the existing drones.

We do not know whether the Board approved it. The document we read is the request. We have not found the minutes, and nothing on this page should be read as saying the system was bought.

One vendor, for a documented reason

The most quotable sentence in Alameda County’s surveillance record is the sole-source justification:

The AeroDome DFR system is proprietary and is the only product that can seamlessly integrate with ACSO’s existing Flock Safety ALPR system and Flock operating software.

In 2023 the office contracted with Flock Safety for license plate readers and put more than 100 cameras across the unincorporated county. Two years later, the reason given for buying drones from that same company without competition is that the plate readers are already theirs.

The county writes this as an advantage, and on its own terms it is one: a single platform, one support relationship, tools that talk to each other. It is also a description of how a decision made once narrows the decisions that come after it. Both readings come from the same sentence, and the sentence is the county’s.

Who was in the room

State law requires the office to hold a public meeting each year on its military equipment report. It held one on October 21, 2025, at the Cherryland Community Center in Hayward, streamed online for anyone who could not attend, publicised through the agency’s social media, its website, and partners asked to share it with their networks.

The report records the turnout: “There were only two attendees from the public, and there were no questions or concerns from the public presented during this meeting.”

Two people, in a county of more than one and a half million. The office did what the law asked of it. The meeting is on the calendar every year, and this is the sort of thing that is easy to miss and hard to undo once the equipment is bought. That is a fact about all of us rather than about the Sheriff’s Office.

The step that did not happen

The report also records a change to the route the item took:

ACSO had planned on presenting this to the Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee on October 23, 2025. Supervisor Marquez requested that the October Public Protection Committee meeting be cancelled and asked for the annual Military Equipment Report to move forward directly to the Board of Supervisors’ regular meeting.

That is the whole of what the document says. It gives no reason, and we have not found one. A committee hearing is a second public occasion to ask questions about the same report, and in this year there was one occasion instead of two.

What the record does show working

Reading the governance history in order, one thing does track from a public comment to a change.

At the December 2023 hearings, members of the public raised three concerns, one of which was “enhancements to the data retention policy governing uncrewed aircraft systems.” The office committed to “consulting with data and privacy experts to amend the ACSO UAS policy.” In May 2024 it presented a revised General Order 6.15 governing small uncrewed aircraft systems.

We have not read that order, so we cannot tell you whether drone retention actually changed or by how much. What the record shows is a request made in public and an order revised afterwards. The part we can verify is the process. The part that matters most, which is what the policy now says, is still on a website nobody here has opened.