Inyo County Sheriff | Drones and ground robots

What a good disclosure looks like

California’s AB 481 requires a law enforcement agency to publish an annual report on its military equipment, including how each type was used, what it cost, and whether any complaints or misuse were found. Most of the reports this project has read treat that as a form to be filled in.

Inyo County’s does not. On the aircraft:

The Sheriff’s Office has four (4) Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).

and then, under Usage:

Seven (7) times for crime scene documentation.

Six (6) times for calls for service related to Sheriff’s SED Operations.

Fourteen (14) times for calls for service in Sheriff’s Patrol Operations.

Two (2) times for Search and Rescue Operations.

Twenty-nine flights in a year, sorted into four categories, from an office with four aircraft. Then the cost, to the dollar: approximately $858 in maintenance, no training costs because the training sits inside existing team training. Then no complaints, and no discoveries of inappropriate use.

The two ground robots get the same treatment:

The Robot was used two (2) times during Sheriff’s SED Operations. Both involved the search of residences of violent suspects in the service of search warrants.

Why that is worth a page of its own

Because the alternative is on this site too, published the same day.

Imperial County’s Sheriff’s Office reports eight unmanned aerial vehicles, twice as many as Inyo, and describes a year of their use in a single sentence: two flew to view the area around locations where suspects had firearms. That is not a violation of anything. AB 481 asks for a summary, and a summary is what it gives.

Same statute, same duty, two very different documents. One lets a resident work out roughly how often an aircraft goes up over their county and what for. The other does not.

This site spends most of its time on what agencies have not disclosed. It is worth being just as specific when one of them does the thing properly, because the difference is not the law. Both counties are complying. The difference is a choice about how much detail to write down, and Inyo’s report is the standard the others could be measured against.

What it does not tell you

What the aircraft are. The report gives no make, model, or sensor payload, so whether these carry thermal imaging, zoom optics or anything else is unknown here.

Whether the pattern held. The Policies page published one annual report when we read it, covering 2023-2024. Later years were not found, and that is a statement about what we found rather than about what exists.

And the framing is the office’s own. “No complaints received” and “no discoveries of inappropriate use” are the agency reporting on itself, which is what the statute asks for. They are not the finding of an outside audit, and this page does not present them as one.