Placer County Sheriff | Drones

The Sheriff’s Office calls its drones unmanned aerial systems, and lists them in the same order as its ground robots and armored vehicles.

What the inventory lists

General Orders OPER 27, the office’s public safety equipment order effective April 1, 2025, gives eight rows of unmanned aircraft with a quantity for each: 19 DJI Mavic Enterprise Dual, four Mobula 6 HD, two Skydio X10, one DJI Mavic Mini, one DJI FPV, one DJI Matrice 210, one Parrot Anafi Thermal, and one DJI Avata Pro-View Combo, which the order spells “Avanta”. The order states an initial cost of “$400.00” for the Mavic Mini and “$40,000.00” for the Skydio X10 row. It describes the Skydio X10 as “capable of still photos, video recording and live view, and thermal imaging,” and states that a drone “may only be deployed for a law enforcement purpose with sergeant or higher approval.”^[1] The order gives no total, and the sum of the rows, 30, is our arithmetic rather than a figure in the record.

The policies on the record

The predecessor order, OPER 28, reached the Board through a Sheriff’s memo dated April 19, 2022. The policy is marked “EFFECTIVE: 5/1/2022” and “to be added to the Sheriff’s Office General Orders effective June 10, 2022.” Its inventory already listed “DJI Mavic Enterprise Dual: Quantity 19.”^[2]

What governs it

Field Operations policy 5-31 covers unmanned aerial system operations. On retention it states that “Data of identifiable individuals captured during a UAS mission shall not be retained unless there is reasonable suspicion that evidence of criminal activity is present.”^[3]

What it does not establish

The orders list equipment, not use. How often each aircraft has flown, what it recorded, and what the flights cost are not in any record we fetched, and we did not locate an annual public safety equipment report on this pass. Neither order gives an acquisition date for any model.