San Bernardino Sheriff | Drones

What the county says it owns

California’s AB 481 requires an agency holding covered equipment to publish an annual report saying what it has, how many, what each cost and how they are used. Unmanned aircraft are covered.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department publishes one, and for calendar year 2025 the entire small unmanned fleet is seven aircraft:

• Four Sky-Hero LOKI Mk 2, about two pounds each, described as indoor aircraft used to search the interiors of structures. $1,825 each.
• Three Autel Evo Max 4T, with a thermal payload and obstacle avoidance. About $8,999 each.

The authorised uses listed with them are SWAT and explosive device responses, hostage rescue, barricaded suspects, rural operations involving armed suspects, search and rescue, natural disasters and riots. The SWAT Commander or a designee approves each flight, and only Specialized Enforcement Division members with current FAA remote pilot ratings may fly them.

That is a small, specific, tactical fleet, and the report describes it as such.

What the manual says the county does

Two months after that report, in June 2026, the Department published a manual containing policy 3.830, Drone as First Responder.

DFR is not a tactical fleet. The policy describes aircraft “pre-positioned in service areas, ready to be launched immediately in response to an emergency call for service”, flying beyond visual line of sight under FAA waiver, live-streaming to multiple stakeholders, with the safety and pre-flight checklists “integrated into the agency’s Computer-Aided Dispatch System (CAD) and the UAS automated docking system”. The policy anticipates that an operator will “automatically launch a pre-positioned drone (strategically located throughout the area of responsibility) closest to the emergency”.

That is a different kind of programme from seven aircraft in a SWAT locker. It is aircraft over neighbourhoods as a matter of routine dispatch.

The gap, stated carefully

The inventory runs through 31 December 2025. The manual is dated 8 June 2026. So the simplest reading is that DFR is newer than the last report, and the aircraft for it, if any have been bought, will appear in the next one.

What can be said now is narrower and still worth saying. Two hundred and thirty-seven readable documents were searched for this county, including every board agenda and Statement of Proceedings the county’s own portal advertises from January 2022 onward. “Drone as First Responder” appears twice, both times inside the Sheriff’s own manual, and not once in the board’s record. Three meetings from August and September 2022 are missing because the portal’s own links return errors.

So the rules for a first-responder drone programme are written down, and no purchase, no flight and no board decision establishing one has been found.

What the rules say

The policy is stronger than most on this site in two places, and both deserve crediting.

It prohibits the thing that worries people most:

UAS systems shall not be used:

• To conduct random or mass surveillance.

And it puts a warrant between the aircraft and a private place:

Absent a warrant or exigent circumstances, operators shall adhere to FAA altitude regulations and shall not intentionally record or transmit images of any location where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Footage is recorded on every flight and is usually treated as confidential investigative material. Release is controlled by the Office of the Sheriff, through a short list of divisions, and nothing may be destroyed while it is the subject of a records request or a legal hold.

The one number the policy does not give is how long the footage is kept. It says only that it will be retained “consistently with the Department’s retention schedule”, and it does not reproduce that schedule.

One note about reading any of this

The annual report that carries the equipment figures is fifty-one pages of scanned images with no text layer. Nothing in it can be searched. Every figure on this page was read off the page.

That is a fact about the file rather than a claim about anyone’s intent, and it is worth recording because the county researched immediately before this one publishes the same statutory report as text that anyone can search in a second.