Visalia Police | Drones

The one surveillance system in Visalia you can count

Most of what this site publishes has to be assembled from minutes, contracts and records requests. Not this. Visalia Police Department’s drone fleet is described, by the department, in a document it is required by law to publish every year, down to the model number.

The 2026 report lists twelve unmanned aircraft: a DJI Avata for interior building searches, a Matrice 30T with forty minutes of flight time carrying zoom and thermal cameras, a Mavic Pro, a Mavic 2 Zoom, a Mavic 3 Zoom, and a Mavic Enterprise with colour and infrared cameras plus a speaker and a light. Operators are licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The reason any of that is public is a statute. AB 481 requires California police departments to adopt a military equipment use policy, publish an inventory, and report annually on what they used and how often. Visalia has published reports for 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Its transparency page states the department holds equipment in seven of the law’s fifteen categories, and that it has never taken equipment from the federal 1033 military surplus programme.

This is what disclosure looks like when a law requires it, and it is worth saying so plainly before the rest of this page: the department is telling you.

Two hundred and twenty-one

The report’s usage log for January to December 2025 is a table of what came out of the armoury and how often. The drone line reads, in full:

1/25 - 12/2025 UAS 221 Equipment used for a variety of missions including: search for missing persons, article search, death scene investigation, unlawful fire monitoring, fleeing suspect search, and public demonstrations.

Two hundred and twenty-one deployments in a year, in a city of about 145,000. That is a drone in the air roughly every other day.

Read the mission list from the left and it is difficult to object to any of it. Missing persons. Searching for a dropped weapon. Documenting a death scene without walking through it. Watching an unlawful fire. Finding someone who ran from a traffic stop.

Then the list ends with “public demonstrations.”

The last item on the list

Those two words are the department’s own, in its own statutory report, in its own list of what the aircraft were used for. We are not going to tell you what they mean, because the report does not say and we have not asked yet. We do not know which demonstrations, or how many of the 221 flights were over them, or whether anything was recorded, or how long any recording was kept.

What we can say is that flying a camera over a demonstration is a different act from flying one over a missing-person search, and that the difference is not a matter of the hardware. A Matrice 30T carrying a zoom lens and a thermal camera does not become a different machine because the people underneath it are exercising a constitutional right. It becomes a different question.

That question is not answered anywhere in this report. The report tells you the aircraft exist, how many there are, what cameras they carry, how often they flew and, in six words, the categories of thing they flew for. It does not contain a policy on what may be recorded when people assemble, how long that video is kept, or who may later search it. The only rule it names for operators is FAA licensing, which governs flying an aircraft safely and says nothing at all about recording people.

The complaint log for 2025 reads “NONE”. That is a record of complaints received about military equipment through a specific channel. It is not a measure of what residents think, and it should not be read as one. Most people in Visalia have no idea this report exists.

What the same law does not cover

One more thing is worth noticing, and it is structural rather than about Visalia.

AB 481’s fifteen equipment categories cover drones, armoured vehicles, breaching tools, less-lethal munitions and specialised firearms. They do not cover licence plate readers. So the same department that reports its drone flights to the public count by count discloses nothing at all, under this law, about the plate reader network it also runs. The 2026 report mentions licence plates exactly zero times.

Plate readers are covered by a different statute, SB 34, which requires a published usage policy instead of an annual report. The department’s own training bulletin tells officers to follow “Policy 428 Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)”. We could not find Policy 428 published on the city’s website.

So in one city, two surveillance systems, two statutes, and two very different amounts of daylight. The drones are counted every year. The cameras are not.