What this is
CityDroneWatch counts, times and maps the drone flights that police and fire agencies publish about themselves. Every number on every page comes from a record the agency itself put online; the site adds the grouping by state, county, city and agency, the purpose classes, the local clock and the maps.
It is not a list of every drone an agency owns or flies. Agencies that publish nothing do not appear, and an agency's record covers only what its vendor's transparency feed exposes.
Where the records come from
- Airdata public dashboards
- BRINC transparency pages
- CAPE transparency pages
- DroneSense transparency pages
- Flock Safety transparency portals
- agency-published spreadsheets and PDFs
- San Francisco open data
- Skydio transparency feeds (ArcGIS)
Each agency page links its source query in the footer. Feeds are read once a day at most, with a contact address in every request, and a feed is kept only once it holds at least 5 flights.
What is published, and what is held
- Paths. The whole published path, simplified to 10 m. No endpoint is clipped and nothing is delayed: every flight in the record at build time is counted.
- Sensitive purposes. A flight whose stated purpose names a domestic, sexual-assault, kidnapping, welfare, mental-health, juvenile or suicide matter is listed like any other but drawn as a generalised area of at least 300 m around the flight, never as a path or point, and has no page of its own.
- Free text. The record's description field is never read into a page.
- Operators. Where the record names the pilot's account, it is hashed at ingest and shown as "Operator 1", "Operator 2", numbered within the agency in order of first flight. No name or address is read into a page.
- Purposes. The agency's own words, grouped into classes by a committed lookup table; unmatched values are "Other", blank ones "Not stated".
Reuse
Every page has a Markdown twin at index.md next to it and a machine index at llms.txt. Each month's flights are a static JSON file under the agency page. Cite the agency's record, then this site.
Corrections and questions: see the about page.