Eyes in the Sky: Wilmington Police Are Building a Drone Fleet

In June 2024, the Wilmington Police Department announced it was ending its SABLE helicopter program and shifting to drones. (WECT) It has since stood up a drone unit — funded, per the department’s own announcement, with state support — and in February 2026 it showed WWAY the aircraft. (Wilmington PD · WWAY)

What they’re flying

It’s a layered fleet, not a single drone (WWAY; DroneXL):

• DJI Avata — a small, agile FPV drone with a wide 4K camera, flown indoors to clear rooms and for barricaded-subject calls.
• DJI Matrice 4TD — an enterprise drone with thermal imaging, used to find people in wooded areas, track fleeing individuals at night, and search when visibility drops.
• DJI Mavic 3 — lightweight and airborne in minutes over a crash scene, a perimeter, or an outdoor crime scene.
• Non-DJI tethered drones — powered from the ground so they can stay aloft for hours. The department describes them as persistent overwatch for crowds, large events, and critical incidents — effectively a temporary aerial light pole that watches.

Corporal Brendan McInerney, who oversees the traffic unit, told WWAY the recent focus has been hands-on training. (DroneXL)

Already in the air

This isn’t hypothetical. During the Independence Mall evacuation last Christmas, the department reportedly used drones to track four suspects who fled by vehicle and on foot, monitoring their movements from the air in real time and coordinating ground units. (WWAY, via DroneXL) WPD also uses the drones for search and rescue, missing-person cases, outdoor crime scenes, and fire response, where thermal can see through smoke.

The next step: “drone as first responder”

Here is where a response tool edges toward a surveillance one. The department has said it hopes to launch a “drone as first responder” (DFR) program: stationing UAVs so they deploy automatically to certain calls, arriving before officers and streaming live video back to dispatch. (WWAY) DFR is spreading nationwide, and it’s the model that draws the sharpest privacy and mission-creep questions — because it turns a drone from something an officer chooses to launch into something that launches itself, over whoever is below. (InvestigateTV · WFAE) To be clear: as of this writing, Wilmington’s DFR program is a stated goal, not a deployed system.

The oversight questions no one is answering

A thermal camera that can track a person at night, a tethered drone that can hover over a crowd for hours, and a plan to auto-launch aircraft to calls all raise the question this whole site keeps asking: who’s watching the watchers? We looked for Wilmington’s drone policy — retention rules for the video, limits on where and when drones fly, audit requirements, public reporting — and could not find one published. That gap is the story: a powerful aerial-surveillance capability, built with public grant money (in part a federal FEMA Port Security Grant), and the public rules governing it aren’t on the table. Best practice, where departments do this transparently, is a published policy, community input, and regular reporting — before the program scales.

Update — July 3, 2026: DeFlockILM filed a North Carolina public-records request with the City of Wilmington for the drone program’s policy, inventory, funding, retention schedule, flight logs, and any “drone as first responder” plans. We’ll publish what the City produces.

Update — the records are in (September 2, 2026). After an eight-week chase, the City produced part of the file. Here is what it shows — and what it still hides.

What the records show

• A real, growing fleet — roughly 18 active aircraft (plus 5 retired). The inventory the City produced lists Autel EVO II drones (including the 640T thermal Enterprise), DJI Matrice M30T, Matrice 4TD and Matrice 200, DJI Avata and Mavic units, a U.S.-made Teal 2 tactical drone, and a Fotokite Sigma — the tethered ‘persistent overwatch’ system that can hover over a crowd for hours. This is not a couple of hobby drones; it is a layered aerial-surveillance program with thermal and persistent-watch capability.
• It is a multi-agency unit — SABLE. The governing SOP is for SABLE (Southeastern North Carolina Airborne Law Enforcement), a joint unit of the Wilmington Police Department, the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, and other participating agencies, run by a ‘SABLE Executive Board.’ The drones are a shared regional capability, not WPD’s alone.
• Federal Homeland Security money bought the newest tactical drones. The inventory carries a FEMA grant number — EMW-2024-PU-05533 — on the 2026 Teal 2 and Fotokite aircraft. That “-PU-” code is FEMA’s Port Security Grant Program (federal, CFDA 97.056). So while WPD publicly credited “state support and funding,” the paper shows federal port-security dollars funding police surveillance drones in Wilmington.
• Flight data lives in a third-party cloud. The SOP names “DroneLogBook” (SafetyDrone), a web-based cloud platform, as the flight-log system; it requires a search warrant where a flight would intrude on a reasonable expectation of privacy, and it provides for a supervisor audit and an annual report. Oversight exists — on paper, self-conducted, and reported to the agency’s own head.

What the records still hide

The production arrived with no cover letter, no “no records” certification, and no exemption log, and it left out the records that would show how the program is actually used: the flight logs (which the SOP confirms exist in DroneLogBook), the grant and purchase paperwork, any drone-as-first-responder plans, and any integration with the STING Center / Fusus real-time crime hub. On September 2, 2026 we sent the City a deficiency letter demanding the balance or a specific statutory basis, and renewing an offer of mediation before a § 132-9 action. The records we do have are preserved on the Internet Archive.

A helicopter, you can hear coming. A drone-as-first-responder, you cannot.

One more layer of the stack

Drones don’t replace the license-plate readers, the gunshot microphones, or the real-time crime center — they add to them. Wilmington now has cameras that read every plate, sensors that listen for sound, a fusion center that stitches feeds together, and eyes that can be put overhead on demand. One at a time, each sounds reasonable. Together, it’s an integrated surveillance system few residents ever voted for.

What you can do

• Ask for the policy. File a public-records request for WPD’s drone/UAV policy, inventory, funding source, flight logs, and retention schedule — then ask why it isn’t already public. (How to file a request.)
• Ask your city leaders to adopt a public drone policy — retention limits, flight restrictions, audit logs, annual reporting — before, not after, a drone-as-first-responder program launches.
• Add your name. Sign the petition and join the residents putting these questions on the record.

Sources

• WECT — WPD announces end of SABLE helicopter use (June 27, 2024)
• WWAY — WPD officers train with high-tech drones (Feb. 2026)
• Wilmington Police Department — “Launches Drone Unit Thanks to State Support and Funding”
• DroneXL — Wilmington PD Expands DJI Drone Fleet (Feb. 26, 2026)
• InvestigateTV — Police drone programs expand as first-responder tool, raising privacy concerns (Feb. 6, 2026)
• WFAE (Charlotte Talks) — Eyes in the sky: Police drones and public safety