Bringing The Genocide Home: SAPD Asks Council For Drone Used In Gaza
SAPD wants AI drones that were trained during genocide on Palestinians in Gaza. ICE uses the same drone system.
Major update, 2/3/2025, 10:17PM: In a 4-3 split vote, the council voted to purchase the Skydio drones.
In the near future when Santa Ana residents look up and see the police department’s drones flying overhead, they will be looking at the same type of drone that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used against Palestinians in Gaza at the start of the genocide. That’s if the city council tonight votes in favor of purchasing the Skydio drones listed on the staff report slated for the council’s consideration. Skydio, a Silicon Valley-based drone manufacturer and Israeli-genocide profiteer has partnered with Axon, a body-worn camera manufacturer and Israeli-apartheid profiteer, to mass distribute its drones to police across the US, federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and military. It is no secret that American weapons and technology have enabled Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, however, the Santa Ana Police Department’s (SAPD) move to purchase Skydio’s X10 drones is a clear example of the imperial boomerang completing yet another arc: ensuring the war comes home.
In 2023, Skydio sent the IDF over one-hundred drones at the start of the genocide. The company’s artificial intelligence (AI) system that powers the drones was then trained and refined on Palestinians during the onslaught that followed, according to reports. SAPD is now taking steps to deploy that same system in Santa Ana. The drones are capable of autonomous flights, feature thermal cameras and are connected to Axon’s centralized database called Axon Evidence. They can track and follow a person or car moving through a city. During the genocide in Gaza, the IDF used the drones for reconnaissance and mapping structures. According to a report, Skydio maintains an office in Israel and is partnered with Israeli company DefenSync to continue selling to the IDF.
ICE also purchased Skydio drones in 2025 and 2024 through another of Skydio’s partners, Atlantic Diving Supply. Since at least 2021, ICE has purchased X10D drones, a military variant of the X10 SAPD wants to bring to Santa Ana.
One of Skydio’s other military drones, the RQ-28A, has already been trained with the US military to drop live grenades from it. In a podcast interview, Skydio CEO and co-founder Adam Bry was asked, “Can you put a gun on that thing?”
Bry laughed and responded, “Well, in the US it is illegal to put any kind of weapon on a drone and fly it in civilian airspace. But you should talk to our friends at Axon about the possibility of putting a taser on it.”
Skydio spokesperson Annie Aleman stated that the company has no comment at this time.
The staff report submitted to council by SAPD Chief Robert Rodriguez, states that the drones will be used to implement a new program: Drone as a First Responder (DFR). The report reads, “The research conducted…concluded that integrating Axon’s [DFR] system with Skydio X10 drones will improve the Department’s ability to serve the community by leveraging modern, commonly used drone technology. The DFR system will enable the Police Department to respond…by deploying strategically placed, dock-based drones throughout the city. The strategically placed drones will directly benefit the community by providing expedited call-for-service response times and gathering critical real-time information about the incident as it develops.”
The staff report also states that SAPD formed a drone committee to determine which drone system the department should pursue.
DFR is marketed as a way to reduce 911 response times and keep physical confrontations from happening, it is one of the latest trends in policing programs. However, the tech build up in cities across the US — at the hands of police and police foundations — that enables DFR and other surveillance operations, and the tech companies’ partnerships with each other, signal a powerful surveillance state that underlies any message from a local police department saying the drones are to combat “illegal fireworks.”
There is no indication that the drones requested by SAPD will be used to directly harm residents, but the proliferation of Skydio’s drones throughout the US has resulted in the erosion of Americans’ privacy. Bry stated that the company will be doing “close to 100,00 flights per month” by the end of 2025. Paired with the buildup of Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader infrastructure throughout the US, police and federal agencies are handing Americans’ data and personal identifying information to private tech companies And ICE is using that to surveil people.
Just last summer, Skydio drones were used to spy on the public protesting against the Trump regime at “No Kings Day” in June. In 2024, the drones were used to spy on anti-war protests at college campuses including Yale.
It is unclear if SAPD is aware of Skydio and Axon’s connections to the Israeli-genocide and apartheid system. It is not mentioned in the staff report and SAPD Public Information Officer Natalie Garcia did not directly respond to questions about that or other issues about the drones. Garcia stated that due to the “operational tempo” of SAPD, they cannot respond by publishing time.
Santa Ana Mayor Valerie Amezcua and council members Thai Viet Phan, Phil Bacerra, David Penaloza, Ben Vazquez and Jessie Lopez did not respond to repeated requests for comment.1
Council member Johnathan Hernandez stated that he is concerned about the technology used in a genocide coming to Santa Ana.
Bry, Skydio’s CEO and co-founder, said in the podcast interview that he began his journey wanting to be the best remote-controlled plane pilot when he was a child. This evolved as technology progressed. He is now one of the faces of a rapidly expanding company that has been backed by Israeli-tied private equity and Axon itself. One of its top clients is the US Department of Defense.
“I’ve been working on this stuff since I was a little kid and I want to be working on it for the rest of my life,” said Bry, “I don’t be a part of building this kind of dystopian future where we’ve got drones following us around all the time.”
The podcast host responded, “I get the privacy concern, I don’t want to pretend like it’s not there. I mean look, if there was a drone flying around my house every day, I’d be like ‘what the f—’, I would shoot it down.”
Edit 2/4/2026: The footnote was edited.
The mayor has not responded to a single request for comment for a long time at this point. However, Inadvertent can confirm that she does see the requests because a couple of months ago, the city attorney “formally” asked me, on the mayor’s behalf, to stop texting the mayor.