AURORA | Last summer, Dr. P.J. Parmar and his friends noticed a drone frequently flying around Mango House in Aurora and the nearby Martin Luther King Library on East Colfax Avenue.
At first, they had no idea who was flying the drone and why, but they felt like they were being watched.
One day, Parmar’s friend, who spoke with the Sentinel after asking to keep her identity confidential, noticed the drone hovering over her for long periods while she was playing basketball on private property. She plays in a private location across from Mango House, which Parmar owns. The shopping and restaurant plaza is also home to his clinic, which provides healthcare to the region’s immigrant and refugee community.
She said it felt like the drone was spying on her.
Soon after, Parmar and his friends started tracking it and learned the drone belonged to Aurora police.
Parmar and his friend, along with a healthcare worker who also works with Parmar at Mango House, Jan Kalkus, were not reassured by the fact that the police department took months after they started flying it to announce the new drone to the public.
Kalkus figured out how to track the drone using publicly available information, and they grew more concerned about the routes it took and where it hovered, suspecting it was not just flying for first-responder calls like the Aurora Police Department said it was.
When they asked the police department about it, they said they felt like they weren’t taken seriously.
The Sentinel, through open records requests, acquired video from a day Parmar indicated they saw the drone at length. It did not reveal any camera shots of the basketball court or even the Mango House building.
That news, and even seeing the drone video, did little to ease Parmar’s suspicion. That distrust is a growing problem across the country as more police departments acquire drones.
Public skepticism comes as police departments like Aurora say drones are excellent tools for officers to better protect the public, and especially faster than ever before.
Police departments, including Aurora Police, have been quietly introducing new hardware, technology and accessories to support policing amid a period without regulation, raising concerns about transparency and the long-standing question of surveillance versus safety.
Police say drone use can help with monitoring crime hotspots, reduce the chances of an officer-involved shooting of a civilian, and reduce injuries and other damage from an actual police pursuit. Drones can act as first responders or assist with patrolling and getting officers eyes into dangerous areas without endangering themselves or others. Since the drone has been added to the Aurora Police Department, it has recovered five stolen vehicles, aided in locating a wanted fugitive for the U.S. Marshals Service, and tracked down a suspect in a fatal hit-and-run, according to the Aurora Police Department.
Critics, however, question the risks to public privacy when police buy into the technology.
“The industry that provides technology to law enforcement is one of the most unregulated, unexamined and consequential in the United States,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia said in a statement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in the digital world. They collaborate with the University of Nevada, Reno, Reynolds School of Journalism on a police surveillance database called the Atlas of Surveillance.
There is little to no legislation governing much of the new technology police departments are using, and that’s what seems to be the biggest problem for those concerned about how it will be used.
The Aurora Police were never required by city council nor state lawmakers to tell the public that they bought a drone or that they plan to have six more throughout the city in the coming months.
The Aurora Police, however, appear to have done a better job than many police departments across the nation in creating policies for transparency and oversight of their new and ever-improving technology, without being required to do so by lawmakers. Even the publicly available transparency portal, which shows flight paths from the previous week and a flight dashboard, was voluntarily created.
Denver also quietly announced their drone program featuring a voluntary transparency portal showing flight paths from earlier in the day.
Police are also not required to inform the public about any add-on technology to the drones, such as license plate readers, although Aurora Police Commander Patrick Shaker said any add-ons in Aurora would be addressed with the public. He said that much of the reason the department did not immediately disclose its drone use was that it was still testing them and deciding which drone company to sign a contract with.
That’s different than other emerging police technologies. Any government use of artificial intelligence linked to facial recognition in Aurora must be reported to the city council and the public, per state Senate Bill 22-113.
“We’ve been very open and transparent about all the stuff that we’ve been doing with these technologies, and we want to make sure that we’re being completely forthcoming with everybody,” Shaker said. “So that would be part of that process, is, hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why we’re doing it.”
The city signed a contract last year with Flock for its drones, allowing them to use add-ons at a future date that also integrate with Flock’s camera capabilities. The only current abilities the department has, according to Shaker, are thermal imaging for low‑light or night use, integrated city mapping and automatic flight options for preplanned flights.
The possibilities in using, or misusing, the technology abounds, industry experts say.
“Once you have a camera on almost anything, you can retroactively apply all sorts of biometric analysis, like face recognition,” said Senior Investigative Researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation Beryl Lipton. “It’s very easy to update software at this point and update these sorts of AI-driven analyses in a way that doesn’t necessarily require new hardware or require some sort of public oversight.”
Click here to see APD drone video segment 1 of 5: 17 minutes
Click here to see APD drone video segment 2 of 5: 19 minutes
Click here to see APD drone video segment 3 of 5: 17 minutes
Click here to see APD drone video segment 4 of 5: 20 minutes
Click here to see APD drone video segment 5 of 5: 21 minutes
Shaker said that, based on his current knowledge, Aurora drone footage is stored for 90 days for investigative purposes and is not being integrated with the rest of the Flock system.
“Clearview AI does not have access to closed sources like our Body Worn Cameras, city-owned cameras or drone footage,” said Aurora Police Public Information Officer Matt Wells-Longshore in an email. “The footage is stored on CJIS-compliant cloud servers where APD retains 100% ownership and control of the data. If there is footage captured of evidentiary value, the pilot will download such footage from the drone and upload that footage into Axon in accordance with policy.”
Lipton added an example of how Real Time Crime Center distributors, such as Axon Fuses, promote a feature they enjoy publicizing: Departments can ask the system to look up a red Ford Focus, and the system can search its available data.
“We know, as consumers, that’s technologically possible, and it’s a thing that they are doing in the Aurora Real-Time Information Center,” Lipton said. “So it’s not conspiratorial to think like you could do that with faces, too. They can do it with almost anything, and it’s just a matter of sort of the public appetite for getting to that point.”
Wells-Longshore said that drone footage cannot be fed into Aurora’s Real Time Information Center in that specific way.
Until 2025, the New Orleans Police Department worked with a private nonprofit group called Project NOLA, which still operates a network of more than 200 cameras using live, real-time facial recognition. The program was the first known real-time facial recognition system used in the United States and was halted in May 2025 after it was deemed in violation of city ordinances.
The partnership was considered to be a loophole around the ordinance until city officials were alerted.
“Communities really need to be thinking about and having some policy around and making it really explicit, because, otherwise, it’s really unclear sometimes where that data goes, or who they think owns it, or what the appropriate use cases are for, footage or possibly audio or other pieces of information that are just gathered through police surveillance,” Lipton said.
Internal sharing of data between police departments, federal and state agencies, and even data brokers currently lacks legal guidelines. Colorado’s Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, is known for selling information to data brokers, according to media reports. Lipton said there are many ways for different agencies to allow access to their crime center data, including password sharing, ongoing access, and collaborations.
Currently, the Aurora Police Department does not share its drone footage with any other agency unless a specific drone video is requested for an investigation, police said. There is no ongoing standing or general access. Shaker said there are also individual passcodes for each employee, which help account for who is taking what actions.
As for federal agencies, Shaker said there are only two that they share data with.
“There are safeguards in place to require them to basically identify the reason why they’re getting that access, and we prohibit as an agency, them from doing any kind of civil immigration enforcement specifically with that data,” Shaker said. “So that’s not what that data is for. Currently, there are only two agencies federally that we share with, and that is Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the US Postal Service, but we also have the capability here at Aurora, anytime we wish, we can turn off access to any federal agent or to all federal agencies.”
All data and information collected is exclusively for official law enforcement purposes and must adhere to all Colorado State laws, Wells-Longshore said.
Flock and many other technology companies that have been advertising to police departments nationwide have been notorious for overpromising, making unsubstantiated claims, and manipulating statistics, according to the Center for Justice Journalism, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Independent Intelligence for Physical Security.
Drones are used by fire departments and police departments, mainly as first responders and for patrolling for incidents including fires, car accidents and even drug overdoses. More than 1,200 law enforcement agencies in the United States operate a drone program, according to the Atlas of Surveillance.
Flock, a $7.5 billion company, previously promised in its advertising that its license plate readers would “eliminate crime” and that 10% of reported crime in the United States is solved using its tools. An investigation by Forbes in 2024 highlights multiple academic reviewers who said many of Flock’s claims were “problematic,” and one of the researchers who was cited on the claim as providing “oversight” said he would have done the study differently himself and that the data is too inconsistent to make a meaningful statistical analysis, according to 404 Magazine.
“Most Americans would rightfully be horrified to know how many decisions about policing are made: not by public employees, but by multi-billion-dollar surveillance tech companies who have an insatiable profit motive to market their technology as the silver bullet that will stop crime,” Guariglia said in a statement.
Other cities seem to be testing the waters with what they have added to their surveillance technology.
In January, the Baton Rouge Police Department introduced a 16-foot military-grade drone to its fleet, capable of conducting long-range surveillance.
Internally at the Aurora Police Department, there are many public-facing policies and safeguards in place intended to prevent the misuse of the drone and other Flock technology. Shaker also said they have a city auditor who audits only the police department.
“We’ve recently stood up our Office of Constitutional Policing, through Chief (Todd) Chamberlain’s direction,” Shaker said, which is part of a quality assurance unit that is made up of a sergeant as a technical expert on law enforcement, data analysts and a manager of the unit, who has a background in the auditing and assessment of agencies and their policies and practices.
“That is something that we’re going to continually monitor, because they will do either in-depth or dives into the information, the data we have to make sure that we’re following our policies and procedures, and we are doing what is best practice, not only for us, but as well across the nation,” Shaker said.
The drone pilot is located inside the Real Time Information Center at the Aurora Police Department. The pilots are accompanied by their supervisor and several other employees who monitor the Flock cameras and other technology in the crime center. So, past incidents, such as an officer using a police database for personal use, are far less likely to occur with witness oversight and regular audits.
All surveillance technology is also subject to Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, Shaker said. One policy that Aurora police and many police departments use is to aim their cameras at the horizon as they move to the next location, so as not to record into people’s private property.
Although they will “patrol” heavily populated streets and roadways, Shaker said it is primarily for responding to car accidents and other crimes they might encounter while flying along. Hot-spot policing, in which officers monitor high-crime areas, is also part of the department’s drone-use policy.
Experts say laws regulating police activity make no distinction between patrolling and surveillance. Police in squad cars, unmarked cars or using drones are unrestricted as long as they are in public spaces.
“If we had a drone that wasn’t going to a call for service and we didn’t have a specific hotspot that we were concentrating on, we most commonly see it along Colfax Avenue,” he said. “The operators will fly it over Colfax, and they’ll look down at Colfax as they’re going along, because it’s a public street. I heard the other day that they caught an accident out there.”
The Sentinel acquired drone video footage from the day when Parmar’s friend was playing basketball through a public records request. Parmar, Kalkus and their friend were able to see what the drone was looking at, and although it did not seem to be watching his friend play basketball, it did not ease their suspicions.
The footage obtained from the police on that day did not include time or date stamps, raising questions for Parmar about whether it was the correct footage. The footage also starts and stops abruptly, making it hard to tell if the footage was edited.
Wells-Longshore said that irregular flight patterns and extended hovering could be due to training, testing, waiting for the next location, observing a subject farther away, or assisting with patrol at a distance.
“They are expected to monitor computer-aided dispatch calls for service, listen to the radio, be aware of what’s currently happening inside of the (Real Time Information Center), and much more, all while monitoring their altitude, wind speeds, local air traffic, weather conditions, and the condition of their drone,” Wells-Longshore said. “There is no training simulator to learn how to fly these drones. Officers, after receiving their licenses, must spend time in the (Real Time Information Center) with a drone pilot and practice flying the drones and learning how they operate. This is typically several 4-6 hour “fly-along” shifts, but can be longer depending on the pilot.”
The footage obtained by the Sentinel mostly showed what appeared to be training and testing, along with some patrolling, such as one instance in which the drone followed a car crash. Another portion in the video from that day depicts the drone watching a man smoking a substance that Wells-Longshore said looked like “crack rocks.” Despite the extended video recording of the man, about six minutes, no police action was taken against the man.
Another video segment focuses on what appears to be juvenile boys on a playground, and another with adults sitting on outdoor tables.
Police said the video provided to the Sentinel covers all flights in that three-hour period. It elicited no comfort from Parmar.
“The big picture is that it doesn’t matter if it’s everything. I don’t think getting the videos does much for the main problem, which is that no one wants to feel like they are being watched on their own property, which is what we felt like was happening,” Parmar said. “We observed the drones overhead for long periods of time, repeatedly, over private property. The point isn’t to play a cat and mouse game with the videos trying to find that. It is the feeling of being watched, when we can see the drones overhead, in a historically low trust situation (of the police). If it sticks to the main roads and public places like parks/schools, and does not hover over private property, that would be great.”