Anchorage confirms drone deployment was omitted and checks for others

Anchorage's administration confirmed Tuesday that APD's annual drone, required yearly by AO 2018-05, omitted one deployment after a Teams-based spreadsheet lost the entry. The city is checking whether anything else was left out.

Municipal Manager William Falsey told the Assembly that the Anchorage Police Department logs each drone launch in an Excel spreadsheet stored in Microsoft Teams. "For a while it was glitching, and so they lost this item in that report," he said. The city is now checking whether the system dropped other flights.

The admission followed Assembly Member Keith McCormick's disclosure that a constituent showed him a police report documenting a drone deployment that did not appear in the city's flight log. APD later confirmed the drone was used and said it would add the flight to a revised report. Records identifying the underlying case were withheld because the criminal matter remains open.

The gap extends the reporting problems Alaska News identified in August. The report arrived months after its June 1 deadline, and its attached flight table lacked the warrant-status information municipal code requires. A later APD notice disclosed another deployment but did not answer the annual report's warrant and evidence-disposition questions.

Falsey said the administration had asked APD to review the historic data and prepare a report that more fully complies with the code. "Effectively, we're asking for a mulligan," he said.

The administration initially asked the Assembly to let the existing report die and replace it with a new item. Members instead voted 8-3 to keep the original submission on the agenda and postpone it to Oct. 6, with a motion to postpone it indefinitely still pending.

That keeps both versions in the public record. It also gives the Assembly a direct comparison between the report APD first submitted and the corrected account the administration has promised.