APD's new drone notice leaves annual-report questions unanswered

Anchorage police have disclosed using a drone during Sunday's East 37th Avenue standoff, but the five-line notice leaves unanswered the same questions Alaska News found missing from the municipality's annual drone report.

The new APD notice lists case number 26-24190, the 1900 block of East 37th Avenue and one reason: "Safely clear a residence." It gives an incident window from 2 p.m. Sept. 13 to 5:30 a.m. Sept. 14. That is 15.5 hours, but the notice does not say how long the aircraft was actually airborne.

APD's main account of the shooting does not mention a drone. It says four officers shot a man after he pointed a handgun at them, then SWAT remained for several hours and used "a variety of tactics" to clear the residence. The drone notice identifies one of those tactics.

The disclosure arrived the day the Anchorage Assembly was scheduled to revisit AIM 139-2026, the municipality's late annual report on drone and facial-recognition use. The report was due June 1, reached the Assembly in September and was postponed from Sept. 1 to Tuesday.

Alaska News reported in August that the attached multi-year flight log contains no field showing whether a flight used a search warrant, court order or recognized exception to the warrant requirement. The report's cover memo says those details are included. The attachment does list dates, locations, purposes, case numbers and, for many APD flights, arrests.

The current municipal code requires the annual report to identify warrant status when applicable and to state the final disposition of evidence from each use. The East 37th notice does not give either. It also does not say what the drone recorded, who could access the footage or how long it will be kept.

Those omissions do not by themselves establish that the flight violated policy or law. The five-line post is an incident-level public notice, not the annual report governed by the reporting rule. It adds a deployment to the public record without answering the questions the annual report was supposed to address.

The timing puts both records before the public as the Assembly continues considering broader rules for municipal surveillance systems, including drones, automated license plate readers and the Real-Time Crime Center. The Assembly meeting begins at 5 p.m. Tuesday.