Anchorage's drone report leaves out the one thing the code requires

Anchorage police have flown drones over homes, apartment complexes, trailheads and street corners on hundreds of occasions since May 2022, according to the city's annual drone log.

City code requires the annual report to state, when applicable, whether a drone use was pursuant to a search warrant, a court order or a recognized exception to the warrant requirement. The flight table contains no field identifying any of those.

The same section sets a deadline. The report is due to the Assembly, and posted publicly, no later than June 1 each year. It reaches the Assembly on Tuesday. Nothing in the record reviewed shows when it was first transmitted or posted.

APD's own drone policy makes that disclosure matter. The policy, in effect since November 2022, says the department will obtain a search warrant before a flight when there are specific and articulable grounds to believe it will collect evidence of criminal wrongdoing or may intrude on a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The log tracks flights by date, department, duration, location and purpose. Most entries list "Search." Police flights include SWAT callouts, homicide investigations and four officer-involved shootings, and APD entries carry fields for arrests and case numbers. Entries from other municipal departments do not carry all the same fields, and some police entries are incomplete. The report states that no municipal department used facial recognition technology.

The longest flight in the log ran 275 minutes over 616 N. Price on April 1, 2026, during a SWAT operation that ended in an arrest. A homicide investigation kept a drone airborne for 267 minutes over 5215 Mockingbird Drive in October 2023.

What the report does not show is how the rules were applied. It does not say how long footage from those flights was kept, who accessed it, or whether any of it was released. APD's drone policy says media should be retained no longer than necessary for training, investigation or prosecution, requires access authorized by the chief or a designee and audited, and generally caps personally identifiable information at 180 days. Alaska law separately restricts when law enforcement may retain drone images.

A draft APD policy for the Real-Time Crime Center, posted without an effective date, says the department "does not retain as public record any data from camera feeds" absent a law enforcement purpose tied to a criminal investigation or public safety threat. The draft uses the term public safety threat without defining it.

Police Chief Sean Case told the Assembly on Aug. 21 that Alaska's constitutional privacy protections reach beyond federal Fourth Amendment standards. The 14-day retention period and fewer-than-10-user search access he described applied to automated license plate readers, not the drone program. Draft policies for the Real-Time Crime Center and a Drone as First Responder program separately call for quarterly reviews weighing operational benefit against privacy risk.

Assembly Members Keith McCormick, Daniel Volland and Sydney Scout have a surveillance ordinance up for public hearing the same night, which would set retention limits and require Assembly approval before the city takes on new surveillance capability. A $598,998 Real-Time Crime Center audio-visual purchase returns to the Assembly that night as well, after two postponements since Aug. 4.

In State v. McKelvey in 2024, the Alaska Supreme Court held that police need a warrant before using an aircraft and vision-enhancing technology to observe the curtilage of a home shielded from ground-level view.

The log identifies no flight as conducted under a warrant, a court order or an exception to either.