Proposed commitments

Privacy and accountability

The proposed commitments, stated before anyone asks: a human decides every launch, no facial recognition in the pilot, no sale of imagery, role-based access with audit logs, a published retention schedule, and aggregate public reporting. Policy is under development with the county; nothing here is a legal conclusion.

A public proposal is more credible, not less, when it states its limits before anyone asks. These are the commitments the pilot would adopt, all of them ▸Proposal until the county adopts policy:

• Human public-safety personnel decide every launch.
• No host, tenant, customer, vendor, or AI system receives flight authority.
• No facial-recognition use in the pilot.
• No sale of imagery or tracking information.
• Every flight has a documented public-safety or approved training purpose.
• Role-based accounts, multifactor authentication, and audit logs.
• Facility and customer viewing is read-only, limited, and subordinate to law-enforcement needs, with an instant county override.
• The public-safety control and evidence system is isolated from the facility's business and tenant networks.
• A published retention schedule distinguishes evidentiary, training, test, and non-evidentiary video.
• Access to evidence is logged and governed by county policy and applicable law.
• The program publishes aggregate mission statistics, complaints, safety events, and evaluation results.
• Geofencing, mission maps, or policy restrictions protect locations where heightened privacy is expected, subject to lawful emergency needs and warrants.
• A complaint and correction process exists.

The first pilot's operating rules

The scaled-down pilot adds a concrete twelve-rule set, listed in full on the FAA page: designated pilot for every flight, sight maintained throughout, geofenced routes, minimum necessary altitude, yield to all crewed aircraft, no intentional overflight of uninvolved people, night requirements, full preflight, tested failure behaviors, no pursuit, every flight logged, and no remote launch without FAA authority. ▸Proposal

The rules behind the commitments

Current federal UAS grant rules explicitly require adequate privacy, civil-liberties, and cybersecurity policies as a condition of funding. ✓Verified Colorado lawmakers have debated drone-privacy legislation; that debate is evidence of public interest, not current law. ✓Verified Agency counsel would address the Fourth Amendment, warrants, reasonable expectations of privacy, state law, public records, evidentiary rules, and cybersecurity; this site says "policy under development with the county" and draws no legal conclusions. ▸Proposal

Sources: bja.ojp.gov, UAS requirements · leg.colorado.gov, SB26-071 · checked 2026-08-23

How the program would be measured

The grant evaluation would track operational measures (launch rate, time from request to live aerial view, communications availability, weather cancellations, safe landings and lost-link events, detection performance in controlled tests), public-safety outcomes (time saved in searches, responder exposure avoided, incidents where aerial information changed tactics, persons located, assessments completed, false alarms resolved without risky entry), and partnership and trust measures (host contribution and satisfaction, tenant feedback, complaints, records requests, audit compliance, cost per mission). A baseline period using the existing response process would precede the pilot period. ▸Proposal

What this project will not promise

• That the drone is always available. ▸Proposal
• That property at a host site cannot be stolen. ▸Proposal
• That a license plate can be read at any speed, height, weather, or angle: plate capture depends on lens, distance, angle, lighting, vibration, and atmosphere, and the pilot would run controlled day and night plate tests before any public performance claim. ▸Proposal

Published August 24, 2026 at 00:38 UTC. Last updated August 24, 2026 at 01:30 UTC. Times come from this page's revision history and can be checked against it.