Lost in the debate over the Metro Nashville Police Department’s “Drone as First Responder” trial is the bigger picture laid out in the Community Review Board’s recently released preliminary report. In its report, the board — which is the city’s police advisory and review committee — firmly situates the drone trial among the larger, unresolved fight over police surveillance technology in Nashville.
The board writes that the drone pilot program is the latest step in “MNPD’s steadily expanding surveillance apparatus, which has often advanced ahead of, or in tension with, Metro Council review and opportunities for public comment.” MNPD’s Community Safety Center, which piloted the drones and stored their data, is the hub the police department designed to operate many other tools, according to the board, and “each new capability added there amplifies the reach of the ones already in place.”
“Fusus software collapses disparate surveillance feeds ... into a single real-time crime-center ecosystem,” the board writes. “Skydio’s drones plug directly into that system.” On its own, the report notes, the trial program amounted to FAA-certified officers dispatching three drones from MNPD’s Madison Precinct within a 2-mile radius. But “the stakes cannot be measured by the drones alone, but by everything they can ultimately connect to; and by whether that vastly interconnected future will receive the public scrutiny that earlier pieces, introduced incrementally, have often escaped.”
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MNPD’s drone trial launched on May 26 and ended Aug. 7 after 30 flight days, police spokesperson Brooke Reese recently told the Scene. Most of the debate has centered on how MNPD launched the trial without a Metro Council vote or public hearing. Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office says the program falls under a Metro Code 13.08.080 exemption for surveillance technology “used on a temporary basis” for investigations, warrants or exigent circumstances. “The Department of Law advised this did not have to go to council,” mayor’s office spokesperson Alex Apple tells the Scene. “The procurement regulations authorize pilot programs that do not require a contract between the parties.”
District 30 Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda introduced legislation on July 28 to narrow that exemption, and it passed first reading at the council’s Aug. 4 meeting. The legal maneuver echoes how the Fusus camera network launched in 2022, also without council approval, before the council halted it for review in 2024. That December, the Metro Council rejected a contract that would have given MNPD access to a network of private and residential cameras.
Skydio, which provided the drones to MNPD, has a partnership with Axon’s Fusus platform built specifically to feed Skydio drone footage into Fusus “real-time crime centers.” MNPD doesn’t currently have Fusus access, and police spokesperson Reese confirms that council approval would be required to make the drone program permanent. But if a future Metro administration revives Fusus and the “Drone as First Responder” program continues, the two systems could theoretically plug directly into each other. This is the “interconnected future” the Community Review Board spoke of.
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Community organizer Kelly Chieng, who has tracked Nashville’s surveillance fights for years, says the individual debates over separate pieces of police tech — whether it’s Fusus cameras or Skydio drones — miss the point. In cities including Atlanta, Chieng says, Skydio isn’t sold through a stand-alone partnership at all. It’s bundled directly into Axon’s contract, alongside body-worn cameras and crime-center software.
“I think that’s an important thing for the public to understand, because a lot of people track this issue company by company,” Chieng tells the Scene. “But it doesn’t really matter which specific brand, because all of this stuff gets integrated in a real-time crime center.”
Real-time crime centers — like the one used by the Murfreesboro Police Department — are modeled on a concept pioneered by the New York Police Department in 2005 that fuses license plate data, camera feeds, social media and other surveillance data. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the centers typically run on internal police department policy rather than a binding ordinance, and they raise serious civil liberties concerns. Police tech vendors like Skydio also lean on “free” trials, Chieng says — a pattern the EFF has documented nationally in which departments sometimes keep using a tool a city never funded, betting money eventually follows.
On Aug. 7 — the day MNPD’s drone trial ended — Metro Police held a private briefing on the program at police headquarters. At least six councilmembers attended. A Scene reporter, community organizers and a handful of Community Review Board staff members were turned away by a security guard after some confusion on whether the briefing was private or open to the public.
In a recording of the briefing obtained by the Scene, an MNPD official says the next steps for the “Drone as First Responder” program run through Deputy Chief Greg Blair. “I think he’s going to look at everything with his team, talk about what worked with him,” the official says in the recording. “Then if it’s something that Chief [John] Drake says, ‘Yeah, I like it, we need it,’ I think we want to move forward with it. Then it’s probably discussions with the mayor’s office again.”
