On August 31, NOPD published drone flight statistics for the first half of 2026, filed under “Transparency.” The release reports 209 flights in Q1 with a tidy breakdown: 164 for special events (121 during Mardi Gras), 13 for fatality scene reconstruction, 2 rescues, 1 tactical operation, 11 training flights, and 18 exempt from disclosure under LRS 44:3.
I compared that against NOPD’s own Skydio flight log covering January 1 through April 1, 2026. The two don’t reconcile. Not close.
The totals don’t add up
The flight log contains 273 flights between January 1 and March 29. NOPD reported 209. That’s a 64-flight gap, and it runs in the wrong direction: if 18 flights were withheld as exempt, the public accounting should be smaller than the total, not 64 flights larger. There’s no filtering I could find that gets from 273 to 209 — not excluding training flights, not excluding sub-minute hops, nothing.
Most flights have no recorded reason
The log has a “Type of incident” field. It’s blank on 206 of 273 flights — about 75%.
It gets worse over time. During January 1–5 (New Year’s, Sugar Bowl), pilots filled the field in fairly consistently: dispatch calls, event overwatch, barricade checks, training. After January 5, the department flew 200 more times. Exactly 2 of those flights have a reason recorded. The other 198 — including the entire block of flights along the Mardi Gras parade route in February and everything in March — say nothing at all.
So when the press release confidently sorts Q1 into rescues, scene reconstructions, and tactical operations, ask the obvious question: sorted from what? The operational records NOPD keeps cannot produce that breakdown. Either there’s a second, better set of records the public hasn’t seen, or the categories were reconstructed after the fact. Neither is what “transparency” means.
The training count is wrong either way
The release says 11 training flights in Q1. The log tags 24 flights as “Non-operational (i.e. training flight)” — more than double the reported number. All 24 occurred January 1–5. Per their own records, NOPD then flew for twelve straight weeks without a single training flight. Pick your problem: the press release undercounts training, or the logs stopped recording it. Both can’t be right.
Why this matters
Police drones are surveillance aircraft with cameras, flying over public streets, parades, and protests (at least one January flight is literally labeled “PROTEST”). The deal that makes that tolerable is documentation and disclosure: every flight has a recorded purpose, and the public accounting matches the operational record. NOPD is failing both halves. The logs are three-quarters empty, and the summary statistics released to the public can’t be derived from them.
Until NOPD can reconcile 273 logged flights against 209 reported ones, and show which record produced the category breakdown, these quarterly releases aren’t transparency. They’re a press release with numbers in it.
Want to do something?
Sign my petition to end illegal surveillance in New Orleans.
