SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY · AERIAL

Police drones / unmanned aircraft systems

Illinois regulates law-enforcement drone use through the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act, including permitted uses, disclosure rules, and public reporting requirements.

DOCUMENTED IN ILLINOIS

The Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act governs law-enforcement drone use. It includes warrant-based and emergency exceptions and provides that records such as flight-path data, metadata, or telemetry of specific flights may be disclosed subject to FOIA.

DOCUMENTED LOCAL EXAMPLES

Agency inventories and reported flights

DOCUMENTED

Huntley Police

The statewide SFY 2024 reporting material records two Huntley Police drones and 38 flights during the reporting period.

DOCUMENTED

McHenry County Sheriff

The same reporting dataset records two Sheriff's Office drones and 24 flights during the reporting period.

DOCUMENTED

Winnebago County Sheriff

The SFY 2024 report lists nine drones and 13 flights, including search, event-overwatch, damage-assessment, and crash-reconstruction uses.

DOCUMENTED

DeKalb County Sheriff

The report lists three drones and seven flights. The Sheriff's Office also publishes a UAS policy covering retention, prohibited uses, disclosure, and facial-recognition restrictions.

DOCUMENTED

DeKalb Police

The statewide report lists one DeKalb Police drone; the department publishes a current UAS policy.

DOCUMENTED

South Elgin Police

The statewide report lists two drones and 43 flights during the reporting period.

EVIDENCE SCOPE

What a deployment record can establish.

Drone inventories and flight counts describe only part of a program. Policies, flight logs, statutory purpose categories, payloads and sensors, video retention, evidence exports, mutual-aid use, training, and vendor systems establish additional operational context. NoRec attributes each claim to the source that supports it.

PRIMARY SOURCES