Lakewood PD Skydio X10 Drone Films Three Drug Deals, Nets Five Arrests

Five arrests came out of a single Saturday operation after Lakewood Police Department officers patrolling Colfax Avenue and Teller Street noticed drug activity and deployed a Skydio X10 drone to watch from above before moving in.

Officers arrested five suspects after using the drone to monitor drug deals at Colfax and Teller, recovering 41 packages of fentanyl. The X10 streamed real-time aerial footage of three separate hand-to-hand transactions, giving operators a documented record of each exchange from altitude before law enforcement made contact with suspects on the street.

During the contact, two additional individuals nearby came back with active felony warrants. Those five arrests included two people with active felony warrants who presumably would have walked away if the approach had been made at first contact. There was no pursuit, no foot chase, and no ambiguous account of what agents observed from a moving car.

The operational math here is straightforward. Forty-one packages recovered from a single suspect at a single intersection on a Saturday afternoon is not a headline-making seizure in the context of the national supply chain, but it represents exactly the kind of documented, drone-verified arrest sequence that makes footage-backed prosecutions far more durable than street-level officer testimony alone.

The Skydio X10's utility on Colfax comes down to a specific combination of hardware and autonomy. Its 48-to-64-megapixel camera captures transaction details from an altitude that keeps the aircraft invisible and inaudible to subjects on the street. Its autonomous subject tracking means an operator can watch a suspect without simultaneously piloting the aircraft. The Teledyne FLIR Boson+ thermal imager extends that same capability after dark, and a max flight time of up to 40 minutes means the drone can stay on station through multiple transactions without returning to land.

Lakewood PD launched the first phase of its drone-as-first-responder program with one drone on one rooftop back in March 2025, with program goals including faster response to high-priority calls, improved officer safety, and more efficient resource allocation. The Colfax operation demonstrates how far that program has evolved, moving from reactive deployment to proactive narcotics surveillance on one of Colorado's most persistently active drug corridors.

The Skydio X10 is the same platform the Norwegian Army flew during Cold Response 2026 and the same one SWEPCO uses for power line inspections in Texas. The drone watched, the camera recorded, and the case documentation wrote itself from several hundred feet in the air. For a street-level narcotics operation, that aerial paper trail is the entire point.