Nashville DFR · Overflight Explorer MNPD DFR · Madison pilot

Methodology

This is a citizen-verification project, not an official government source. Everything below is either drawn directly from the shipped dataset — counts you can re-check yourself via the CSV export on the other two tabs — or cited to a primary source.

The trial

Metro Nashville Police Department's Drone-as-First-Responder (DFR) pilot began May 26, 2026 in the Madison precinct — a 30–45 flight-day trial within a 2 mile radius of the precinct, using three drones loaned by Skydio and flown by four FAA-certified officers. Drones respond to emergency calls, active investigations, missing-person calls, and significant crashes; MNPD states none carry weapons and video is deleted within 7 days. The trial began under a temporary code exemption, without a Metro Council vote — the Council was weighing restrictions on the program as of August 2026.

The 82 m threshold

"Flew over" means a site is within 82 m (SWATH_M) of any flight-path segment. That number isn't ours — it's reused from the sibling clovenbradshaw-ctrl/DFR project's published map, so the two stay comparable instead of each picking its own threshold.

Data pipeline

• Flights — MNPD's feed on Skydio's public ArcGIS FeatureServer, deduplicated by flight_id (the feed double-logs some rows): 409 raw rows → 395 unique flights.
• Addresses — Metro Nashville GIS Addressing/AddressPoints, filtered to the trial's bounding box: 16,029 candidate points, of which 10,240 fall within 82 m of a flight.
• Sensitive sites — schools, childcare, playgrounds, and places of worship from Metro GIS + OpenStreetMap: 1,743 candidates (380 schools · 26 childcare · 352 playgrounds · 985 worship), of which 24 fall within 82 m of a flight (18 worship · 5 schools · 1 playground).
• Satellite crops — fetched live per-record from Esri's public World Imagery export service when you open a record; nothing is stored in this repo.

What we double-checked

Every count above was verified directly against the shipped data files (not just the prose describing them) before this panel was written. The 16,029 address figure was also re-queried live against Metro's own GIS endpoint — it returned 16,028, one lower, which is ordinary drift in a government database that's edited continuously rather than an error in either number. The flight count was re-pulled live from MNPD's Skydio feed the same way — 409 rows, 395 unique flights, an exact match against what's shipped here down to the last coordinate.

scripts/fetch_nashville_flights.py now does that pull — it hardcodes this trial's one FeatureServer (credited below) rather than running scripts/dfr.py's full 900-agency crawl just to reach it, so reproducing this repo's data doesn't require standing up infrastructure for cities this project doesn't cover.

Sources

• Nashville.gov — "MNPD to Begin Limited Drone as First Responder Trial on May 26"
• WSMV — "Metro Nashville police to launch drone pilot program in Madison"
• WSMV — "Council to vote on restricting police drone use following unapproved pilot program"
• Nashville Banner — "Metro Council to weigh limits on Nashville police drone use"
• clovenbradshaw-ctrl/DFR — source of the 82 m threshold and sensitive-site methodology