A Boston police drone fell out of the sky and onto a parked Mazda 3 at 11 Hatherly Road in Brighton around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 3, smashing the rear windshield and trunk and leaving the aircraft in pieces in a private driveway. The car’s owner, a 42-year-old Brighton man, was not home. He came back to a wrecked car and a note from a Boston police officer on the windshield.
The crash came six days after the Boston Police Department announced its Drone as First Responder pilot with Motorola Solutions and BRINC, and less than a week after the first launch sites went live. BPD had sold the program on speed and safety. The Boston Herald broke the story on September 9, and the city’s largest police union used it to attack the entire program.
I have covered police drone crashes in New York and Kent since May 2025. This one has a detail the others didn’t: the department that flew the drone had, days earlier, promised to publish the program’s statistics. The first statistic that matters is now a crashed aircraft on a stranger’s car, and BPD has said nothing about it in public.
The Crash Report Says the Drone Was in Pieces on Arrival
The BPD incident report, quoted by the Boston Herald, says the responding officer found the drone in pieces in the driveway and that it appeared to have crashed onto a vehicle. BRINC, which builds the aircraft, collected the wreckage afterward. Neither BPD nor BRINC has said what brought it down…