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Odd police video shows drone removing knife from motionless suspect
Promo video comes as more US police departments fly drones as first responders.
In a supposed “nationwide first” use of drones to disarm a person, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in California promoted a video showing how a small quadcopter drone used a dangling magnet to remove a knife from the hand of a motionless suspect.
The promotional video shared to Facebook and Instagram on June 22, 2026, uses the Mission: Impossible film franchise theme to dramatize video footage of the incident that took place earlier in the month, which involved what the video describes as a “felony suspect armed with a knife and a firearm” who “was not responding to negotiators.” The sheriff’s office is just one among hundreds of US police departments and sheriff’s offices that have deployed camera-equipped drones to assist first responders.
In a Facebook post, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office described having surrounded the suspect’s residence with a SWAT team after the “known felon and parolee-at-large was seen earlier with a firearm.” A first drone deployed to the scene located the suspect hiding in a corner of the garage, but also spotted the motionless suspect holding a knife in one outstretched arm.
Piloted by an officer wearing a drone operator’s first-person view goggles, a second small drone equipped with a magnet on a cable flew into the garage. The video shows the motionless suspect in a gray hoodie lying facedown on a chair or sofa while still clutching the knife.
The drone then used the dangling magnet to grab the knife by the blade and pull it free from the apparently unresisting suspect’s hand. A final shot from the video shows the drone flying outside with the dangling knife spinning freely beneath it, enabling police officers to retrieve the drone. Some of the action in the video is also captured from the camera perspective of the first observer drone.
It is unclear what happened to the gun that the suspect supposedly possessed at one point.
The sheriff’s office praised the “incredible display of creativity, skill and precision by the drone pilot” in its Facebook post. But several comments on the sheriff’s office Facebook post alluded to the fact that the suspect was not actively moving, including a popular comment from Vic Moss, CEO and cofounder of the Drone Service Providers Alliance, a drone industry trade association based in Lakewood, Colorado.
“The dude was comatose,” Moss wrote in the Facebook comment. “You could’ve disarmed him with a marshmallow. But congrats on good use of the drone.”
In an interview with The Hill on NewsNation, Jim Cooper, head of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, said the suspect “may have overdosed” after initially responding to law enforcement. But he praised a patrol officer for coming up with the magnet idea and said it “possibly saved someone’s life, preventing us from taking a life.”