In the Russia-Ukraine war, drones have leveled the playing field between economically unmatched adversaries and have provided unprecedented capacity to monitor enemy troop and equipment movements. In domestic law enforcement, they are already being used for crime scene reconnaissance, for tracking suspects and for finding missing persons. 

Their greatest potential, however, lies in detecting and responding to a crime in progress before a victim or witness reports it. This is a line that police agencies have been reluctant to cross.

A quadcopter drone is a battery-powered, unmanned aircraft, held aloft by four helicopter-like propellers. They usually carry cameras capable of recording in detail objects below them or as much as 2,000 feet away. At the start of the drones-for-policing era, an officer would carry one of the devices in his squad car and launch and pilot it himself at the site where it was needed – where a missing person was last seen, say, or at a public event at risk of a terror attack. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations required drone operators to keep drones in their line of sight to avoid collisions with other aircraft. The drone and its pilot had to be near each other.

The big breakthrough came in 2018, when the Chula Vista, California, police department created the flagship Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. The idea behind DFR is that rather than arriving at an accident, missing person or hostage situation in tandem with its piloting officer, the drone would get there first to provide reconnaissance before officers arrive.

Getting first to a scene required launching drones from a central docking station rather than from an on-scene police car. A pilot in a central command center would guide the drone from afar. But such remote piloting meant that the drone was often beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight, in violation of FAA rules. Obtaining a waiver from those rules was time-consuming and laborious.

A drone can park itself on a table to preserve battery life and continue beaming a live video feed

A drone can park itself on a table to preserve battery life and continue beaming a live video feed

The second breakthrough occurred in spring last year, when the FAA, spurred on by an executive order from Donald Trump, expedited the waiver process for law-enforcement remote piloting. The applications for waivers from line-of-sight requirements skyrocketed.

A reliable count of the police departments operating DFR programs is unavailable, but estimates put the number at 300 to 400. Further estimates on the number of police departments using any kind of drone vary wildly from about 1,500 to 6,000. But the momentum is with DFR programs.

Drones have found missing dementia patients in minutes after conventional search-and-rescue teams fruitlessly searched for hours. They have located and tracked car thieves as they made their getaways, avoiding dangerous police pursuits (undoubtedly to the disappointment of many cops, who love to chase cars). They have unearthed criminals hiding in the woods late at night.

In April 2024, after a 911 caller reported a fight in progress in Silver Spring, Maryland, a drone recorded 45-year-old Jovan Ali stabbing his opponent and fleeing the scene. The drone led Montgomery County police officers to Ali’s hiding place, where they arrested him without incident. The stabbing victim refused to testify, but prosecutors obtained a conviction anyway based on the drone footage.

In April last year, police in Dunwoody, Georgia, received an alert from a neighboring department saying that an active shooter had driven into their city. Dunwoody’s license plate cameras found the suspect’s car, then a drone traced the car to the roof of a car park and confirmed the suspect’s identity from the tattoo on his neck. Armed with this intelligence, officers were able to effect a safe arrest.

First-responder drones provide officers with what is known as situational awareness, illustrating the layout of a potentially lethal environment before officers arrive. They can even do so indoors. If a suspect has barricaded himself in a house, possibly........

© The Spectator