The Green Bay Police Department and Metro Fire Department launched their new Drone as First Responder program in June and say it has already proven useful in allocating limited resources.
In December, the Green Bay City Council approved a $1.3 million contract with security technology company Flock Safety, providing the city with two drone hubs. The city has four drones, two on each side of the city, police Captain of Community Services Division Tom Denney said.
When the departments brought the contract to city council, Police Chief Chris Davis said the program could ease chronic staffing issues and help the departments better allocate its resources.
“Recruiting officers is a tough thing to do,” Denney said. “This doesn’t mean that we’re going to have less officers, but we have less than we want. And this allows us to use the resources that we have more efficiently.”
The departments use the drones as a first responder to get “eyes on the situation faster,” Denney said. The drones are only used to respond to calls for service and are not used for proactive surveillance, he said.
The departments may use the drones in scenarios that already have a first responder presence to gain visual access from a different perspective and help determine whether more officers or firefighters need to be dispatched, Denney said. It is also being used as a way to get a visual of a service call before officers or firefighters arrive, which Denney said has proven to be particularly helpful in resource allocation.
One call the drones were sent to observe came in as a low-priority call for a disturbance and officers weren’t immediately dispatched due to other incidents occurring at the same time, Denney said. The department deployed the drone, which showed a violent physical disturbance in progress and prompted the department to send officers faster.
The drones were used in another disturbance call and arrived at the scene before the dispatched officers. The drone video showed what appeared to be a child with disabilities and a parent or caregiver soothing them, Denney said, and the department eventually determined officers didn’t need to respond.
“There’s two huge benefits to that. One, we don’t introduce the police into a situation where they don’t need to be introduced. Probably the parents or caregiver is the best one to deal with that,” Denney said. “And then second, that’s probably a two-officer call. Well, now we put those two officers back in service and they’re able to respond to another incident where they’re really needed.”
The program will also help the fire department better allocate resources, life safety educator Ben Peters said. When responding to crashes on a highway, getting a visual with the drones first can ensure crews are travelling in the right flow of traffic and the right lane to reach the incident “before we allocated those resources in the wrong spot,” Peters said. When a fire is reported by a fire alarm, the drones can get eyes on the fire right away to determine how big it is and what response is necessary.
“This doesn’t tell us everything. There is still a lot of things we do where we need officers or firefighters on the ground to handle it,” Denney said. “This gives you a really good vantage point to collect some intelligence.”
The drones can autonomously fly to a specified location but an officer or firefighter always has to approve the launch and “be there, hands on the keyboard, watching where the drone is going,” Denney said.
“For us to operate safely in the airspace, we always need a human being on the other end, controlling the drone or at the very least watching what the automation is doing and making sure that its what we want it to do,” Denney said.
Privacy concerns were a point of contention when the contract was before the city council, with the council requiring the addition of explicit privacy protections in order to approve it. Denney said protecting privacy is “a huge component of this being successful.”
“We want to provide the best outcomes we can, but if we’re intruding on people’s privacy to do it, that’s not acceptable,” Denney said. “We understand that with this capability comes a lot of responsibility.”
The drone’s camera is programmed to remain pointed at the horizon until it arrives at its specified destination, which is when the camera will first point down, Denney said. The department also has a transparency portal on its website which shows the dates, times and flight paths for every time the drones are launched.
“This is something that’s going to improve the effectiveness of both the fire department and the police department and its going to help us provide better public safety outcomes,” Denney said. “We don’t want to keep any secrets.”
Vivian Barrett is the public safety reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. You can reach her at vmbarrett@usatodayco.com or (920) 431-8314.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Police, fire departments launch Drone as First Responder program
Reporting by Vivian Barrett, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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By Vivian Barrett, Green Bay Press-Gazette | USA TODAY Network
