It wouldn’t talk to you, and you might not even notice it, according to officials with the Meridian Police Department. But it may very well be there, a few hundred feet up, giving the police “first eyes” on everything from petty thefts to missing persons reports.
By mid-March, the department is expected to launch three new “drone first responders” into Meridian skies, Lt. Brandon Frasier, a department spokesperson, told the Idaho Statesman in an interview.
Instead of being deployed by officers already at the scene, these drones would be operated from afar and sent with the push of a button to calls throughout the city in minutes.
Frasier says the program, which is expected to cost roughly $180,000 a year, will save the department time and resources — and make it safer for both officers and the people involved in the incidents they respond to.
“It’s like having the officer’s viewpoint in the sky,” he said. “We have examples where we could eliminate tying up 10 or 20 or more officers on specific situations just by having one drone in the air.”
Stationed around city, drones to make policing ‘safer and easier’
How would it work?The drones would be stationed at docks installed in certain high-call or otherwise “strategic” areas of the city, Frasier explained.
From there, they’d get the digital call-to-serve from an officer stationed at Meridian police headquarters and take off toward an emergency, aided by artificial intelligence-powered collision-avoidance technology and automated flight paths. According to a Meridian police presentation to the City Council on Jan. 14, the goal is for drones to arrive within two minutes. Officers average just under four minutes for the highest priority calls in the city, the presentation showed.
The officer piloting the drone could use its display monitor to determine whether more officers need to be dispatched to a call or fewer. It could direct officers, for example, that a suspect has a weapon or is headed in a certain direction, Frasier said.
If officers can be saved a trip in low-threat situations, Frasier said, that would free them for higher-priority ones.
“The reason we want to use these is to put more police officers on the street and make their job safer and easier,” he said.
He said the drones would also lead to “safer outcomes for offenders.”
“If you look at a foot pursuit, you know, a cop chasing a bad guy, it is inherently more dangerous for the bad guy for a person or a dog to be chasing them versus a drone,” he said. “The drone can reduce (the) imminence of threats, provide real-time information that officers would not have any other way ... and that increases the time available to make a decision.”
That could translate to less force being used, he said.
Will you notice police eyes in the sky?
Despite expected time-savings for police, Frasier said the public won’t notice big changes once these drones are in the air.“We’ve used drones in the department for the better part of a decade,” he said, including in car crash investigations. He estimates they’re now deployed to multiple calls per week, if not per day.
The difference, he said, is that drone use now is “reactive.” Once officers arrive at a call, they may ask for a drone, which is then driven out and piloted by an officer there while a second officer is required to watch.
But technology is rapidly advancing, and drones that could once fly only 10 minutes can now stay in the air for up to 40. More is automated, including the ability to fly in a pre-set flight path.
With the new program, Frasier said, the drones will be deployed more proactively, but they’ll have much of the same capability and type of use that they have today. And he emphasized: The drones won’t talk to you (even though he said they’re able to).
“This isn’t happening purely autonomously with no human oversight,” he said. “A human has to initiate the flight, and a human has to sit there and watch the flight.”
If anything, Frasier said, residents might start to notice “just how often drones fly over their house already that are not ours.”
“You just ... weren’t looking for it.”
Police emphasize transparency amid tech upgrades
Frasier said he expects the program to ramp up over time, with the potential for additional drones or for civilian employees to be trained in piloting them rather than sworn officers.“It’s not going to start off being a 24/7 operation with a full staff,” he said. “We have to crawl, walk, run to that.”
The drones are part of a larger program to boost tech use at the Meridian Police Department, the January presentation showed. The city gave its blessing for the department to reallocate roughly $740,000 toward the new tech package, which includes the drones, on-body cameras that use AI to do language translation, software that can assist with data or public-records requests, and a system that allows schools or companies to provide video footage to the police more easily if they choose.
That money was already budgeted to the Police Department, according to the presentation, including some money intended for salaries in positions police say have been unfilled for years. An extra roughly $5,000 was added to the department’s budget for this fiscal year, also intended for the tech package.
Frasier said the technology is meant to be a “force multiplier” and not to replace officer interactions with the public.
He noted that the department will have a public dashboard where residents can track what time drones were flown, for what purpose and in what general area.
“We don’t currently, nor will we ever, have any interest in overstepping or overreaching the trust that’s given to the community,” he said. “Like, right now, if we wanted to, we could go have an officer stare into your backyard all day and write down what you do. But we don’t do that. We’re not going to do it with a drone.”
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