The City Council on Thursday approved the $400,000 contract with Seattle-based BRINC Drones to provide one drone, a launch platform and software for the police department’s “drone as a first responder” program.
The program aims to use a drone to respond first to calls to help assess situations.
“This will give us the ability to get an aerial observation on a call that has come in through 911, prior to officers arriving, and eliminate that mental shock of an officer arriving on scene ...,” Sgt. Vincent Brown of the Frederick Police Department told the City Council on Thursday.
Brown is in charge of the department’s drone program.
The drone will be launched and remotely controlled from the police department headquarters at 100 E. All Saints St. It will enable supervisors and command staff to come up with more efficient approaches to a scene, Brown said.
“We’ve modeled a lot of this on agencies throughout the country, and the overarching goal is an increase in de-escalation through use of technology to give officers more information before they arrive on scene,” Brown told the council.
Police officers already employ drones for other calls, Brown said. Currently, the police department has eight licensed drone operators.
Brown said the police department has been using these drones, operated in the field, as a pilot program. There have been over 389 drone flights of this kind in the past year, he said.
“We’re seeing ... a big decrease, actually, in interactions that we have to make because there are some calls that we don’t have to send two, three, four, five officers to ...,” he said.
This enables the police department to better allocate resources to priority calls, Brown said.
He told The Frederick News-Post in an interview on Friday that resource allocation is especially important given the difficulty many police departments now have in recruiting additional officers.
BRINC, which offers drones and other public safety-focused equipment to agencies across the country, will provide a launch station for the top of the police headquarters as part of the contract.
That launch station is designed to help the drone stay ready for launch despite adverse weather conditions, Brown said.
As part of the contract, BRINC will replace the drone every other year and will maintain and replace the drone if any problems occur.
The drone will have a two mile-radius, according to city documents.
Brown said he expects, after Mayor Michael O’Connor signs the contract with BRINC, that the new program will be up and running in six to eight months.
All eight licensed drone pilots will be trained in the use of the drone, he said, though the focus will be to eventually move to civilian drone pilots.
Brown said there will be a public-facing aspect of the program as well: the BRINC system includes web-based information on the use of the drones.
That will give the public information on the time, date, location and type of call the drone responds to, Brown said.
Some information might not be released in certain kinds of cases, he said, but generally, it will help someone “clear up why is a drone flying around my house.”
Brown said the department has had extensive conversations around privacy in the use of the drones.
Drones are only used to to respond to calls in public areas and when the police department has a search warrant for an area, he said.
“We don’t use drones to go swooping around looking for things,” he said. “The Fourth Amendment prevents that.”
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prevents unreasonable search and seizure of private citizens and their property by law enforcement officials.
“We’re not out here trying to see what’s going on in your backyard. That’s none of our business,” Brown said.
He said about 75% of drone flights currently are for missing persons.
In a few occasions, the police department has used it to look for fugitives, but he said the drones don’t go anywhere officers wouldn’t already go in those situations.
One of the major reasons the police department uses drones is large public events, Brown said.
There, drones are mostly used to help keep track of crowds and manage emergency services resources, he said.
However, “especially at large events, there’s always the possibility of someone coming in with malicious intent,” he said.
© 2025 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
