Police Using Drones: Pain Points in Starting a Drone Program
David: Hey everybody, David Plummer here along with Michael Ferguson from Aerial Influence. This is part two of our episode “Police Using Drones”. We're also joined by Matt Udelhoven of the Elgin Police Department. If you know anything about drone departments, if you're a police officer that's wanting to start a drone department, this is the right podcast to listen to simply because Matt is here. We're so happy he's joined us. I know we’ve got our first question. Michael wanted to ask him something about…
Michael: Matt, we wanted to kind of go over some of the pain points on starting a drone program. And I know that we've kind of talked about this where we've got the public, kind of onboarding the public, and letting them know what you're going to be using the drone for. And then we've also got things like how to actually integrate the drone into a useful tool where it's not getting in the way or not taking up extra time. Let's start with, when you started, you kind of had an idea of how to go about this and that was with the public forum, right?
Lt. Udelhoven: Yes. The two main focal points that we were concentrated on is a needs assessment. Do we actually need a drone? And the more research that we did, it was just popping up time and time again, that drones, in all reality, save you time, money, and resources, and increase your personal safety. So drones could be used for a number of things. We went through our calls for service and found hundreds, if not thousands, of calls annually that a drone could have either handled or assisted and played some part in. So there was definitely a needs justification for it.
The second part was to get the public on board. Even though it's one thing to go out and buy, in this case a drone, but if you don't have the public support, you're going to go through a lot of scrutiny and have difficult times in having a successful program. So we held a public forum when we announced it weeks in advance and we had the community come together and basically had a meeting in our rec center with about 35 to 40 citizens who showed up. And we basically did like an hour and a half question/answer and went over the drone capabilities. And more importantly, what we would be utilizing drones for, to kind of ease their minds and to not have the unknown questions. You know, why do the police need a drone? What will they be doing?
Michael: And some of the questions that you were asked right off the bat were…?
Lt. Udelhoven: Well, there's been a stereotype of, you know, if the fire department gets a drone it's to check for heat sources for burning buildings and things of that nature. If the police get a drone, they're going to be doing surveillance and I don't want them looking in my window. And that's just not what we're doing.
We explained that we're basically looking more to life-saving measures, to look for search and rescue and missing persons, traffic crash diagramming to open up the roadways in a quicker way than doing measurements the old fashioned way, and just basically showing them how it's going to save time, money, and resources. And it was very well-received. We had a lot of questions, but a lot of positive feedback and it basically educated the community, because this is relatively new still. There's a lot of unknowns and people don't necessarily have the answers or an understanding of what drones are or what they're being used for.
Michael: Going back to...you had said that about a third of your call-outs were actually helping other communities. And so two-thirds are you're doing it on your turf in Elgin. Do you have a guesstimate of the stuff that you're doing in Elgin? What is kind of like a search and rescue versus maybe a crash scene? Because sometimes those are two different drones.
Lt. Udelhoven: A few months back, I would probably tell you it's about 50/50 search and rescue or traffic crash, but now I'm going to throw in more of our tactical negotiator or SWAT team. They’re doing more training with them for indoor and outdoor applications. So we have had a couple of SWAT callouts now this last six weeks. So I would have to say search and rescue is still probably about half and we're probably 35-40% traffic crash and 10% or so is kind of creeping in a SWAT aspect.
Michael: Okay, great.
David: Can you give us a story of a time when, you know, obviously drones are just a tool in the tool shed kind of for police as they are in a lot of different industries. Can you give us a time when a drone was brought in and was able to do something, was able to aid in a specific situation where if the drone hadn't been there, it would have been a completely different outcome?
Lt. Udelhoven: Sure, and David, you hit it spot-on. It is another tool in the toolbox. Getting a drone is not going to solve all your problems. It is simply another resource for you. So we still need our canine partners, we still need personnel boots on the ground and things like that.
But just a couple kind of come to mind immediately. Assisting an outside agency. A missing person went into a rather large forest and this person had some medical conditions and it had been several hours in the winter. It was about 28 degrees out, snowing, and officers had been cruising the forest preserve with their PA system and their thermal devices on the ground and looking around and came up empty. And as soon as we popped the drone up in the air, the thermal night vision had a rather large heat source that was pretty clearly identified as a human. And they went out quite a ways. I question if they would have actually found this person out in the wetlands, and they went out and saved the person's life literally. The doctor said he had a few hours to live
David: And that's got to really be something that makes it all worthwhile.
Lt. Udelhoven: Yeah, if that doesn't pay for your program right there….And that agency has since then...we were called out three times for them last year, and they have since started a drone program and they've seen the benefits of it. And that's kind of what we're looking to do on the mutual aid aspect is to assist each other, but kind of show you how to get started.
And, just another real quick one. We had some car thieves run off into another prairie grass-type application, and this time canine dogs were out in the area and we had the thermal up in the air and were having radio contact with them. And the canine, obviously it was upwind. And it was literally three or four feet from the suspect hiding in the prairie grass. So, it could have been a dangerous situation, but we literally said, we've got a hotspot three or four feet on your left. And they took that subject into custody. He was embedded in prairie grass. The dog didn't even see him.
David That's incredible. So, see everybody, people think that somebody's out there doing surveillance or something, and usually it's a trying to save a life or catch a bad guy. And so that's the way we want it.
Alright. That's it for this episode, this is number two, we've got four more episodes left to go with Matt Udelhoven from the Elgin Police Department, he is the head of the drone program. You’ve got to come back for episode three. We're going to be talking a lot more. We'll see you then.