Police Using Drones: Meet Lieutenant Matt Udelhoven
David: Hey everybody, David Plummer and Michael Ferguson here from Aerial Influence. We've got a podcast, I know almost no one has asked for that, but we gave it to you anyway!
We're talking right now, this next series is Police Using Drones. That's something we know a little bit about cause we've worked with a lot of police departments. But one of the first ones, one of the first police departments we worked with was the Elgin Police Department. Lieutenant Matt Udelhoven from the Elgin Police Department, specifically, he honestly has one of the most successful drone programs in the Midwest, which is a really interesting thing because there's not a lot of drone programs, and successful ones, there's really not a lot of them. So we're so happy that you're here, Matt, thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, and we're sitting outside right now to keep our social distance from one another. So, um, you might hear some cars in the background, et cetera, but Matt, I wanted to start with, when did you originally start getting the idea that you wanted to start a drone program in Elgin?
Lt. Udelhoven: This was somewhat of a long process, probably about five and a half to six years ago. And it took quite a while to get more information on drones and policies and do a needs assessment. Do we actually need a drone and could we benefit from a drone? So we kind of sat on that and had monthly meetings for a couple of years before we actually got going where our program has been successful, for about three and a half now.
David: That's great. Now how many people, how many pilots do you guys actually have right now?
Lt. Udelhoven: We have seven pilots presently.
David: Seven pilots, and what...two, three drones?
Lt. Udelhoven: We have your DJI Matrice 210, we have the Phantom 4, and then we recently purchased three Mavic Minis that we're slowly introducing more of an indoor application tactical situations with our SWAT team, or even indoor crime scenes, which I just droned our first indoor crime scene a couple of weeks ago. And through your DJI COVID-19 response program, we presently have three Mavic 2 Enterprise drones on your loaner program.
David: Oh, that's great. That's great. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in one of the next episodes about exactly how that program is working and how you guys have benefited from it. Before we get into all of that, I wanted to sort of hit on, you know, how often are you guys being called out, before COVID, before all of this hit, just in your regular day to day? Like how many times per week were you guys being called out?
Lt. Udelhoven: Looking at our annual audit, we are averaging roughly a call-out a week, so we're having 50 to 55 call-outs a year. So in that, it ranges anywhere from a traffic crash, reconstruction-type calls, or missing persons/search and rescue-type applications. Both for the city of Elgin and neighboring communities will call us for mutual aid.
David: Yeah. So a lot of people don't know that if there is a smaller police department that maybe they can't afford a Matrice 210, maybe that's outside of their budget, they may decide to work with, you know, one of the bigger departments that can help them out and bring a drone to their town, and helping it in a serious situation. So this is a great way that they're all working together.
All right, so how often are you guys working with other departments outside of the Elgin area? How often are you guys actually working with neighboring communities?
Lt. Udelhoven: Yeah, I would say without looking for exact numbers, probably about a third. A third to a fourth of our calls, annually, are to assist outside agencies. But those are not the traffic crash-type stuff, they are more, we're searching for suspects, missing persons-type calls for service.
Michael: What's the population in Elgin?
Lt. Udelhoven: Elgin? We're about 115,000.
Michael: Okay. So 115,000. And then, I'm trying to think if there were the neighboring areas around that. So I mean, you could potentially serve close to 250,000?
Lt. Udelhoven: Oh, absolutely. We aren't necessarily helping just our border communities. We've traveled an hour, hour and a half away. We've been up to northern Illinois up along the border. There's literally about an hour 15, hour and a half, radius of Elgin. We've been out in the last year and a half or so to assist agencies.
Michael: Yeah. And you've been around long enough where people know you by name, they know you by...
Lt. Udelhoven: Yep. Fortunately we're in a database as having drones, so when they call the mutual aid or ILEAS, State of Illinois network, they’re patching them through to Elgin for assistance.
Michael: Okay, that's great.
David: All right guys. Well this is episode one. We're going to have five more of these in our line of Police Using Drones. Matt is going to be coming back with us, we're really happy he's here. So check back in with us. We're going to talk about how things have changed since coronavirus and how exactly the Elgin Police Department has been working with DJI during these difficult times. So we will see you guys soon. Thank you so much.
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Michael: As always, thank you for listening. We're excited to share the future of drones with you.