Police Using Drones: Envisioning the Future
David: Hey everybody, David Plummer here from Aerial Influence, along with my business partner, Michael Ferguson. We are joined by Lieutenant Matt Udelhoven from the Elgin Police Department. This is the guy that has started a very successful police drone program, probably one of the most successful in the Midwest. We're so happy he has joined us for these last five episodes, and now we're here for number six!
Matt, we're going to talk about the future of drones, where we see the future headed towards in drones and how it's going to affect future generations, but what's the one thing now that's not quite where you want it to be? The technology is amazing, but the police need this one thing to work right and it's just not there yet.
Lt. Udelhoven: Hands down right now, it would be the ability to have live streaming applications. There’s several out there, and they all have their pros and cons, but we haven't found “the one” yet.
Michael: And that would be beneficial because it sends it to someone that is not necessarily on the scene?
Lt. Udelhoven: Correct. Those are mostly our SWAT, our tactical situations. To be able to send a livestream to our tactical operators on their cell phones, or to a command post, or to our chief back at her office—just to send out anywhere an image of what's going on at the scene. We haven't quite settled in on something yet.
We're also looking at the drones, hazardous material-type initiatives, train derailments...I think I speak for firefighters as well. Firefighters or police—no one wants to go down to that tanker car and see what's down there. Send a drone down to look at the placards to see if there's a leak or something like that. Or to go into that building, that warehouse, that alarm, etc.
When you said, “What do you think the big game changer is going to be?” I truly think, without saying what capability the drone is going to have, I think the big game changer is, in itself, the drone. I think such a small percentage of agencies—police, fire, everybody—have drones right now. I think we're truly in our infancy stage and that five years from now, you're going to see a tremendous amount of more agencies coming on board and having drones.
David: I really do think, at some point, we're going to see a small drone in every squad car. And then each agency will have one or two big drones just in case. But I do think it's going to be as common a holster. It really is, at some point.
Michael: The future for drones is not just going to be the drone, but it's going to be the department. Like you said, you get a call out-for someone who’s missing. It's a different circumstance. You have a certain amount of steps.
Lt. Udelhoven: Well, and it gets them thinking, “Could a drone be used for this?” Or, maybe the officer says, “No, we're not going to use a drone for this. Either it doesn't meet the criteria or we can't fly right now because it's too heavy a fog.” We've educated our supervisors and our officers to know when to call, and they usually call no matter what, but they may say, “Hey, I know you probably can't fly today. It's foggy. We can't see a hundred feet in front of us, but we’ve got to check.” You know what we can do though? We can get ready, and we'll be out there, and the sun's going to be up in about 20 minutes and boom, we're going to fly. And so, you know, we've kind of worked through some of those glitches and educating the public and our staff was a big part of the success.
Michael: You said that you had talked with the Chula Vista people.
Lt. Udelhoven: Yes, I saw Chief Roxana Kennedy at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference at McCormick last year. And I went to their drone presentation and they have quite an impressive program going. It's not 24 hours (or it wasn't a few months back). They run something like a Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 program with the DJI Matrice 210s, and they take off on top of their police facility as well as a hospital or deserted hospital that are a couple miles apart. And they have beyond visual line of sight waivers—I believe they were the first or only in the nation to acquire that. And the neat thing of that was not only are they staffing constant drones ready to go for certain calls, but once you get a call that is drone applicable, they launch the drone, but then they had a program (and I'd have to go back to their Chula Vista police website to get the accuracy of this) but the camera turns on on the drone and it activates to the squad car’s computers.
So if there's a fight in the mall parking lot for example, the drone is getting there minutes before the squad car is, and the drone is zooming in and the drone operators are giving the officers play-by-play before they even arrive. They’ve got eyes on the fight, it's a subject in a red jacket, he's now hopping in a blue Jeep heading wherever. Because the squads are pulling up and two or three people are still fighting and the drone operators are like, “Guys, you want the blue Jeep that's taking off over here.”
They showed a couple of videos like that in the presentation. It was just so impressive. They keep up on their stats on their website to show how many deployments they're having daily and what they're doing. I think we're a ways from that yet, but I know we've been taking off from our old Sherman Hospital. We've been kind of doing some elevated platform taking off and practicing and just kind of keeping all the options open to see if that's something we could entertain in the future. It was very impressive.
David: Well, you’d think that's going to make a ton of sense for fire departments to think about, how a drone can be at the scene of a fire before the fire truck gets there and how beneficial that would be!
Interesting stuff. Obviously the future of drones is bright and they're going to save a lot of lives, thanks to guys like Lieutenant Matt Udelhoven of the Elgin Police Department. Again, Matt, thank you so much for being here. And we will see you back with our next set of podcasts!
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Michael: As always thank you for listening. We're excited to share the future of drones with you.