Several law enforcement agencies throughout Colorado are planning to begin dispatching drones instead of officers to respond to 9-1-1 calls.
“This really is the future of law enforcement at some point, whether we like it or not,” Sergeant Jeremiah Gates, who leads the drone unit at the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, told The Denver Post.
At least 20 agencies in Colorado’s Front Range already use drone technology for certain tasks, such as locating missing people, crime scene mapping, providing overhead surveillance during SWAT operations, and tracking fleeing suspects.
Now, agencies like the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office are considering taking their use of drones to the next level by having them respond to some 9-1-1 calls in situations where the drones might be able to provide useful information from the location of an incident before officers are deployed. Additionally, sending drones to calls that require less urgency could allow officers to prioritize more pressing calls.
“I could fly the drone over (a reported suspicious vehicle) and say, ‘Hey, that vehicle is not out of place,’ and I never had to send an officer over to bother them, and I can clear it with that,” Gates said.
After initially abandoning its only drone in 2018 due to constitutional concerns, the Denver Police Department (DPD) is now looking to expand its drone program using a $100,000 grant from the Denver Police Foundation.
“The long-term scope of what we are trying to do is drones as first responders,” Phil Gonshak, director of the department’s Strategic Initiatives Bureau, said. “Basically, having stations on top of each one of our districts so we can respond with drones to critical needs or emergencies that arise throughout the city.
“We would never simply replace calls-for-service response by police officers,” he continued. “The DPD would respond to any call for service where someone is physically requesting a police officer on scene. But if there was a fight at Colfax and Cherokee, and we put a drone in the air and there is no fight and nothing causing traffic issues, then we would reroute our police officers to other emergent calls.”
Gonshak added that the goal of DPD is to create a public-facing dashboard, which would allow residents to track Denver police drone flights to ease concerns about potential violations of people’s personal freedoms.
