The South Bend Police Department plans to start sending drones to incident scenes before officers arrive.
The department on Tuesday issued a statement announcing they’ll host a press conference Wednesday to roll out their new Drone as First Responder program.
The statement says the program is an expansion of the department’s Real-Time Crime Center and will “allow for broader situational awareness and faster responses to critical incidents across South Bend.”
In a recent LinkedIn post, South Bend Police Capt. Kyle Dombrowski said he’d been working on starting the program with Fritz Reber, who heads up Drone as First Responder efforts for Flock Safety. Here’s Reber, in a recent webinar for police departments, describing how prepositioned drones can respond immediately to 911 calls before officers arrive on scene.
“So that you actually know what you’re going into.," Reber said. "You can see the future this way. Is it even a police call? Twenty, 30% of the calls, from our customers, they realize they don’t have to send any ground units. It’s no longer happening, it’s not police-related, maybe we send different resources there.”
The webinar also noted it’s important that police make sure such drone use does not violate 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
