South Bend police on Wednesday announced they’ve launched a new Drone as First Responder program. Yhe department hopes the drone will save lives and help police and firefighters more efficiently respond to emergencies.
The drone launches from a rooftop box at the department’s Sample Street headquarters. It’s deployed at the discretion of analysts in their Real Time Crime Center, once a 911 call comes in.
Flock Safety, the department’s vendor, says the drone flies at speeds up to 51 mph. Such drones on average reach an incident scene in 86 seconds. That’s about two minutes before officers typically arrive.
Chief Scott Ruszkowski says that will give responding officers critical information before they arrive on scene. He says the drone will always focus on the horizon, not into people’s windows, and concerns that police will invade people’s privacy are unfounded.
“This is not used pre-emptively or proactively," Ruszkowski said. "We don’t use it to seek out wrongdoing or to invade anybody’s privacy. We follow the Fourth Amendment just like everybody else. Anything that we would need a search warrant for for a regular police officer, we would do the same with that. Everything that we do as police officers, if cops had propellers on them, it would be no different.”
The drone will capture video but no audio. Like dash and body cams, its recordings are public records under Indiana's Access to Public Records Act. Ruszkowski said maps of the drone's flight paths so far are already publicly visible on the department's Transparency Hub, eight hours after the flight.
"Some people are like, I want to know what's going on. It's not going to specifically tell you what's going on but I want to know what flew over my house. We've had claims already that there's a UFO flying over my house. It's not a UFO. It definitely is identified. But this is just another transparency and proof to you all, and we're using software that automatically tracks and logs every single drone launch and landing. With that, that updates every eight hours, meaning when a drone takes off and lands, eight hours later that specific flight becomes public information."
