How one city made drones a ‘resource’
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By
Chris Teale
Fort Collins, Colorado’s public safety agencies initially used drones to help with its first response. Now, other agencies are getting in on the act and using them for other needs.
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA — While police and fire departments have traditionally been major users of drones as first responders, one city is letting other agencies join in and share those resources.
Fort Collins, Colorado refers to the program as “drones as a city resource,” and currently uses three drones that are stationed on top of two firehouses to not only respond to fires, traffic accidents, crime and the like, but also as a way to monitor infrastructure issues for its utilities. The city’s public safety agencies receive approximately 84,000 calls for service each year.
That can include water main breaks, power outages and even blockages in rivers. A drone can get virtually anywhere in the city in approximately 90 seconds, so it can quickly be piloted somewhere, take photos and video of the situation and then let dispatchers decide if a crew is needed for an in-person response. It’s still very much in a pilot phase, but city leaders said drones are a helpful way to supplement limited staffing in public safety and elsewhere.
“In policing and being in the city government space, [we recognize] that as calls for service continue to go up and up and up, we really can't hire more and more police officers,” Fort Collins Police Chief Jeff Swoboda said during a panel discussion at the International City/County Management Association’s annual meeting last week. “It's very expensive to hire police officers, so we've got to reduce the demand on our officers. And we found that the drone program specifically was able to really cut into the amount of calls that our officers were going on.”
Currently, the police, fire departments and the city’s public utilities cover the cost of the program equally, with the drones from manufacturer Skydio. But there has already been interest from other agencies in getting involved: City Manager Kelly DiMartino said the initiative has been brought up at several meetings of department heads, and they are kicking around various ideas for new use cases. She said it shows that agencies are “thinking more uniformly instead of in individual silos.”
“It's helping, I would say, promote that culture of innovation, of thinking differently,” DiMartino said. “You're having someone from utilities who's there talking about it with someone from police, so it's showing cross-departmental, cross-organizational collaboration, and the police engaging in ways that sometimes may have felt like they were a little bit more separate. They're really now being seen more as part of the overall organization, and there are some intangible benefits to that as well.”
Privacy concerns remain a top concern for law enforcement to manage, especially as states and localities have wrestled with the future of deploying Flock cameras. Swoboda acknowledged that drones also have some residents worried about their privacy, so this program has rolled out slowly and has involved a lot of testing and community engagement.
Law enforcement and other agencies must balance their desire to implement new technology for safety with residents’ desire to retain their privacy, so Swoboda said the conversation is likely about “not safety at all costs,” but finding that balance.
“Part of the discussion is how safe do we want our communities to be?” he said. “Because we can make our communities super safe with a lot of technology, but people don't want that level of technology intruding on their daily lives. It's been said, ‘It's really important when two values clash, and which one ends up winning out.’ Public safety and living in a safe community clashing with my personal liberties and the government, ‘Big Brother’ and all of those things” is one such discussion, he added.
Budgeting for such a program can also be a thorny issue, even when departments look to collaborate and share resources. But Swoboda said having it be split evenly and allowing for equal access has fostered a sense of togetherness that should last as the program expands to other agencies.
“Many places, the police or the fire department let parks or utilities use their drones, but that's still the police or fire department's toy that they're letting other people use, just being a good partner,” he said. “Whereas ours, it's a true partnership. Everyone is paying the same amount. The police pay the same amount as the fire department, which right now pays the same as our utilities.”