Drones now beat patrol cars to 911 calls in a growing list of US cities

St. Louis police adopted a new drone program earlier this month and wasted no time. The department's two-drone Aerial Response Unit lifts off from launch pads on the roofs of the North and Central Patrol divisions, and within hours of approval, pilots flew their first missions — helping ground officers search for a missing boy. The department said the drones checked spots the boy was known to frequent while officers covered other ground, and an officer ultimately found him and brought him home safely.

Department public affairs director Mitch McCoy told KSDK the aircraft can be on scene within 70 seconds of a 911 call being dispatched. He said the units will handle calls in progress, shots-fired reports and ShotSpotter activations, and may free up officers when a drone can take a call instead. St. Louis turned to the tech while fighting severe staffing shortages and high violent crime.

The city joins a rapidly expanding map. Chula Vista, California, started flying in 2018 and has logged more than 25,000 missions, with drones arriving in about 97 seconds on average and resolving roughly one in five calls without a patrol unit. The NYPD runs a Drone as First Responder program across precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, flying autonomously to ShotSpotter alerts, robberies and missing-person searches. Las Vegas formally launched its program after using drones to map the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting scene. Durham and Fayetteville in North Carolina approved programs earlier this year, and Raleigh is gathering information, per WRAL.

Brandon Henderson, a criminal defense attorney at HMW Law in Cleveland, told The Independent the appeal is obvious: drones put eyes on a scene faster without putting help there. But, he said, a drone cannot make an arrest, secure a scene or put hands on a patient. He also flagged what the cameras capture beyond a suspect — neighbors in yards, people on the street, families who never learn they were filmed. What a drone offers, he added, is information before anyone commits.

The evidence is starting to land. Scott Mourtgos, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, led what is believed to be the first randomized control trial on drones as first responders, studying Montgomery County, Maryland, and Philadelphia in trials that wrapped earlier this year and were published in October. He told WRAL the drones handled 911 calls more quickly, arriving about two minutes faster on so-called Priority 2 calls like retail theft or vandalism in progress. The authors cautioned the data could not say whether faster arrivals outweighed the financial, organizational and privacy costs.

Henderson expects the rollout to keep accelerating, pointing to stretched department budgets and the FAA making beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights easier to approve. He argued communities should settle who owns the footage, how long it lives and what else it may be used for before adopting a program, because those terms are nearly impossible to tighten once one is running.