SMILE! It’s Monday’s Police Drone Roundup

But whenever Monday comes, but whenever Monday comes

A-you can find me cryin’ all of the time

—  The Mamas & The Papas, Monday, Monday

If you love drones and you love law-enforcement, Monday will hopefully find you smiling as DRONELIFE presents another installment of Police Drone Roundup. Join us as we travel from the Deep South to the palisades of New Jersey.

Georgia

Two trained officers will soon take the Gwinnett County Police Department’s newest and only drone for a test flight over the red-clay terrain of the North Georgia region.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the new, unnamed-model UAV will be launched for “implementation during missing-persons searches, at-large crime scenes and natural disasters.”

“We’re able to launch this thing and within five minutes have pictures of the entire scene,” GCPD Lt. Chris Smith told local media.

Indiana

The Tippecanoe                County Sheriff’s Office may be forking over some serious cash for new unmanned aircraft. The Lafayette Journal and Courier reports that Sheriff Barry Richard will spend “more than $10,000, less than $20,000” purchasing an unspecified number of UAS solutions including drones, thermal imaging arrays and hi-def cameras.

The county will use funds from its commissary account – money spent by jail inmates on small, retail items – to buy the tech. The TCSO is reviewing a purchase agreement with Skyfire Consulting, a UAV consulting firm focused on public-safety tech. The firm has already made a name in this specialized drone sector, having been a founding member of the Drone Advocates for Public Safety (DAPS) group – a “coalition of public safety officers and UAV industry partners [focusing] on training first responders in using drones to support their operations.”

New Jersey

In Bergen County, the Office of Emergency Management is already reaping the benefit of three new drones – one of which is a $25,000, sensor-arrayed model donated by an unnamed UAV company. The eye-in-the-sky has been used to search for a homicide suspect and to find a missing person. According to NJTV News, the drones will be used to find missing children, survey arson scenes and monitor forest fires.

“This will allow us to fly the drone down into hazardous material environments and take air samples and air monitoring and determine if we should send a human life down there or not,” Bergen County Office of Emergency Management Coordinator Lt. Matthew Tiedemann told the news site.