Redmond, WA Police Take Innovation to New Heights with Drone First Responder Program

City embraces innovation in launching DFR program

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Armed with recent approval to conduct drone missions beyond the visual line of sight, the Redmond, Washington Police Department is working to launch its drones as first responders (DFR) program to new heights to protect public safety.

Last November, the FAA granted permission to fly BVLOS missions, without the need of visual observers, to police in the city in northwestern Washington state. In December, the Redmond City Council approved contracts to install five drone docking stations – three built by Skydio and two by Seattle-based BRINC — at locations spread out throughout the city.

Redmond Police Chief Darryl Lowe noted that the city, which operates the only full-time DFR program in the state, was only the second police agency on the West Coast to receive such a BVLOS waiver. Since then the FAA has issued several more waivers to other U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Lowe credited the region’s culture of “innovation and leading the way with the test and evaluation of the various DFR platforms,” for helping the city to secure the waiver. He also cited the efforts of Mayor Angela Birney and the City Council, “to ensure that we utilize technology to keep our community safe.”

The department currently deploys UAVs to safely clear the interior of buildings, aid in suspect apprehension, document crime and crash scenes, and search for lost or missing persons. Its drones are equipped with thermal-imaging and visual cameras, which enable them to help assess structure fires and help officers locate and track fleeing suspects in thickly wooded areas.

The Redmond PD began its drone program in 2018, deploying UAVs to conduct traffic-accident scene reconstruction and to locate missing persons. Last April Lowe initiated the department’s DFR pilot program to expand its use of rapidly advancing drone technology. “We started flying directly to 911 calls and calls of service. We ran that pilot through the end of last year and now it is a full-time program,” he said.

Currently the department employs drones dispatched from two nests or docks, one located in the city’s Municipal Campus and the second one on the other side of town in a city-owned facility. When a call for service comes in, it’s entered into the department’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. Once the latitude and longitude coordinates are entered into the system, the drone is launched to autonomously fly to the incident’s location.

Once the craft is airborne, the drone pilot has the ability to monitor the UAV’s progress and to make deviations to the flight path it if necessary. To ensure privacy of members of the surrounding community and to prevent any unnecessary recording, the drone’s gimbal is set toward the horizon while en route to and returning from a call for service.

“It’s only when we are approaching the actual location that we will tilt the camera down so that we can then get the visual assessment of what’s occurring at that particular location,” Lowe said. The drone’s battery gives it to about 22 to 24 minutes of flight time before the vehicle needs to return back to the dock for charging.

“It’s a rapid-contact charging system, so we’re able to power back up in a relatively short period of time if that particular call for service goes beyond the flight time of that particular air platform,” Lowe said. The DFR docks will be equipped with multiple batteries and the system’s is designed for battery swapping within about a minute and a half. In addition, the department has the ability to launch a second drone to the incident location if necessary, to continue providing coverage of the scene.

“It could be kind of a leapfrog circumstance to where as one starts to get low on battery, we can send the other in overhead. Once it gets overhead, we can send the first one back to base, to swap out batteries, etc.,” Lowe said.

The department will continue to use both BRINC and Skydio equipment throughout the current year. At the end of the year, it will make the operational decision as to whether to continue to contract with both companies, or whether to switch to using the services of one or the other drone operators exclusively.

Lowe said that when the department was deciding which drone provider to use, it was important to weigh the need of choosing a U.S.-based company, whose products are National Defense Authorization Act-compliant.

“That clearly was one of the considerations as we planned our DFR program,” he said. During the program’s pilot phase, Redmond PD tested out drones and operating systems from multiple vendors, including China-based DJI, but ultimately decided to move forward with the two American companies.

Goal to dispatch UAVs in under 3 minutes

Initially established as a suburb of Seattle, Redmond, the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America, has become a rapidly developing metropolis, featuring a bustling central-city area, residential communities and nearby wooded areas. With its current two DFR docking stations, the police department can dispatch a drone to reply to a call to most locations in the 17-square-mile city area within about two-and-a-half minutes and to the city’s farthest edges within four minutes.

“We will have five docks moving forward and we will place those so that our response time will stay in the sub-three minutes timeframe,” Lowe said. To date, the program has logged more than 500 missions and has assisted police officers with making a number of arrests.

Redmond has taken measures to ensure that data collected through its DFR program doesn’t infringe on the privacy of city residents. “As far as the data, the video itself is maintained consistent with our criminal justice information system policies, and our own city data policy,” he said. “So, if it is not related to a specific crime or a pending prosecution within 90 days that video and everything is deleted or destroyed.”

The department maintains a forward-facing dashboard at Redmond.gov/police, which in the second quarter of this year will be updated to include flight telemetry of every DFR mission in the city. This will help give residents confidence that UAV missions are not being launched to conduct improper surveillance, Lowe said.

“Individuals can rest assured that unless they are at that location where the call for service was, the drone is not going over people’s backyards or doing any type of surveillance or anything like that,” he said.

Given the program’s initial successful launch, Lowe said he that in the current year he hopes to expand Redmond’s DFR program to the next level. “Given our BVLOS waiver, I plan to begin to have conversations with surrounding communities and departments that don’t DFR to explore the possibility of regionalization,” he said.

Redmond currently participates with surrounding communities in other law enforcement efforts, such as a regional SWAT team, and Lowe said he believes that a regional DFR program is the next logical step to continuing the area’s innovative approach to public safety.

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Read more:

• Flying Lion Achieves Milestone: Over 50,000 Drone as First Responder Flights Completed
• Montgomery County Secures First Conviction with Drone as First Responder Program: A Milestone in Public Safety
• Campbell Police Department Secures 24/7 Waiver for Drone as First Responder Program

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.