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Even without large and volatile situations, small infractions in an event are often hard to manage. UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have the ability to monitor large areas at once.

The benefits of drone use in law enforcement go far beyond their innumerable uses, force multiplication, and risk reduction, extending to cost savings and greater accountability for the department and community at large.

The MPD has hailed the system for apprehending criminal suspects and allowing the agency to be more efficient with police resources by providing real-time information to ground officers.

The drone would identify license plates and individuals at a safe distance, and officers can make arrests, issue tickets, and impound vehicles later.

But they’re not just useful in coordinated events. The Bay Area is increasingly facing the issue of illegal sideshows, in which large gatherings of people use their vehicles to block intersections and take areas of the city hostage at night.

Today’s police drones are much bigger than regular drones commonly used for recreational purposes, with much longer battery lives and features such as thermal sensors, loudspeakers, spotlights or beacons.

Drones offer the opportunity to meet all of those demands and pressures, while improving operational and departmental efficiency, increasing officer safety, and reducing costs.

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"Prior to police officers’ arrival on the scene, officers will see what the drone sees in real time via their smartphones," the spokesperson said. "This emerging technology stands to enhance situational awareness as officers arrive at scenes, promote officer safety, and help NYPD leadership deploy resources in an effective and efficient manner."

The city of Chula Vista, California, was one of the first cities to use drones for 911 calls and has deployed unmanned aircraft nearly 20,000 times since 2018 to respond to emergency incidents such as crimes in progress, fires, traffic accidents and reports of dangerous subjects.

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BRINC, a Seattle-based drone company, has launched a purpose-built 911 response drone that can deliver life-saving medical supplies to a scene, such as EpiPens, defibrillators, personal floatation devices (PFDs) and naloxone (Narcan), as well as assessing low-priority calls without the need to dispatch personnel.

Most towns and cities need more boots on the ground. Yet, it’s harder today to find new recruits, takes a lot of time to get them on the force, and costs the department far more.

The report states that police departments should not be able to roll out surveillance technologies without the consent of the community it serves.

Mauro said police departments need to figure out how to properly manage public requests, the man hours fetching that type of information might take, and what footage needs to be saved or deleted. He said the same issues came to the fore with the rollout of police body cameras.

More blue city police departments are embracing the use of drones to carry out police work, with some cities now even using them to respond to 911 calls. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Elsewhere, the NYPD told Fox News Digital that it is rolling out drones to respond to possible 911 calls of shootings in the Big Apple.

Since October, the drone system has been deployed over 850 times with an average response time of just under 49 seconds, according to police data.

"Some of the cities that are rolling them out are rolling them out because they have no choice, because they can't get cops to take the job."

Drones are capable of searching wide areas using thermal imaging, quickly finding missing citizens even in the harshest areas. As was seen in this search for a missing man separated from his family and stuck chest deep in marshlands.

The advantage extends to searches for missing people, whether they’re suspects or not. Some areas are challenging to search due to the terrain, conditions, brush density, and other factors.

If we take a look at just one state’s use of drone technology, we get a small glimpse into law enforcement’s use of drones.

The system was used mostly for theft, about 33% of the time, with reports of suspicious persons next on the list accounting for 15% of responses. Police say the deployment of drones meant that patrol units were not needed in over 120 instances.

When an officer deploys a drone, they’re able to act as several officers, providing overwatch and surveillance where they might otherwise have to wait for air support or more officers to fulfill those roles.

As budget and staffing pressures continue, and public concerns evolve, so must law enforcement agencies. Remotely piloted unmanned aircraft systems offer departments a cost effective solution to address these pressures, while improving officer and public safety.

Several law enforcement agencies in Colorado, including the Denver Police Department, which has seen cuts due to its migrant crisis, are making plans to start dispatching drones instead of officers to respond to 911 calls and at least 20 agencies in Colorado’s Front Range already use drone technology for certain tasks.

A drone pilot remotely based in the NYPD’s Joint Operations Center in Lower Manhattan activates a drone to fly to the location of the gunfire, an NYPD spokesperson told Fox Digital.

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"But at the end of the day it's helpful, and it will potentially take some weight off of police because a drone can get there quickly – especially in a congested area like Manhattan – it can tell you what's going on and how many cops [you need]. Is it an emergency? Is it a verified shooting? Is somebody bleeding out in the street?"

Springfield police officer Tony Del Castillo takes out a new drone for a test flight at the city fuel depot in Springfield, Oregon. (Imagn)

Helicopters, for instance, cost around $5k -$10k per mission. A Skydio X2E costs just $20,561 for 3 whole years of Skydio Autonomy Enterprise. While you’re still likely to keep a helicopter in your department toolkit, adding drones is a helpful way to have overwatch on calls that would be too low-priority to deploy as expensive a resource as a helicopter .

While those are all exceptional employments, the uses for drones in law enforcement aren’t limited. Consider the following applications.

There have been instances where suspects flee from open windows or back doors, discarding evidence or identifiable clothing along the way. Without the drone, suspects would be difficult to pursue effectively and safely. With aerial surveillance of the scene, officers suspects and quickly collect any discarded weapons or drugs.

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A law enforcement official sets up a drone during a manhunt for suspect Robert Card following a mass shooting on Oct. 27, 2023, in Monmouth, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

This number is ever increasing, not just due to the boosts from COVID relief funds, federal grants, military surplus transfers, and civil asset forfeitures, but because of their many advantageous uses on the force.

Around 1,500 police departments across the country are currently using drones in some form, according to a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy group, with agencies deploying the technology for crowd control purposes, missing people searches, tracking fleeing suspects or mapping crime scenes.

"And I think now a lot of cities, blue cities in particular, are starting to realize, well, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We need cops. You see it in places like Seattle where they had the CHOPS (Capitol Hill Organized Protest), where they had these police no-go zones and people died. There were murders and all kinds of robberies, so there's a realization that, OK, we do need policing. The use of technology has always been part of policing."

Law enforcement drones are capable of going inside and between buildings, operating in tight and hard to reach areas. For instance, if a suspect were hiding down an alley and behind dumpsters, you could send a drone ahead to capture an aerial view of the situation before sending a team around the corner.

However, Mauro said that deploying police drones opens up a host of other issues, including privacy and civil rights concerns. In a report last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recommended guardrails be put in place to make sure the technology does not "evolve into much broader surveillance programs."

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Maryland has also witnessed progressive laws to reform policing and the Montgomery County Police Department (MPD) began rolling out its "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) program in October in the wake of rising crime and a staff vacancy rate of 43%, according to police officials.

It’s easy to justify a drone program when you consider one fact alone: police work is evolving. With police departments facing officer shortages, budget cuts, and a more technologically advanced public, evolution is a necessity to promote community safety.

Last year, Chicago lawmakers passed a bill that allows police to use drones during special events like parades, walks, races but not during protests or demonstrations.

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By showing how drones are used by police– especially if every uniformed officer were to have a drone in their patrol vehicle – you’ll be able to justify funding for your drone program.

Steep budget cuts and dwindling staff numbers in blue cities, in particular, make drones both an effective and cost-saving tool for police in Democratic strongholds.

Instead of sending dozens of officers into a potentially dangerous situation for the public and the officers themselves – and to avoid further property damage during a chase – officers could deploy a drone.

The use of the technology meant that in nearly 4,300 of those cases, officers were not physically required to respond to a location as the situation was properly assessed from a control room. Police in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Burbank, Fremont and Hawthorne as well as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department also use the innovative technology in the state.

"Good policies, including on usage limits, transparency, and privacy, should not be left up to police departments, but should be given legal force by a city council or other legislative body as part of a vote to approve a DFR program."

"So look, there are a lot of issues relative to electronic surveillance that go beyond drones, and when you're talking about a government that implicates the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and so that makes things that much more volatile and complicated. It's just something that has to be watched very closely."

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Having the manpower to properly secure an event isn’t always easy, and can pose significant costs to the city. It can also be incredibly dangerous, as witnessed at events such as the Boston Marathon and the Las Vegas shooting at Harvest Music Festival.

While departments may use seizure funds, grants, and military surplus to fill out the gaps in their ranks and be prepared for every type of situation, there is room for operational and budgetary efficiency.

"Undeniably, they are an assist," Mauro said of police drones. "It's a force multiplier in departments that just can't get enough people to cover the ground. In dense urban areas, the drones can get there faster, and very rural areas where it could take a cop 20 minutes to get to the accident site or the scene of the call, a drone can get there very quickly and let you know what you're getting into."

If a suspect runs through a building, down an alley, over a fence, and into the woods, officers will have a harder time apprehending them.

Quick, efficient and with a bird's eye view of any scene, more police departments are embracing the use of drones to carry out law enforcement work, with some blue cities now even using them to respond to 911 calls.

Where once investigators were relegated to using cameras and video at crime scenes and crash sites, they’re now able to use drones to reconstruct the scene with multiple angles and three-dimensional models.This overview helps officers map the entire scene and collect evidence they may have otherwise missed, and performs this task in a fraction of the time.

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"And I think the real key … is that there has to be significant human interaction with the drone. The drone has to be very subordinate to somebody who's controlling it, it has to be police in real time watching what's going on and making decisions and controlling the drone."

The ACLU has called for strict privacy rules, usage limits for where drones can be deployed and for police to provide clear information about where and when surveillance drones are being operated.

Meanwhile, the NYPD’s new drone program is being piloted to supplement its gunshot detection system known as ShotSpotter, which alerts police to a possible shooting. Under the new drone system, five police precincts are being trialed to have drones immediately deployed to the scene when such an alert goes off. The five precincts include three in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx, and one in Manhattan at the Central Park Precinct.

"Some of the cities that are rolling them out are rolling them out because they have no choice, because they can't get cops to take the job," former NYPD inspector Paul Mauro told Fox News Digital. The NYPD saw an exodus of police in the wake of the defund the police movements, progressive policing reforms and anti-cop rhetoric sparked by the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

The American Civil Liberties Union has raised privacy and surveillance concerns about the technology. (KAREN BLEIER/AFP via Getty Images)