The mission of our Drone-as-First-Responder (DFR) Program is to provide the fastest and safest possible air support to our city’s first responders in a responsible and transparent manner. Our goals are to increase safety, reduce response times, and increase our effectiveness and efficiency. Drones have become a critical tool to provide a birds-eye view of an incident for ground personnel, searching for missing persons, determining appropriate next steps in a situation, and much more.

We are not using this program to proactively seek wrongdoing or invade privacy. DFR is used specifically to reactively respond to emergency calls for service and enhance our ability to serve you. The department’s policy for use is available online for review. To achieve transparency, we use software that automatically tracks and logs all drone flights launched by our department that are publicly available for review.

Available today is a visual representation of all drone flights within the last 30 days. We are currently working to integrate our computer aided dispatch software to provide more detailed information, such as the type of call to which the drone responded. This information is expected to be available shortly as we work to improve the transparency portal.