‘Game Changer’: Brooklyn Park Police Deploying $4.6M in Drone Tech

Brooklyn Park police will soon be deploying $4.6 million in drone technology that will give first responders additional eye-in-the-sky capacity at crime scenes and other emergencies.

The new system, which will be purchased from Axon Enterprise, Inc., will give police the ability to deploy up to 12 drones from 10 docking stations in support of emergency response.

“It’s hives of high-tech drones that are docked strategically throughout the city,” said Police Chief Mark Bruley during a Nov. 10 city council meeting. “It would be 120 seconds to any house in the city at the longest, and most of them would be about 40 seconds from the time the call came in to the time a drone was over.”

This tech is also known as a Drones as a First Responder (DFR) system, and it will bolster other recent tech purchases made by the Brooklyn Park Police Department.

Through the system, the drones are self-dispatching and autonomous, depending on the type of police call for service.

The DFR system will be integrated into a police supervised operations center. That operations center will be equipped with advanced computers that can recognize guns in video footage, connect with license plate readers and provide real-time updates to patrol officers.

Bruley called the system a “game changer” for responding to in-progress crimes.

Drones Have Non-Criminal Emergency Use

The drones can also be deployed in response to non-criminal incidents, such as a missing adult or a fire.

“A drone can fly grids all by itself and cover 10 times the distance that officers can,” Bruley said. “The drone also has ability to use heat signatures through thermal imaging to be able to find individuals in wooded areas.”

Drone footage is largely non-public and cannot be obtained through a Minnesota Data Practices Act request, unless the person making the request is the subject of the footage, according to Bruley.

Likewise, Bruley says the department will delete footage after three days unless it is part of an active criminal investigation.

A so-called transparency portal on the department’s website will publicly show flight paths, timing of flights, and the reasons for the dispatch.

The total cost of the program is $4.6 million, but that will be spread out over a 10-year period. 

Axon will replace the drones every 2.5 years.

Brooklyn Park