Wilmington Police Department officers train with high-tech drones
NEW HANOVER COUNTY (WWAY) — The Wilmington Police Department showed WWAY its new crime-fighting technology on Wednesday.
This is the DJI Avata, a small, agile drone with motion control and a super-wide 4K camera.
It’s just one of several drone models used by the Wilmington Police Department, deployed for indoor searches to clear buildings and for responding to barricaded subjects.
“We’re more or less just practicing with the drones, putting ones up,” said Brendan McInerney.
Corporal Brendan McInerney oversees the WPD traffic unit and was one of the officers training on Wednesday.
He says sessions like this give officers hands-on experience in operating and piloting the drones so they’re ready when real calls come in.
“A lot of what we used on today is we work out some of the kinks that you might run into, and if you’re trying to use it for an immediate operation on the street, it’s a challenge if you run into technical difficulty,” said McInerney.
The department also uses drones equipped with thermal imaging to locate suspects or missing persons, and a tethered drone that can provide overhead surveillance to improve situational awareness for officers on the ground.
The technology has already proven useful, including during the Independence Mall evacuation around Christmas, when drones helped track four suspects who drove and ran from the scene.
But Kim Breeden, the department’s Unmanned Aerial System Program Manager, says the drones are for more than just enforcement.
“We’re utilizing these for search and rescue, to help locate missing persons, outdoor crime scenes; we are using them on fire scenes, to help navigate firefighters straight to the fire source so we can see through the smoke,” said Breeden.
Breeden says at the end of the day, it’s about adding another layer of safety and support.
“We’re just able to give them just an extra tool in the toolbox is what we are,” said Breeden.
The UAS teams hope to implement a new program soon that would allow stationed drones to deploy without an officer on scene, able to gather vital information before officers even arrive.
