What Drones Mean For Police and Public Trust

Every local law enforcement agency deals with challenges unique to its own community. When determining how best to keep people safe, managing resources effectively is among the most important objectives.

Drones have given local police departments a new tool to combat the problems they encounter on a daily basis. However, as a new technology, their use is as varied as each community in which they are deployed.

“They’re using drones in extraordinarily different ways. What I’ve found is that no two agencies are exactly the same in the way they’re deploying their assets, but there is a common thread,” Ryan Bracken, Vice President of Customer Success and Chief Information Security Officer at DroneSense said.

Bracken spent more than a decade with the FBI before transitioning to the private sector, where he now helps implement drones to improve public safety.

While drones provide a very useful resource for officers, they must be careful to communicate their benefit to locals in order to maintain trust.

“You now have a 4K camera flying around in the sky. It just exaggerates those fears that people have that they’re going to be spied on,” Bracken said.

Police departments and the communities they serve must continue to work through trust and privacy concerns for drones to make the sensible impact they are capable of if implemented correctly.