Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office to Launch Drones-as-First-Responder Program in The Woodlands

By DRONELIFE Features Editor

The Woodlands, Texas, a master-planned suburban development about 30 miles north of Houston, is joining the growing list of communities that are coming under the watchful eye of police agencies’ drones-as-first-responders programs.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s office, which patrols The Woodlands, plans to have its DFR program operational by the end of the year, Lt. Scott Spencer told DroneLife in an email statement.

“Initial incident responses and tests with the equipment should be starting by the end of October,” he said. Spencer added that much of the timeline for implementing the program would depend on the sheriff’s department ability to secure regulatory approval from the FAA, as the department develops the best risk-mitigation strategies to earn a full beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver.

“Drones-as-First Responder is a transformative method of policing that allows the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office to remotely pilot drones to respond to 911 calls. This unique aerial perspective will allow us to rapidly gather additional information about a public safety call for service,” Spencer said.

Initial plans for the program call for deploying one drone and its docking station at the sheriff’s office substation in The Woodlands. The drone will be able to respond to calls in a predetermined area focused around The Woodlands Town Center. Based on the success of this initial pilot program, the sheriff’s office could decide to expand DFR service to other areas of the fast-growing county.

The Drone will be operated using software developed by Austin-based DroneSense, Spencer said.

“DroneSense Remote software, when used in conjunction with sensors onboard the aircraft, will allow a hybrid of autonomous, and first-person-view operations. A pilot who holds an FAA Remote Pilot certificate will be in control of the aircraft at all stages of flight,” he said.

The software will give the remote pilot the ability to view visual images from the aircraft in real time. In addition, the video stream can also be provided to units on the ground or to the sheriff department’s Real Time Crime Center (RTCC). This is expected to provide greater situational awareness to the sheriff’s department, allowing supervisory personnel to better determine the level of resources that should be dedicated to handle evolving incidents.

Spencer said the DFR program could serve to provide eyes in the sky in response to a wide variety of incidents, in which a person’s life is at risk, such as fires, welfare checks, assaults in progress, weapons calls or reports of missing persons. Other types of incidents that could trigger a DFR response include: traffic accidents, reports of stolen vehicles, thefts or burglaries in progress and business burglar alarms.

In addition, the DFR program could be used when there are specific grounds to believe that a drone could help gather evidence related to a specific criminal act, or whenever the sheriff’s office receives public safety requests from other law enforcement agencies, fire departments or emergency medical service agencies.

The sheriff’s office currently holds four FAA certification of authorization (COA) waivers authorizing BVLOS flights. These authorize First Responder BVLOS and Tactical BVLOS, which allow flights beyond the visual line of sight under strict conditions, generally with a visual observer. The sheriff’s office will use its First Responder BVLOS to operate its DFR Program until the department receives its Full BVLOS waiver, Spencer said.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s department has had a long history with drone operations. It began its first drone program in 2011 with a Vanguard Defense Industries’ Shadowhawk. The sheriff’s office was the first local law enforcement agency in the state to receive an FAA Certificate of Airworthiness for UAS flights.

Currently, the sheriff’s office operates a fleet of 16 drones, largely comprising DJI models including Mavic Enterprise 2 and Mavic Enterprise 3 and Matrice M30T as well as an Autel Evo II. The department regularly uses its UAVs for numerous patrol-level operations such as search and rescue, fire response, and crime scene reconstruction.

The department also has six DJI Avatas which are used in tactical operations with its SWAT team. It recently acquired a DJI Dock 2 and DJI Matrice 3TD for use in its DFR program.

With 16 of its officers FAA-certified as Remote Pilots and another 20 officers currently in the process of becoming certified, the county operates one of the largest public safety drone programs in the Lone Star State. For most of these pilots, drone operations are considered as a collateral duty, with their primary job being patrol deputy or detective, although they have received additional training to be able to operate a county drone.

Program to address privacy concerns

As police agencies across the country embrace DFR programs, some critics have raised the possibility that such programs could impact the privacy rights of residents.

In an email statement, Savannah Kumar, staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas, criticized such programs as “costly gimmicks that waste resources,” and that have the potential of allowing police agencies to spy on their citizens from above. “The bottom line is that the police should not have this unchecked ability to monitor our every movement.”

However, Spencer said the sheriff’s office DFR program will include safeguards to protect the privacy rights of community members.

“Drones responding to incidents will have their cameras positioned to face the horizon during transit, preventing the inadvertent capture of private property. Upon arriving at the scene, the camera will only be directed at the incident location, and every effort will be made to avoid capturing unnecessary footage of private residences or individuals,” he said.

He added that the sheriff’s office has worked closely with other agencies, including the Pearland Police Department, which had consulted with the ACLU in forming the policies of its own well-established drone program, to ensure that the Montgomery County DFR program balances public safety with the privacy rights of members of the community.

In addition, he said the drones would be clearly marked with the word “Sheriff” for public identification, and they will be equipped with Remote ID technology to broadcast their location to the FAA.

“These safeguards ensure that the public remains aware of drone operations and that the program operates transparently and lawfully,” he said.

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.