When someone calls 911 on Madison’s west side, a drone could soon start arriving before a police officer does. That’s if the Madison Police Department is able to secure a $200,000 federal grant to test a pilot program using drones as first responders.

The city’s finance committee Tuesday night, with no discussion, recommended approval of the grant if received; the measure was introduced Oct. 6 and the city council is expected to vote on it Oct. 20.

Under the potential pilot program, which would run two years with a one-year extension option, a drone stationed in the West District parking lot would be sent to some outdoor calls at the same time patrol officers are dispatched.

Three-quarters of the grant would cover the cost of leasing and housing one drone, with the remaining $50,000 covering officer overtime.

“Drones when utilized correctly are a powerful de-escalation tool that will make Madison safer,” Assistant Chief Matt Tye said in a Sept. 28 memo to alders, noting that the technology lets officers slow down, collect information before they arrive, and keep their distance if needed.

But it would be a significant expansion of the department’s drone usage. MPD started using drones in 2017; it now has 11. Tye tells Isthmus he’s aware there are concerns.

“I get it…people are worried about surveillance,” he says, but cautions that police would only fly the drone to specific calls rather than using it to patrol neighborhoods. The department’s existing standard operating procedure prevents using drones for random surveillance, or to harass or target individuals.

The police department submitted its grant application this summer under a federal COPS grant, a community policing grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice. Funding is expected to go towards such things as combating human trafficking, child exploitation, gang activity, or “illegal squatting.”

It's the first time the same grant has also listed unmanned aerial surveillance as a funding option, says Scott Reitmeier, a department lieutenant who manages the drone program. 

The police department is seeking council approval months after the grant’s Aug. 24 deadline. “It is desirable but not mandatory to seek city council approval before applying for a grant. In this case, time did not permit MPD to seek council approval before applying for this grant,” says MPD spokeswoman Stephanie Fryer.

The department has had success with the COPS program before, says Jim Powell, the police department’s grants manager. In the past, awards have been announced by the end of the fiscal year of Sept. 30.

This time, Powell says it’s unclear when the grant decision will be announced: “The current administration has not followed past practices in any way. My best guess is early next year,” he adds.

If Madison gets the money, it would set up in the West District, which stretches about 25 square miles. Tye and Reitmeier say the distrct was chosen through elimination: restrictions on flying over the Dane County Airport ruled out basing the program out of the North or East Districts. The South District’s call volume is too low, the Central District is already “compressed,” and the Midtown District has many service calls inside buildings where drones cannot fly. In other words, the West District was the Goldilocks option, and proved just right.

“The sheer real estate of the West District makes it a good option,” says Reitmeier, as officers already have further to go to get to calls. The commander of the West District, Captain Dan Nale, is also captain of the SWAT team, which uses drones.

The West District’s building, though, is not a good fit for housing the drone on the roof — the expense of installing security beams and renting a crane to install the drone port ate away at the grant. So instead, the drone and its landing pod will be housed in a trailer parked in the district’s parking lot. The drone will be manually dispatched.

The drone, manufactured by Seattle-based BRINC Drones, would be leased by MPD from Chicago-based Motorola Solutions. Per city of Madison rules limiting surveillance technology, the drone would not be equipped with license plate detection, facial recognition, walking pattern detection, or gunshot alert/detections, confirms Fryer.

It would be equipped to fly in all weather situations, and the drone will be busy — capable of traveling in a 3-mile radius around the West District.

 “We’re going to try and send it to every call we can,” Reitmeier says, in an effort to create a large dataset to test the usefulness of the technology, fulfill grant reporting requirements, and report back to city leaders at the end of the program.

Down the line, the program could set the stage for Madison police to ask to fund a permanent version of the program. Reitmeier says that several years ago, he engaged a contractor to see how much it would cost to use drones as first responders citywide. They estimated the cost at over $6 million for three autonomous drones spaced across the city.

When the MPD first launched its drone program, then Assistant Chief Vic Wahl cautioned that they’d have a limited application: “Our [standard operating procedure] is going to be very limited in how we deploy these things. There are going to be specific incidents where we use them and if it's outside those, we aren’t going to use them.” 

The department has a policy outlining how unmanned aircraft systems can be used: in search and rescue operations, aerial documentation of crime scenes, public safety operations and crowd situations, and “other circumstances as approved by the Chief of Police or their designee.”

All of the officers who operate the department’s 11 drones are FAA certified. With rare exceptions, drones are only permitted outside. Tye and Reitmeier point out they can be especially useful in detecting heat signatures when, for example, a victim is buried in a bad crash, or a person eluding police has jumped in potentially-fatal cold water.

Yet Madison lags behind the potential applications of all kinds of trending tech in policing, says Tye, who adds that the use of AI, and drone-as-first-responder technology, are the hottest issues in policing nationally.

“We’re never first on technology,” he says, but points out encouraging results from other departments — like in Montgomery County, in Maryland, which just concluded the nation’s first randomized control trial study of “drone as first responder” programs.

The study looked at 652 drone flights over five months, and according to initial findings, drones arrived on scene before an officer nearly half the time. Drones arrived an average of 4.6 minutes after a call came in, compared to 12.3 minutes for patrol officers to arrive. Drones also “determined” that an in-person response wasn’t needed nearly a fifth of the time.

The final report is still being written by Scott Mourtgos, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina who was a police officer in Salt Lake City, Utah, for 20 years.

“It’s all encouraging,” Tye says of the study, and the “data looks promising,” while cautioning that the Montgomery County community is much larger than Madison. Testing whether that technology would make sense for Madison is precisely the point of the pilot program. In the meantime, he's the urging the city to support it.

“The drone is not going to go up and start looking around for trouble. It’s not going to go hang out at a park where we’ve had a lot of calls lately. This will be dispatched to a specific call that an officer would have been going to anyway. It’ll be a case-by-case, call-by-call deployment,” says Tye.

“I encourage our community and our elected officials to be open to investigating and exploring new technology and studying it, and then making the determination after.”