Drones May Start Responding to 911 Calls in The Woodlands

Drones could soon take on a new role in The Woodlands Township, responding to 911 calls ahead of first responders.

Leaders of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office see the drone pilot program as a way to beat traffic congestion and get to calls quicker, but critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union have raised privacy concerns about similar programs in other cities.

The use of drones isn’t new to Montgomery County, said Samuel Harrison, a specialist with the sheriff’s office. The agency uses them for search and rescue operations and to assist surrounding agencies, he said.

The Drones as First Responder program would expand on this use by providing a “cost-efficient way” for the agency to get support in the sky and respond to 911 calls quicker as the county continues to grow.

Lt. Scott Spencer said Montgomery County’s fast growth poses a challenge for leaders and the general public when infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the population.

As of July 1, 2023, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the county’s population to be 711,354. In 2022, the population was 679,554 and in 2021 it was 650,755.

The program has become popular with law enforcement agencies around the country.

In 2018, the Chula Vista Police Department in California was the first department to kick-start a similar program after the Federal Aviation Administration began offering waivers for flying beyond visual sight, opening up the possibility of longer flights, remote operation, and more efficient and expansive fleets, according to a report by the MIT Technology Review.

Other agencies followed suit, including the Pearland Police Department, which began its drone program in 2023.

Privacy concerns have been raised about drone programs in law enforcement. In a 10-page letter published in 2023, American Civil Liberties Union Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley said these drone programs could lead to the public feeling more uneasy than “the sense of safety and well-being that people want to feel when they're in their homes and communities.”

“The Constitution doesn’t normally permit warrantless surveillance where people have a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy,’ but abuses do occur, and when they do, people naturally become paranoid,” Stanley wrote in his letter, giving examples of instances where people, in the privacy of their own homes, could be mistakenly seen as committing a crime.

Savannah Kumar, attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said the state group also has concerns about the drone program.

“We have previously raised serious privacy concerns about the Drones as First Responder program,” said Kumar. “These programs require careful scrutiny, as they tend to be costly gimmicks that waste resources, infringe on individual rights, and lead to concerning shifts in policing practices. Our communities deserve better than to have our tax dollars pay for unnecessary police machinery to spy on us from above. We need more transparency around this proposal, but the bottom line is that the police should not have this unchecked ability to monitor our every movement.”

When asked about privacy concerns in 2023, the Pearland Police Department told the Houston Chronicle that it based its policies for the drone program on legal precedents and would place restrictions on surveillance technology to only emergency-response situations.

“We understand the importance of privacy and have taken significant steps to ensure that the (Drones as First Responder) program is used in a manner that respects individual privacy rights," Spencer said about the sheriff’s office program. “We have worked closely with other agencies, including the Pearland Police Department, which consulted with the American Civil Liberties Union to ensure their policies, and in turn ours, balance public safety with privacy rights.”

Drones responding to incidents are expected to face their cameras toward the horizon during transit, preventing the inadvertent capture of private property, Spencer said. Upon arriving at a scene, the camera will only be directed at the incident location and efforts will be made to avoid capturing “unnecessary footage of private residents or individuals,” he said.

As for capturing photos and video, operators of each drone are instructed not to document an incident until they arrive on scene.

Other steps are expected to be taken by the agency as a way to be transparent with the public, such as making each drone identifiable as the agency’s drone, logging each flight and making it publicly available on the agency’s website for anyone to view the details of each flight.

The sheriff’s office already keeps a log of when and where deputies operate a drone.

The agency plans to launch its program in The Woodlands and eventually expand to more areas in the county, Spencer said. A launch date has not been announced.

According to documents provided to The Woodlands Township, the new program will cost more than $400,000. This includes funding for deputy drone specialists, vehicle and drone equipment, and a surveillance subscription. County commissioners approved funds for the agency to purchase a dock-based drone and an aircraft detection system, Harrison said.

During a township budget workshop in August, the board of directors agreed to spend $20,000 for the new specialists.

The drone program costs much less than a helicopter, Spencer said.

“These other large agencies have very large, expensive helicopters ... in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars to maintain,” he said, noting that drones would be able to respond to the same calls that a helicopter would, such as an officer-involved shooting or a missing person.

“This is the same concept, if there’s one of those types of calls.”

The Woodlands was chosen for the pilot program because of population density, Harrison said.

“There’s a lot of commercial, public space and foot traffic,” he said, noting the amount of shopping centers, businesses and The Woodlands Mall. “You have, one, a lot of vehicle traffic, which reduces response time, and two, people out walking around.”

If funding is approved, a drone would be docked on a rooftop in The Woodlands, Harrison said. When a 911 call is made, or if an officer asked for assistance, the drone would then respond.

“It won't be doing any patrols,” he said. “It’ll primarily just be to respond to 911 calls and provide that ‘eye in the sky’ with very rapid response time.”

Harrison said a drone might respond to a report of a person using a weapon, an injured person needing immediate assistance or a burglary. Agencies that have launched similar programs have seen response times drop to 60 to 80 seconds from when calls come in, he said.

“If we can get a drone overhead in 60 to 80 seconds, we can start feeding information and even a live video feed to the other officers that are responding, so we have more information,” he said.

The sheriff’s office hopes to make more progress on the program by the end of the year, Harrison said.

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