GBPD, GBMFD launch Drone as First Responder program

GREEN BAY – The Green Bay Police Department (GBPD) and the Green Bay Metro Fire Department (GBMFD) officially announced the launch of its Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, featuring technology enables first responders to quickly obtain an aerial view of an emergency scene, improving situational awareness and response efficiency.

By sending a drone to the scene of a call for service, Green Bay Police Captain Tom Denny said the pilots are able to better determine the priority and severity of the call before officers get there and use the information gathered to direct the department’s response, meaning resources can be allocated more effectively.

“I’m very thankful for the people that call the police or call the fire department and tell us about a problem in the community, but obviously when you consider the telephone game and they have one perspective that’s on the ground looking one direction, there’s a lot of limitations there to the information that we get,” said Green Bay Police Captain Tom Denny said. “[The drone] doesn’t tell us everything and there’s still a lot of things we do where we need officers or firefighters on the ground to handle it, but this gives us a really good vantage point to collect some intelligence.”

Already, the drones have been utilized in more than a dozen calls resulting in several “small success stories,” according to Denny.

“Last week we had a disturbance and based on the information we had, it did not look like a high priority call whatsoever and we had other calls going on, so we didn’t immediately dispatch officers,” he said. “[The drone] showed up and we saw a kind of violent, physical disturbance in progress outside, so the DFR pilot was able to get on the radio and say, ‘This is what I see. Let’s send officers now.’”

The fire department will also benefit from the use of the drones in its response to fires and other incidents.

“If there is a crash notification on an iPhone or an accident on the interstate, it’ll be able to get there before our crews are able to to ensure we’re in the right flow of traffic or in the right lane before we allocate those resources,” said Ben Peters with GBMFD.

Both departments recently completed training to pilot four drones, which will be stationed at the City of Green Bay Department of Public Works’ east-side and west-side facilities.
Denny said each drone has the ability to fly for up to 50 minutes in a radius of 3.5 miles.

“There are a lot of really good safety features and automation features built in, but an officer always has to launch the drone…” Denny said. “If you put in an address or click a point on a map, the drone will fly where you ask it to, but an officer always needs to have their hands on the keyboard watching where the drone is going.”

The DFR program is part of an agreement with Flock Group approved by the Green Bay Common Council in December which included an amendment stipulating that the city, not the vendor, could secure the data collected and have access to the log after council members raised concerns over Flock’s data security and privacy policies.

“They maintain all the equipment and they maintain the software, but we’re the ones that operate it and we’re the ones that own all of the data,” Denny said.

Denny said the drones fly with their cameras pointed towards the horizon until they reach their destination as an added privacy measure, and residents can view a Transparency Portal for data regarding how and when the drones are being used.

“If you go in there now, you can look and see dates, times and flight paths for every single time we launched a drone…” he said. “There really don’t need to be secrets. This is something that’s going to be about effectiveness for the fire department and the police department. It’s going to help public safety outcomes.”

The DFR transparency portal is available on the GBPD website at greenbaywi.gov/1039/Inside-GBPD.

“We understand that privacy is a huge component of this being successful,” Denny said. “We want to provide the best outcomes we can, but if we’re intruding on people’s privacy to do it, that’s not acceptable… We’re using this to respond to calls for service. We’re not using this for any type of proactive surveillance activity.”