One U.S. city has retired its traditional police aircraft and replaced them with drones, including one the department says is the first of its kind.
When you hear the word drone, there’s a whole range of flying vehicles that might come to mind. Maybe it’s a dirt-cheap Amazon toy that you’d buy for a kid as a Christmas present. Or it could be one of the fast, deadly, and increasingly sophisticated drones used by the military. In between that, there are a whole lot of uses for drones that fall somewhere in between being a kid’s toy or a deadly military aircraft.
On the regional and municipal levels, drones of various sizes are now being used for everything from airborne wildfire prevention to local law enforcement. The Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has recently taken to the skies with what it says is a new type of police drone that’s larger and more advanced than existing law enforcement drones. Though not exclusively designed for police use, Baton Rouge’s new drone more represents a new type of task for an existing Lockheed Martin drone model called the Stalker. If successful, the drone has the potential to take on a lot of the jobs currently done by manned police helicopters.
For the Baton Rouge Police Department, the big drone isn’t just a new, high-tech piece of law enforcement hardware to use.
