The mission of our Drone-as-First-Responder (DFR) Program is to provide the fastest and safest possible air support to our city’s first responders in a responsible and transparent manner. Our goals are to increase safety, reduce response times, and increase our effectiveness and efficiency. Drones have become a critical tool to provide a birds-eye view of an incident for ground personnel, searching for missing persons, determining appropriate next steps in a situation, and much more.

We are not using this program to proactively seek wrongdoing or invade privacy. DFR is used specifically to reactively respond to emergency calls for service and enhance our ability to serve the community. To achieve transparency we use software that automatically tracks and logs all drone flights launched by our department and will make those flights publicly available for review through this portal.