Eyes in the sky: Montgomery County police expand and upgrade their fleet of drones

As the burglar climbed onto a Bethesda home’s porch and through a second-story window, a Montgomery County police drone hovered nearby.

Now the suspect in that break-in last summer and a string of others is serving a 15-year prison sentence.

Evidence provided by the drone was “invaluable” in securing a conviction, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said in a social media post.

Since police launched the county’s Drone as First Responder Program in late 2023, they have dispatched drones to more than 5,000 calls for service.

Now the department’s leaders are upgrading the program to expand its coverage area, improve response times and allow drones to deploy from a central location, they said at a demonstration and press conference on Tuesday.

“These enhancements are about one thing — getting our first responders the most accurate information faster so that they can make safer and more informed decisions,” said Police Chief Marc Yamada.

But watchdog groups are raising concerns about the technology, saying it will target minority groups, infringe on privacy rights and cost taxpayers too much.

Police until recently have used four drones to respond to 911 calls and to help officers already on scene of an incident. With the new drone system, manufactured by California-based Skydio Inc., police will have 12.

Unlike the current drones, the new ones do not need a rooftop pilot, but will be controlled from the County’s Joint Operations Center in Gaithersburg.

That means that police can have 24/7 access to drones said Police Capt. Tony Galladora, who directs the department’s operational intelligence division.

The older drone program, while successful, was “labor intensive.”

“We had to have contractors on the roof,” he said. “They had to change the batteries. They had to upload video evidence, perform maintenance on-site, while maintaining visual observations of the drone while in flight.”

The new fleet of smaller, lighter and quieter drones will allow police to cover about 85 square miles off the 500-square-mile county, compared with about 30 for the older drones. They can reach the scene of an incident 75% faster on average than a squad car, police said.

Like the older drones, they will not use facial recognition technology and do not have microphones.

But that doesn’t reassure those who fear drones will be misused.

Drone concerns

Robert Landau, with the Silver Spring Justice Coalition, a grassroots organization that formed in 2018, said the police’s drone program is unproven and called for an independent study to determine its worth.

“What we don’t want to see is excessive policing in minority communities,” he said.

The Justice Center studied the drone program’s first full year of operation through the police’s drone dashboard website and concluded that it did not give a complete description of the role drones played in preventing crimes or apprehending suspects, he said.

Every drone dispatch is documented on the dashboard that describes the flight and the reason for it.

“We do not actively patrol or use [drones] in a surveillance capacity,” Galladora said.

Police did not provide the cost of the new system by publication time, but Galladora said it’s similar to the outgoing one. The department recently hired three full-time professional drone pilots, he said, and has about 30 officers who are also capable of flying drones.

Police said they use drones most often for alleged thefts and larcenies, assaults, trespassing, burglaries and rescues efforts with the county’s fire department.

They have shared examples of drones in action across the county on social media. In one video, a drone flying over Silver Spring on June 11 tracks a theft suspect who was later arrested in a parking lot as he entered his vehicle.

“We saw you on the drone,” an officer tells the man during his arrest.

In another video, from June 24, police sent out a drone after a report of suspects throwing rocks at a train near Wisteria Drive in Germantown. The drone shone a spotlight, prompting them to disperse and, according to the video, precluding the need for officers to respond to the scene.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union said the increasing reliance on drones by police should spur lawmakers to place limits on their use.

“Technology advances like self-docking drones, longer flight times, and more powerful cameras and other sensors all make drones an even more powerful surveillance technology than they already are,” he said in a statement.

The upgrades are happening in phases, police said.

The first phase includes downtown Silver Spring, White Oak, the Gaithersburg and Montgomery Village area, and Germantown, which is already operational. The department expects to complete equipment replacement in the Wheaton and Bethesda areas during the summer.

This story has been updated.