Within line of sight – personal issue police drones are on the horizon

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

The announcement by the Metropolitan Police Service that they are to deploy drones across all 32 London boroughs shouldn’t come as a surprise – at least not to anyone involved in providing police aerial capability.

The popular image of police air support is the ‘Blue Thunder’ model from the old TV series set in Los Angeles. The reality in the UK is very different. British police helicopters are not used to land SWAT teams, and the policing environment doesn’t yet need the advanced armed functionality of the semi-military engagements in many US police departments. The numbers underscore the differences: while the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has 17 helicopters to cover the city’s 1200 square kilometres, the National Police Air Service (NPAS) for England and Wales has just two more to cover the entire country (150, 000 square km).

When we established NPAS in West Yorkshire in 2012, air support’s principal contribution to policing was eyes in the sky. Think of the police helicopter as a flying camera platform – then the real surprise from the Met’s decision is how it’s taken so long to adopt cheaper, adaptable technology that’s already proved itself in many other fields.

Although the rotary vs fixed wing debate has rumbled on in policing for years, there are many settings in which drones offer more than either of them – and for a lot less. Examples of where uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) are already upstaging old world airframes include wide area searches of hostile terrain in Australia, traffic monitoring and incident management in Vietnam and air quality sampling in California.

Although providing an undoubtedly valuable service, the highly dispersed NPAS police fleet is very limited in both its capability and availability. Annual maintenance requirements alone are around 10 weeks per helicopter, meaning almost 20% of their time is spent in the shed while, for the remainder of the year, the reported average availability rate in response to a request last year was 65.8%. What this figure doesn’t show is the number of ‘never made’ requests where an officer knows from experience that a helicopter won’t be coming so doesn’t ask – like people who stop calling the police for the same reason.

Individual forces are beginning to use drones to tackle rural crime and patrol railway lines but emerging threats to Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) stretch far beyond the remit and reach of even national law enforcement. Immediately deployable assets are needed to protect waterways and motorways, power stations and data centres on a scale that is simply unaffordable for conventional police air cover.

Last year NPAS announced plans to work with global air systems manufacturer Schiebel on feasibility trials of UAVs to work ‘alongside’ crewed helicopters and planes for ‘Beyond the Visual Line of Sight’ (BVLOS) use cases. Schiebel’s S-100 is called a CAMCOPTER which tells you what it does, raising the question what additional functionality the £50m per year fleet of police visibility cams brings.

In the combat environment, drones are a formidable leveller; their rapid evolution has rewritten the rules of engagement as shown in conflicts in Ukraine and the Gulf. Some battlefield capabilities will be transferable to the fight against crime, functions like intelligence gathering and logistics, but the real opportunities for UAVs – particularly micro-drones – are much closer to the ground.

Small civilian drones are being fitted with mixed modality biometrics like face recognition and gait analytics to work at Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) altitudes. They can be kitted out to allow officer initiated facial recognition for confirmation of ID, and data analytics to conduct live routine checks against the wanted and worrying. Offering augmentation of situational awareness, scene recording and transmission and potential de-escalation of aggression, airborne police cameras are a natural elevation of the body worn device being widely used in law enforcement already. The British army is considering the use of autonomous robotics for close protection of soldiers; with the growing list of benefits they bring, drone-borne cameras might be equally effective as top cover for response personnel in the police and other blue light services.

Accelerated drone use will bring some new challenges for policing, particularly around data storage and sharing, anti-UAV activity plus cyber vulnerabilities and even injection attacks, however their flexibility, affordability and adaptability make them an obvious investment for local prioritisation over national mandation.

With no procurement protocols or deployment policies to slow them down, organised crime groups will have noticed how next generation drones have taken off. Terrorist organisations have deployed 3D ‘printable’ drones using commercially available components that can be adapted for dual civilian and military use for around $300-$400, making them “cheap, disposable and hard to evade” even by sophisticated military defences. Drones are increasingly being used in multi domain criminality; evolving UAV capabilities have gone beyond dropping drugs and weapons into prisons, to potentially lifting people out of them. All this means there will be a need for drone tracking and interception from police air support in the future but, if helicopters were the answer, why would the army be replacing its fleet of Wildcat scouts currently used for that purpose with UAV?

For policing, the strategic risk in further delaying the use of drones is the perennial one: being outgunned by criminal adopters of available technology. Multi capability UAVs are giving universal tactical options to both police and criminals everywhere. Until now, the approaches to police air support in the US and the UK have been very different but that’s changing. A decade ago, a policing advisor to governments in both jurisdictions told me that one day every patrol officer would have a drone. Cost, capability and competition for aerial effectiveness will probably prove him right – and that day may be much closer than we think.

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  drones  |  facial recognition  |  Fraser Sampson  |  gait recognition  |  law enforcement  |  London Metropolitan Police