That enabled approval for the program to be granted in just days when previously it could take up to a year.
Some 50 agencies started drone programs between 2018 and 2024, said Charles Werner, a retired Charlottesville, Virginia, fire chief who founded DRONERESPONDERS, an advocacy group that promotes responsible drone use, and now "a handful of departments per week" are adopting it, said Divy Shrivastava, CEO of Paladin Drones, a drones as first responders manufacturer.
Law enforcement and drone industry leaders praise the technology as lifesaving, with the potential to significantly aid police in incidents ranging from missing persons cases to active shooters.
But critics are concerned the programs encourage mass surveillance and violate the public's privacy.
"When you have a camera in the sky that can see things that police officers can't normally see, that offers a huge potential for privacy invasion," said Beryl Lipton, a senior researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.
The drones serve as an "eye in the sky," police explain, streaming footage to officers before they enter a potentially dangerous situation to give the cops vital tools in one of the hardest aspects of policing.
They are different from the tactical drones long used by police departments, drone experts told the Post. Unlike some earlier drones, the drone first responders can be launched from docks around a city and controlled from inside police stations. They don't need to be within the line of sight of an officer, which is why they require a special waiver from the FAA as part of a regulatory process meant to prevent collisions and other dangers.
The drones can arrive on the scene of emergencies far quicker than squad cars, with, for example, in Redmond, Washington, drones reaching the scene before an officer about 75% of the time they're deployed.
But there are concerns among critics, who say drone first responders can encourage police intrusion in places they couldn't normally observe.
"Drones and aerial cameras could be used to surveil political protests, and it could even be deployed for other purposes to see who is seeking health care in California from another state, or used to track who's coming and going at an immigration courthouse," Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told the Post. "So the idea that we should all be assured that law enforcement is just saying, ‘Don't worry, it's only for a narrow purpose' flies in the face of what's happened historically."
Privacy advocates say police departments may promise to use the drones to respond to calls for only service or certain types of emergencies, but once the technology is out of the bottle, it will be hard to put it back in.
Independent oversight bodies and local government could help assuage some of the concerns by imposing strict limits on the programs, said Jay Stanley, a privacy and technology policy analyst at the ACLU, emphasizing that "this is really a brand new technology, and the jury is still out on it."