THUNDER BAY — Following the success of implementing drones into a variety of investigations, the Thunder Bay Police Service is expanding the program and training more officers on how to use the technology.
“By expanding it into our primary response, we’ll have it out on the road. Officers will be able to access it much quicker,” said Insp. Joe Dampier with the Thunder Bay Police Service's Primary Response Unit. “In the past we would have to call officers out who were home.”
On Wednesday, eight officers were undergoing hands-on drone training with the help of an officer with the Toronto Police Service.
Const. Tom Armstrong with the Thunder Bay Police Service Traffic Unit was one of the first officers trained to use the drones when the program was first implemented.
He said the new officers will be doing four days of flight training, as well as preparing for the Transport Canada exam and reviewing all legal requirements to operate drones.
“Today we are going to get into realistic scenarios and mock those up and put these officers through an actual scenario,” Armstrong said. “It’s a mixture of theory and hands-on training.”
Drones have a wide variety of applications in policing, including assisting in missing person searches, looking for suspects who may have fled an area, and documenting crime scenes and collisions.
Armstrong provided an example where an individual was in crisis and in a remote wooded area at night. A drone was used to locate the person and guide officers to the location to safely resolve the situation.
“It’s a really good example of using technology, coordinating with officers on the ground, using the spotlight, and using the thermal cameras to find somebody and successfully resolve that,” he said.
“Another application we use on a regular basis is crime scene documentation and collision scenes. It gives you a wonderful perspective and we can capture high quality images of an entire scene. So we can process a collision scene much faster with these and get better information than we historically were able to.”
There are now 12 officers trained to operate the six drones utilized by the Thunder Bay Police Service.
Dampier said they will assess how the program operates and consider expanding it further.
“We will roll this out and assess where we are at. If we see a need or an opportunity to expand it a little further, we may do that. But for the time being we will get the eight new officers up and running and see where we are after that,” he said.
“It’s an evolving technology as well. As we expand our program and learn all of the different applications we can utilize it in, it provides us more opportunities.”
