Montgomery County adds drone to arsenal

For local police departments who do not have a helicopter unit or cannot afford one, small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are quickly becoming a cheap solution.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas recently purchased the ShadowHawk, a small remote controlled helicopter manufactured by Vanguard Defense Industries.

“The sheriff’s office has no air patrol unit,” said Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel. “To have an aircraft we can deploy quickly when we need it seems to be an appropriate means of equipment and technology. It’s something that will be able to protect our personnel on the ground and the public.”

The ShadowHawk is used primarily to give officers a “bird’s eye view” of crime scenes, search and rescues, and large-scale emergencies, McDaniel explained.

In response to criticism that drones violate privacy, McDaniel brushed aside those concerns stating that the sheriff’s department had no time to use the drone to gather intelligence on residents.

“We’re not about spying on the residents of this county. We are about putting criminals in jail and putting a stop to criminal activity,” McDaniel said. “We have better things to do, and spying is not our role.”

The $300,000 drone was purchased with the help of a DHS grant and is operated remotely by a laptop computer with a video game-like controller.

The drone can stay in the air for about an hour and is equipped with a camera as well as infrared sensors.

McDaniels said the drone is also used to help search for missing persons.

“It will have specific missions. Certainly we will use it to locate lost individuals in wooded areas. That can be an elderly autism patient or someone lost in the National Forest, which is in the northeast corner of the county,” McDaniel said. “This would be a much more efficient use of time and resources when you can launch an aircraft and search from the sky rather than get a bunch of people together and search on foot, horseback, or ATV.”