Santa Fe police officially launch Drone as a First Responder program

Santa Fe police have officially launched a Drone as a First Responder program, Interim Chief Ben Valdez said this week. The program lets officers deploy drones from city docking centers before arriving at a scene, helping in pursuits and missing-person cases across the city.

Valdez told KRQE that as of Monday, the program is fully operational. He said the department tested the drones for several months before a soft launch earlier this month.

During Fiestas and the Zozobra event, the drones supported officers for the first time, according to Valdez. One early call involved a horse loose in the streets, a situation he called a recipe for disaster.

“We utilized the drone and our motorized officers to make sure that they could provide him safe passage until we could get some cowboys up there to get the horse reigned in,” Valdez said.

Staff are now assigned to a real-time operations center. The department has flown drones from patrol cars for years, but only after officers reached a scene.

Now, drones launch remotely and reach calls minutes ahead of officers, Valdez said. The aerial view gives officers in the field better information about suspects’ whereabouts.

“We’ve had a lot of great use cases where if we didn’t have that drone available, an offender who committed a crime otherwise would not have been apprehended,” Valdez said.

The program has also helped crack down on people riding ATVs on trails, he said. Drones have aided shoplifting cases too, giving field officers updates on suspects as they move.

“Those are just some great cases with the crimes that have been occurring where again, if we didn’t have that asset, we would’ve likely not made contact with the offender,” Valdez said.

From last week through this week, at least one arrest has been made per day with drone help, according to Valdez.

“We’re allowing our folks to have a bit more time to organize and make a safe apprehension of that person, which has been invaluable to us,” Valdez said.

The Santa Fe City Council approved more than $430,000 in funding last month for the police contract with Axon to cover the drones.