Photo: The State
Two local police departments in South Carolina recently unveiled the latest additions to their arsenal of law enforcement tools — remote controlled mini helicopters.
The helicopters were custom built by officers from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the Columbia Police Department, and will be used by both. Deputy Marcus Kim, who built the Sheriff’s aircraft and will pilot the vehicle, said, “It’s pretty amazing what you can see from the sky.”
These small helicopters are equipped with cameras and will allow police officers to conduct aerial surveillance, search for missing persons, or monitor dangerous situations from a distance. The remote controlled vehicles cost about twenty-five cents in electricity to charge the battery and less than $4,000 to purchase, far cheaper than full size helicopters which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain, operate, and fuel. Batteries can last for up to forty minutes, and help it run silently making it ideal for discrete surveillance.
The helicopters were bought with funds raised from the sale of seized assets. “It does everything a helicopter does, but it’s very quiet. It can get up there in the sky, so it’s just a dot, for covert surveillance,” Sheriff Lott said. He added, “It can fly so high in the air that you’re not going to really see it or hear it.”
The mini helicopters can fly up to fifty miles per hour, and are equipped with high resolution cameras with zoom capabilities that are fed back to mobile command centers. Sheriff Lott sought to ease privacy concerns by reiterating the fact that the drones cannot fly for very long and would only be deployed for special missions.
“This is only going to be used for special operations that we’ll have a mission for. Its flight time is not that long where we can just take it and fly it around, so it’ll have a particular mission. So just to ride around looking for something with this particular aircraft is not going to happen,” he said.
Source: Homeland Security News Wire
This story shows that many small law enforcement offices have almost no money, but a high need for UAV. I applaud them for rigging their own RC helicopter. It also looks like all they need is a RC, not a UAV.