A Fairfax County police pilot program that uses drones to gather initial information in emergencies continues to grow after receiving overwhelmingly positive returns.
Launched in fall 2025, the “Drone as First Responder” program features specially-outfitted drones that are deployed and remotely piloted to the location where an emergency is reported.
Staff in the Real Time Crime Center then relay what they see to officers headed to the scene, allowing for a quicker response to incidents, members of Fairfax County Police Department told the Board of Supervisors’ Safety and Security Committee last week (Feb. 24).
First responder drones have been first to arrive at the scene in more than 70% of their first 100 missions, averaging a response time of less than 90 seconds, according to data presented to the committee.
“Our goal in this program is to have a negative response time to an emergency in our community,” Assistant Police Chief Bob Blakely said. “We hope to achieve integration with our 911, so that when keywords are mentioned like ‘gun,’ ‘shot,’ [and] ‘fire,’ the technology is automatically saying ‘we should start a drone now.'”
The drones, which can fly 200 to 400 feet high, are equipped with a thermal camera and night sense technology that allows for navigation in near complete darkness, along with a spotlight or speaker.
Maj. Hudson Bull, who leads the FCPD’s technology integration projects, highlighted multiple instances in which the drones have made an impact, including a recent incident where a man allegedly threatened people with a baseball bat.
“Thanks to the immediate response of the drone, police officers maintained a visual location of the man during the entire incident, so officers could plan a safe and measured approach to take the man into custody without utilizing additional resources,” he said.
The program is currently in the midst of its second phase, which will see drone docking stations added in more locations. Plans are in place to feature 18 different locations based on calls for service data, with each drone able to fly within 2 miles of their home base.
Additional expansions could also be on the horizon, including a more robust integration with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department.
“We’ve taken this concept and made it a whole public safety program,” Blakely said. “By sitting down early with our partners in Fire and Rescue, we recognized that there was significant value in using drones to fly as first responders — not only for police, but for the fire and rescue space.”
There are no local ordinances in place restricting the deployment of such drones. The only restrictions in place come under state law, which dictates that unmanned aircraft may only be used without a warrant in cases of “life safety,” Blakely said.
Blakely noted that, in the future, he hopes the department could use the drones to aid responses to more types of crime, such as commercial burglaries.
“There would be nothing better than to have a drone overhead to say ‘I have a hot vehicle in the back of the building,’ or ‘ there’s somebody coming out of the doors’ to inform our police officers as to their response,” he said.
