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“That scenario, where [accident investigators] can do their measurements in just a few minutes – that’s got major implications in the next five or ten years,” said Ben Miller, director of research and development at Colorado’s Department of Public Safety.

Drone usage is also on the rise in crime scene investigations and reconstructions.

“You’d never ask for a million dollar satellite for a homicide investigation, but if you can put a drone up in the air for $25 or $30 bucks, it’s more than worth it,” said Miller, a law enforcement drone pioneer who flew the devices for the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department, which was one of the nation's first law enforcement agencies to incorporate drones into their department's work.

“Like a lot of law enforcement agencies, our first thoughts were, ‘Cool! Let’s use it for tactical missions -- for chasing bad guys across the county,’” Miller told Reuters in 2013.

“But the reality is you’ll have a mission like that once or twice a year,” he said. “The real utility of unmanned aerial systems is not the sexy stuff. It’s the crime scene and accident reconstruction.”

'Wait and see'

More than 900 public safety agencies are currently operating drones, according to a recent study by Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone. The center estimates that the number of public safety agencies using drones has spiked 82 percent in the past year.

Normally, the nation's largest police departments, including the NYPD and the Los Angeles Police Department are leaders in policing innovations but drones are a unique type of law enforcement tool -- and experts say there is good reason for a department like the NYPD to proceed with caution in creating their own drone program.

“Some of the big [police] departments have taken a wait-and-see approach, especially if you’ve got areas that service large, dense populations it can be beneficial for the department [to wait], because there can be a lot more pushback” from the public, said Dan Schwarzbach, executive director of the Airborne Public Safety Association, a non-profit that supports and promotes the use of drones among public safety agencies.

The Seattle Police Department scuttled it's nascent drone program in 2013 after an outcry from Seattle residents concerned about unlawful surveillance and other privacy issues. Those fears of intrusive surveillance have subsided, to some degree, in recent years, experts said.

“Seattle was one of the first to go out and put the time and the effort and the personnel capital into training and certification back when it was still pretty new, and they got pushback from citizens, had to end the program, and ended up donating the drones they bought to the [Los Angeles Police Department], where I believe they ended up in a closet somewhere.”

Still, Schwarzbach said, the rate of law enforcement adoption of drones is rapidly increasing due to innovation, falling price points and a gradually more accepting attitude towards responsible drone use among much of the public.

“I’ve got [airborne rescue] success stories coming in all the time, and for every one helicopter or airplane public safety success story, I get ten UAS success stories,” he said, using industry terminology for drones.

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