SACRED HEART, Minn. — After several years of debate and public input over the use of drones by police, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is now rapidly rising in the Twin Cities.
Using the eye in the sky is nothing new in western Minnesota, where a rural sheriff's office that is already five years into its drone use just pulled off a rescue that saved an injured man from the path of an oncoming train.
"Within five minutes (of launching the drone) we were able to spot this guy on the tracks and get that train stopped and get down there and get him immediate care," said Jeff Nelson, an investigator with the Renville County Sheriff's Office.
The call for the drone came from the Sacred Heart Fire Department on Friday morning. After responding to a vehicle rollover one mile west of town, firefighters found a car on fire but no sign of the driver.
"They thought they saw a trail from the car towards the train track nearby so they called us," said Nelson, who has been a drone pilot for the sheriff's office for the past five years. "Our drone has thermal imaging, an infrared camera, on it. I could just see an individual - like a heat signature - on the tracks that was kind of stumbling back and forth. He was about a mile from the crash site."
Nelson says they immediately requested that TC&W railroad stop any trains in the area, while officers and EMS reached the man, who had collapsed on the tracks. They later learned that there had been a train headed for that area, but stopped about two miles away thanks to the call.
"If a train is going, I mean, they are moving along and they are going to have a hard time, I would imagine, stopping if they saw him last minute," Nelson said.
According to the sheriff's office, the 37-year-old was airlifted to CentraCare Hospital in St. Cloud. The Minnesota State Patrol is investigating the crash.
That kind of rapid drone response has only recently become more available in the Twin Cities metro area.
Minneapolis and St. Paul spent the last few years weighing public comment on police drone policies, with concerns about privacy and uses in such heavily populated areas.
While St. Paul police have just begun training its own drone pilots and deploying drones in limited cases, New Brighton has been at it a bit longer.
"We just got our program up and running at the end of March," said New Brighton Police Sergeant Matt Farmer. "In the last three months, we've had just over 50 deployments."
The latest deployment happened just before our KARE11 cameras arrived for Farmer's interview on Monday.
"We were looking for an autistic juvenile male that had wandered away from his dad," he said. "Fortunately he wasn't missing long."
He says New Brighton, and all other departments, have to go through the public comment period before launching a drone program, and they also have to follow state laws governing law enforcement drone use.
While their neighbors wade through that process, he says they have already received several calls for aerial support.
Farmer: "We've been to St Paul, Maplewood, we've gone a little into Anoka County with Fridley and Columbia Heights, assisting those agencies on different search activities."
Kent Erdahl: "What would you tell members of the public who are maybe concerned, or at least want to be cautious?"
Farmer: "I understand the concern, I think some folks have this concern that big brother is going to be out there looking into their windows, flying over their yard for no reason. I understand that completely. When we did our public comment period, we had some of that, but we laid out what our program is going to do. There are certain provisions in state law that tell us what we can and can't do."
Farmer points out that drones can only be used without a search warrant in specific situations, and even then agencies are required to file their flight information with the Minnesota BCA.
In addition, he points out that New Brighton police have gone a step further and posted monthly flight logs to their website.
"That's not required by any law but that's just what we wanted to do to be transparent with the community," he said. "I would say, do your research. If nothing else, talk to your local department and see how they are using it. because in our experiences, when we have been out and about and talking with individuals and they have some questions and they are generally concerned, that quick one to two-minute conversation really alleviates all those stressors."