This City Claims To Be First In The US To Deploy New Police Drone

When you hear the word drone, there's a whole range of flying vehicles that might come to mind. Maybe it's a dirt-cheap Amazon toy that you'd buy for a kid as a Christmas present. Or it could be one of the fast, deadly, and increasingly sophisticated drones used by the military. In between that, there are a whole lot of uses for drones that fall somewhere in between being a kid's toy or a deadly military aircraft. 

On the regional and municipal levels, drones of various sizes are now being used for everything from airborne wildfire prevention to local law enforcement. The Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has recently taken to the skies with what it says is a new type of police drone that's larger and more advanced than existing law enforcement drones. Though not exclusively designed for police use, Baton Rouge's new drone more represents a new type of task for an existing Lockheed Martin drone model called the Stalker. If successful, the drone has the potential to take on a lot of the jobs currently done by manned police helicopters.

For the Baton Rouge Police Department, the big drone isn't just a new, high-tech piece of law enforcement hardware to use. Its deployment of the vehicle comes directly in response to a tragic helicopter crash that led the Department to rethink its aerial operations completely. 

In March of 2023, a Baton Rouge Police Department helicopter was on its way to assist with a police pursuit when it crashed in bad weather, killing two veteran BRPD officers. While the department and community were hit hardest by the loss of the officers, the crash also led to the city disbanding its traditional helicopter aviation unit. Not wanting to give up on vital aerial surveillance, the department decided to transition to unmanned aerial vehicles.

Fast forward nearly three years, and the BRPD has taken delivery of an Edge Autonomy/Lockheed Martin Stalker VXE30, which will serve as the flagship of its drone fleet, which now includes over 30 vehicles. Police departments around the United States have been using law enforcement drones for many years, but the VXE30 takes police drone capabilities to a new level — literally. The vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone has a 16-foot wingspan and can fly up to 400 feet in the air, which is the maximum altitude the FAA allows for this type of unmanned craft. It can stay in the air for up to four hours at a time and has a current range of 30 miles with plans to extend that to 100 miles — all of which are numbers we more associate with helicopters rather than small drones. Per Lockheed Martin, some fuel-powered versions of the Stalker can fly for up to eight hours and at altitudes up to 12,000 feet. 

The Baton Rouge Police Department says the package for the drone and all the associated training costs around one million dollars, and that the drone will be used for everything from long distance surveilance to tracking high-speed pursuits to assisting the fire department in looking for hot spots on buildings with its thermal cameras. Again, all jobs that would previously be done with a traditional manned helicopter.

With new types of both manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, the limits to their use often come down less to the capability of the aircraft itself and more to the rules over how it operates within an airspace. We've recently seen this with the planned VTOL taxi service currently trying to get off the ground in Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. The larger the vehicle gets, the higher it flies, and the more FAA procedures need to be followed. But if these types of larger, long-range police drones can be successfully implemented for everyday law enforcement use, they could potentially become a cheaper, more versatile, and safer alternative to the police helicopters currently operating over American cities.