Drones could be sent as first responders in police trial being tested across Norfolk

• Rob Setchell went to see the drones in action

Cutting-edge plans to use drones as first responders to police emergencies have been showcased in a demonstration.

A drone, housed in a box on a nearby rooftop, was deployed to search for a man playing the role of a missing person at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich.

The demonstration on Wednesday comes as part of a national trial to establish if and how the technology could be used.

If testing is successful, the devices would be stationed on buildings and operated remotely to be sent first to scenes to give police early information.

Initial trials are taking place in Norfolk, which has limited access to the helicopters flown by the National Police Air Service because they are stationed so far away.

Supt Taryn Evans, who heads the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s drones programme, explained that during the demonstration a drone – housed in a box on top of a building, dry, charged and ready to go – was deployed.

The drone beamed back real-time imagery to an officer, who sat at a set of screens in the back of a police van parked nearby.

The drone flying was conducted under current visual line of sight rules.

Ms Evans said the trial would run in phases until 2026, and outlined potential benefits if it is taken forward.

“While we don’t anticipate it will replace any standard police response [the drone] is ready to go and can be deployed at a moment’s notice.

“Furthermore, it can fly as the crow does towards the incident which is a lot more freedom than we’d have going in cars [which] means that in theory, depending on the location of the call compared to the box, we could be overhead within seconds,” she said.

“The advantage of this is that while police resources are either preparing or making their way to the scene, we’ve already got them, and anyone in the control room, live images of what’s going on so we can best address how to respond to it.”

She said that “towns and cities will be the first application we envisage”, with the location of rooftop drone boxes based on demand and the proximity to other drones.

Asked what type of incidents the drones could help with, Ms Evans said: “It’s going to be area searches, any incident on roads, town centres, public order, night-time economy, anything like that where we would get an advantage by getting overhead and getting live images within the first two or three minutes.”

Ms Evans said it was a “really emerging field”.

“The first challenge is checking that it all works and it’s safe,” she said.

“It’s talking to the communities that we’re flying over and the regulator that manages airways above the UK to assure them that what we’re doing is carefully managed and completely professional.

“Then, it will just be a case of seeing where we apply that and whether we can get funding to roll it out.”

The trial will take a “phased approach”, she added, “based on assessing the safety of this in the first instance and the safe integration of all the technologies”.

“We’ll do that in controlled spaces first across four test sites in the UK,” Ms Evans said.

“Once we’ve got through all the testing phases of that, we would expand that to capture more data and more information on how it relates to live policing activity so we’d be looking at the next year-and-a-half completing that work and then, by 2026, hopefully having a view on whether this can be useful in towns and cities across the UK.”

Currently, police forces in England and Wales use about 400 drones that cannot be flown out of the operator’s line of sight.

Plans are in place to amend those rules to allow police operators to do so, with initial trials taking place in areas with closed-off airspace.

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