Walker County, Alabama (WBRC) – The Walker County Sheriff’s Office has a new tool to help with search and rescue cases. It’s a new $16,000 drone camera called the SkyDio X2E.
The department said it was another pair of eyes, but from the sky. The department already has a helicopter and aviation team, but they say the new drone can be launched into the air in seconds, giving them a quicker view of a scene.
“The drone was a little faster,” said TJ Armstrong, public information officer for the Walker County Sheriff’s Department. “It didn’t take much time to get it out.”
It only takes seconds to start, but instantly provides the Walker County Sheriff’s Office with better crime scene visuals.
“There’s a lot of rural areas in the county, a lot of sparsely populated areas, so keeping our eyes open can really allow us to see things that we might not be able to see with our boots on the ground,” Armstrong said.
The department used to have to borrow drones from other agencies, but now, they can use the new technology in-house.
“With FLIR technology, which is thermal imaging, it allows us to look for objects that are hotter and hotter than other objects around them,” Armstrong said. “This allows us to find people in the woods or fields, or even in the dark, that we might not be able to find normally.”
These features make it critical in search and rescue cases, Armstrong said.
“It can find jailbreakers,” he said. “Gathering evidence from the air, shooting video, and mapping crime scenes, it can monitor county jails and crowd control events.”
It’s also helpful at a time when the department is dealing with staffing shortages and busy phone volumes, Armstrong said.
“A lot of times, we don’t have enough manpower to put boots on the ground and look for a missing child or person in a wooded area or something like that,” Armstrong said. “Having a drone really reduces that.”
The Kavaco Resource Conservation and Development Board approved a grant for the Walker County Sheriff’s Office search and rescue drone.
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