By the end of February, the Montgomery County police department is expected to launch the long-awaited use of drones in downtown Bethesda to help officers and emergency crews responding to service calls, according to a department official.
The launch of the Drone as First Responder program will come more than seven months after the department announced in July it was preparing to deploy the drone program in Bethesda. At the time, police said the program, which now currently operates in Wheaton, downtown Silver Spring and Gaithersburg, would be operating by the end of August in Bethesda.
“We’re really excited to get it going,” Capt. Nicolas Picerno, director of the department’s Special Operations Division, told Bethesda Today on Monday. “I know people have been eagerly anticipating that we would start this fourth site.”
According to police, the drone program will cover Bethesda’s central business district, including the corridors of Wisconsin and Connecticut avenues, Friendship Heights, Somerset and Chevy Chase.
The launch of the Bethesda drone program has been highly anticipated by residents and county elected officials, who included funding for expanding the drone program to downtown Bethesda and Gaithersburg as part of the fiscal year 2025 county operating budget adopted in May. The Gaithersburg drone program launched in October.
According to Picerno, the Bethesda launch delay can be attributed to a lengthy process of planning and negotiations over “administrative and legal agreements” regarding liability protections for the privately owned building where the launch site will be located. Picerno declined to say where the drone site is located but said it is on the roof of a newly constructed building on Wisconsin Avenue in the downtown area.
County Councilmember Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1), whose district covers Bethesda, noted Tuesday in a text message to Bethesda Today that he pushed hard last year for funding to expand the program to be included during deliberations over the county operating budget.
“Obviously we’re all frustrated by how long these negotiations have taken to get the Bethesda Drone as First Responder program off the ground,” he wrote. “Our police department, residents, and businesses are eagerly awaiting the launch because we know how impactful it will be to improving response times and enhancing public safety.”
Picerno said Tuesday he hoped to see the Bethesda drone program fully operational before the end of February, and possibly as early as next week.
“I think realistically, it’ll take us about a week to do all the infrastructure things we need to get [onto the building’s rooftop]. You know, brings the drones up, plug in the internet, make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to, program a couple pieces of software,” he said.
Launching the Bethesda drone program
According to police, drones will be deployed after a 911 call if the emergency services dispatcher and a drone pilot believe there is a use for the drone to respond. Once the drone arrives on the scene, the pilot can assess if threats are credible, if more emergency responders are needed, and determine other details that could help expedite emergency response.
Since the Drone as First Responder program’s launch in November 2023, drones have responded to more than 1,900 calls, according to a police data dashboard. In January, a drone aided police in tracking a teen who was allegedly involved in a Gaithersburg armed robbery. The teen was arrested and charged. In December, a Fairfax man was sentenced to seven years in prison after a drone filmed him stabbing and injuring a man in April in downtown Silver Spring. The case is regarded as the first time a defendant was convicted in a jury trial using video footage from a county police drone as evidence.
Details about the drone flights are available on the department’s Drone as First Responder Flight Maps and Data dashboard website.
To establish the drone program in Bethesda, Picerno said the department and the owners of the building where the drone launch site will be housed had to form a public-private partnership. With that came a process of “doing their due diligence,” forming a relationship, educating the department’s partner about the program and discussing the department’s expectation and needs, he said.
“With this type of program, especially doing a public-private partnership, there’s layers of accountability that people want to have in place, and that just takes time to set up,” Picerno said.
“The red tape of it all is a lot less interesting than the actual missions that are being flown. But in many ways, that red tape will keep us operational,” he added. “So it’s a necessary evil we have to go through, but that process is just about done.”
Another factor the department had to consider is downtown Bethesda’s urban environment. Picerno said the drone site must be located on top of one of the tallest buildings in the downtown area to allow drone pilots to maintain a “visual line of sight of the drone” while it’s in use.
Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7), a member of the council’s Public Safety Committee, told Bethesda Today on Monday the delay in launching the program was similar to delays that occurred with the launch of the Gaithersburg drone program.
“We thought it was going to be last July, right after the budget and then it had delays and so it started in October,” Luedtke said. Issues in hiring a contractor to serve as the pilot located on the roof of the launch site helped delay the launch of the Gaithersburg program, she said.
To reduce such delays, Luedtke suggests using a county employee as the roof pilot instead of hiring a contractor and implementing new innovations in drone technology that would allow the drones to be remotely operated from the police department’s command center.
“Certainly, we’re interested in exploring anything that enhances the functionality, makes it cost effective and prevents the kinds of delays that we have seen in getting [the program] up and running,” Luedtke said. “[It’s] not due to any fault of folks on our side. We’re doing the best we can, but there are some challenges in getting [the pilots] staffed.”
A tool to combat crime
Allie Williams, president and CEO of the Greater Bethesda Chamber of Commerce, also has been supportive of the Bethesda drone program. Launching the program would be a “game changer” for Bethesda’s central business district in “enhancing public safety, reducing response times, and improving situational awareness,” he said Tuesday in an email statement.
In recent years, downtown Bethesda businesses have dealt with numerous incidents of retail theft. From January to July in 2024, shoplifters hit stores 67 times, resulting in increased police and security presence in the central business district.
Picerno said he is looking forward to the impact of the drone program once it launches in Bethesda.
“I firmly believe that the presence of this program in other places has reduced citizen injuries, reduced officer injuries, limited unnecessary police contacts, but also allowed police officers to make apprehensions in cases where they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. And I know this will happen in Bethesda as well,” he said.
