During its first day in action Tuesday in downtown Bethesda, a drone deployed by Montgomery County police responded to three calls for service ranging from a report of a suspicious situation on Wisconsin Avenue to calls about someone who might have a gun in the 5000 block of Hampden Lane, according to police data.
The flights signaled the long-awaited expansion of the police department’s Drone as First Responder program into the downtown Bethesda area, following the earlier deployments in the downtowns of Silver Spring, Wheaton and Gaithersburg.
On Wednesday, county police officials touted the launch and the importance of the Bethesda drone program during a press briefing at police department headquarters in Gaithersburg.
Assistant police Chief David McBain described the Drone as First Responder program as a “game changer,” adding that it was the “most impressive development that the police department has put into place to help fight crime.” All drone flights, including Tuesday’s in downtown Bethesda, are recorded in the program’s Flight Maps and Data dashboard.
“Not only does the drone respond quicker, but it provides our officers with critical information to help them do their job,” McBain said. “It keeps our officers safe. It keeps the community safe. And to some extent, it keeps the suspect safe, because we’re getting real time, real information for our officers to respond in an appropriate way for specific crimes.”
County Executive Marc Elrich said during the briefing the program is a helpful crime-fighting tool as the police department struggles with staffing shortages.
“Data from the program shows drones are most often deployed in theft and robbery cases, but they’re also used in for calls for suspicious vehicles or persons, and using the technologies helps us to respond to crime when our resources are short,” he said.
Elrich, who is expected to release his fiscal year 2026 county operating budget proposal on Friday, said he is looking to expand the drone program to the police department’s First District in Rockville and the Fifth District in Germantown, the two remaining districts without the program.
Elrich also noted he is considering calling for “more advanced drones” with new technologies including drones that fly faster. Quicker drones could be used to track speeding drivers, he said.
“One of the challenges in the county is high-speed drivers and we have a policy of non-pursuit,” Elrich said. “There are drones that are out there that could be able to fly at higher speeds and could track that person without putting our officers at risk.”
A long-awaited launch
The launch comes 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 would be operating by the end of August. In February, Capt. Nicholas Picerno, director of the department’s Special Operations Division, told Bethesda Today that he hoped the program would launch by the end of the month.
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 is located. Picerno declined to say where the launch site is but said it is on the roof of a newly constructed building on Wisconsin Avenue in the downtown area.
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. But before the launch of the programs in Silver Spring and Wheaton, members of the community voiced concerns about the program, particularly with privacy, surveillance and racial profiling during public hearings and community forums.
County Councilmember Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1), who represents Bethesda, said during Wednesday’s press briefing that he was thrilled to see the program expanded to his district and to be in the police department’s Special Operations Divisions command center during Tuesday’s launch.
“In the command center, you can see the real-time live 911 call, and the time it [takes] for a police officer to be dispatched on the scene, and how much faster, overwhelmingly faster, that the drone can get on hand and provide real-time information to the officers when they get on the ground, or to determine whether or not officers even needed to respond,” Friedson said.
“This is a critical example of how Montgomery County and our police department is leveraging technology to improve public safety,” he said.
Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7), a member of the council’s Public Safety Committee, echoed Friedson’s praise of the drone program, describing it as a “force multiplier” for the department.
She noted deploying a drone can also be helpful in cases of potential self-harm, suicide or elopement, which is when an individual with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities or dementia may wander away from their home or school.
“The drone has been deployed and has been successful in locating those individuals, so our officers are able to get there and get those individuals to the help that they need — that is incredibly impactful,” Luedtke said. “There’s no price that you can put on that kind of level of service and lifesaving.”
How does the program work?
According to police, drones are used if the emergency services dispatcher and a drone pilot believe deployment is warranted based on the nature of a 911 call. Once the drone arrives at the scene, the pilot assesses if threats are credible, determines if more emergency responders are needed, and ascertains other details that could help expedite an emergency response.
Since the Drone as First Responder program’s launch in November 2023, drones have responded to more than 2,050 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.
Recently, the police department released a video touting a November incident in which a drone deployed near downtown Silver Spring aided police in arresting a suspect who broke into a Purple Line construction site to steal tools.
