Facing an ongoing officer shortage, the Los Angeles Police Department plans to more efficiently deploy its officers and shorten response times by doubling the size of a cutting-edge drone fleet that the department is making permanent this week.

The nations’s third largest police force increasingly deployed the unmanned aircraft since launching a “drone as a first responder” pilot program last July. Now, department leadership is doubling the size of the effort and making it official.

In an exclusive interview with The California Post, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said the department is better able to fight crime thanks to the new, smaller craft joining the LAPD’s familiar black-and-white helicopters.

“To be able to decrease our response time to emergency calls for service, and to be able to use it as a force multiplier for a very lean department, that is very important,” McDonnell said. “The operation of the drones has been very, very impressive.”  

Drones have already been used by the department with strong results, McDonnell said, boosting safety at high-profile events such as the World Cup, and helping cops more quickly defuse dangerous situations and rapidly solve crimes.

The fleet is growing from 13 to 26 electric drones, with the aircraft used to assist first responders and some used on occasion to enforce flight-restriction zones.

LAPD drones were deployed more than 3,000 times last year, mostly in response to emergency calls or officer requests for assistance, department officials said in a report presented to the Police Commission in April.

The LAPD’s drones are controlled by FAA-certified offers using desktop computers in police headquarters. They’re frequently deployed to incidents in high-crime areas. An online dashboard shows LAPD drones flew 26 missions on Thursday alone.

Powered by four sets of rotors, the department’s unmanned aircraft are about a foot wide and feature video cameras and infrared night vision. They fly from rooftop launch sites located around the city, with another two unmanned aircraft using portable launch sites.

Once airborne, they can travel about 40 miles per hour, allowing cops to more quickly see what’s happening at crime scenes and dispatch an appropriate number of officers. McDonell said it’s easy to see why officers likes them.

“It gives you a much broader perspective than you would have otherwise,” he said. “You can see if there are people on the roofs. You can see if somebody’s running down an alley that you might not have responded to.”

Footage from one LAPD drone mission shared by the LAPD shows an unmanned aircraft being used to locate a 5-year-old child who wandered away from his family and was walking dangerously close to traffic.

The drone was used to quickly locate the child on July 7, helping police rapidly deploy a cruiser to the scene for his rescue.   

McDonnell said drones have been used in recent cases to respond to homicides, kidnappings, burglaries and more.

The chief explained that drones respond to crime scenes more quickly than officers, arriving first about 73% of the time. In 11% of cases in which drones are deployed, the department decides an officer response isn’t actually needed, he said.   

LAPD officials said the department will soon start flying drones in response to street takeovers and on anti-fireworks missions for holidays such as the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve.

Other LA County police departments, including in Beverly Hills, already boast big drone programs. A rough plan to expand the LAPD’s fleet came together last year after a rash of high-profile burglaries on the city’s Westside.

McDonnell said the program so far has been very effective in helping the department better deploy resources, prepare officers for crime scenes, and track down suspects.

“We have the ability to identify suspect vehicles, license plates, description of suspects, how many suspects, if they leave, what direction to travel,” he said. “It’s able to capture evidence of the crime and then send that back via video to the control center.”

The drones are meant to reinforce rather than replace the LAPD’s fleet of 17 helicopters, which is among the largest of any force in the world. The department relies on its choppers for patrols and emergencies, keeping at least two in the sky for around 20 hours each day.

The department’s drones are used to respond to crimes rather than conduct surveillance, police officials said. The LAPD website has a drone-as-first responder dashboard showing drone flight paths, and the department’s drone policy is posted online.

The policy for recording video produced by drones is similar to that of the department’s policy for body-worn cameras, with footage recorded only just before drones arrive at crime scenes and while the scenes are active.  

McDonnell said drones are never used to identify people involved in protests.  

“We would only use them in protest circumstances to look for crowd size, or to focus on people who are committing acts of violence there, and then to be able to focus on them once a crime has been committed,” he said.