A future with flying cars and hover skateboards may still be years in the making, but airborne robots helping law enforcement are already here. 

More agencies are using drones for various activities in policing, including as first responders to scope out a scene and provide important information to officers before they arrive. Though law enforcement agencies have used drones for a decade already, there exists little research to support whether using drones as first responders (DFR) improves public safety ina meaningful way.  

That’s where Scott Mourtgos comes in. He recently completed the world’s first randomized control trial to gauge the effectiveness of using drones as first responders. His early findings show that drones can improve response times and alleviate strain on understaffed officers, which supports existing observations on the technology. 

“There are anecdotal testimonies indicating DFR effectiveness, but hardly any rigorous analyses assessing actual costs and benefits,” Mourtgos said. “We are looking to provide that type of analysis so agencies know what works and what they can expect if implementing a drone program.”  

Mourtgos is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on policing and criminal justice policy. Before he became an academic, he policed the streets of Salt Lake City, Utah, for 20 years. 

He completed the first phase of this research project from December 2025 to April 2026, where he worked with the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland to gather data from their first responder drone program, which launched in 2023.  

 From the first round of data, he found that drones reached the scenes quickly, often before patrol was dispatched. Drones resolved a meaningful share of calls without a patrol response, and they reduced typical response times. Overall response times improved even on calls where drones were not used, indicating that drone deployments provide workload relief for patrol officers. 

Why drones? 

Like many police departments around the country, Montgomery County has dealt with years-long staffing shortages. Police Captain Tony Galladora started the DFR program to help fill staffing gaps. He was enthusiastic about working with Mourtgos on the research project to learn if the data supported the improved outcomes his department had observed over the last three years. 

“If drone programs can assist in alleviating some of the negative consequences associated with staffing shortages, we want to be able to speak to that and quantify those effects,” said Mourtgos. 

Along with speed and efficiency, drones may provide a tactical advantage that may lead to reduced use-of-force by officers. Mourtgos used the example of an armed robbery situation. If a call comes in regarding the sighting of a suspect, operators can deploy drones to get eyes on the suspect first. This gives officers the upper hand with information about the suspect’s location, potentially allowing them to commandeer the suspect without incident.  

 

It’s not a new approach, just a new technology. 

“Even before first responder drones, SWAT teams were using remote control robots with cameras to surveille a scene before sending in officers,” Mourtgos said.  

But along with the benefits, Mourtgos is aware of a reasonable skepticism when it comes to using drones in policing. There’s a real tension that exists among the public when they hear about drones in police work, he says. 

To address public concerns, Montgomery County is transparent with information surrounding drone usage. They disclose all the drone flight patterns for each call. It’s part of a policy they developed before implementing the DFR program. They’ve also publicly committed not to use the drones for patrolling or passive surveillance. The drone also does not use facial recognition and does not record audio, according to the county’s website. 

 

How it works 

The Montgomery County Police Department has human drone pilots listening in on Live 911, a real-time phoneline that enables operators to deploy drones without having to wait for dispatch to process a call. Drones respond to high-priority calls where response time is crucial. That includes calls for burglaries, assaults, thefts, missing persons and suspicious circumstances. 

The drones have cameras that give human operators a bird’s-eye view of the scene. Because of the drones’ small size, they can maneuver easily to quickly assess a scene. From there, operators decide if the call can be resolved or if officers are needed. The pilot can also chat by phone with the caller to gather more information if it’s needed. 

On the data side, Mourtgos found that of the 652 drone deployments over five months, almost half arrived on scene before an officer was dispatched. The median response time saw drones on scene 4.6 minutes after a call was made, compared to 12.3 minutes for patrol. When both drones and patrol units were dispatched, drones arrived first nearly 74 percent of the time, and drone pilots determined that an in-person response was not required in 19.5 percent of deployments. 

Though more research is needed, Mourtgos is cautiously optimistic about the early results. He said the next step in his research is to scale the drone programs to find out if more drones would continue to result in improved outcomes. 

“What’s most important here is the empirical scientific evidence,” Mourtgos said. “Some of the proposed benefits of using drones do actually pan out, including response times.” 

 

What’s next? 

Mourtgos and colleagues recently completed another study with a large urban police department, this time measuring "time to clearance" — the span between officers responding to a call and the incident being resolved. The research will expand on questions left unanswered by the response time analysis, including whether DFR programs truly reduce officer workload, affect use-of-force incidents and how costs compare with operational benefits. Mourtgos and his team are finalizing the results of that study and anticipate publishing their findings this summer. 

He's also part of an application for a National Institute of Justice grant to study a new generation of DFR systems built around autonomous launch pods. Under current protocols,rooftop pilots must keep the drones in sight at all times. The pod-based approach could expand drone coverage and eliminate the need for an operator stationed on a rooftop for every deployment. 

The broader question Mourtgos is investigating is how far agencies should scale the technology, if at all. Does adding more drones continue to improve outcomes, or do departments eventually reach a point of diminishing returns? What is the number of drones needed to effectively cover a given area? At what point does expanding a fleet become more expensive than it's worth? 

"In policing, agencies are constantly getting pitches from vendors for new technology," Mourtgos said. "When it comes to public safety and finite budgets, it's really important that we have concrete information about what works and what doesn't."