{"id":349160,"date":"2026-07-22T22:34:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T22:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/349160\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T22:34:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T22:34:20","slug":"jsos-new-drones-get-to-a-crime-scene-before-officers-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/349160\/","title":{"rendered":"JSO\u2019s new drones get to a crime scene before officers do"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, a 911 caller reported that a 15-year-old boy with autism was missing. A Jacksonville police officer, equipped with a drone, was dispatched to a community off Golfair Boulevard.<\/p>\n

Within a minute, the officer pulled up and deployed the Eagle Eye drone, one of about 25 in use citywide, and flew near a lake where the missing teen might have gone.<\/p>\n

The drone camera quickly spotted the missing teen next to the lake, as a sergeant guided the ground search by the view from the sky.<\/p>\n

\u201cOfficers on the ground don\u2019t always see lakes in the area,\u201d said Detective James Nguyen. \u201cBut because the drone is at an altitude, it is able to scan the area and see there are bodies of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Sheriff\u2019s Office re-created the search Wednesday to publicize the expansion of the department\u2019s drone fleet from 25 to 61, funded with state money.<\/p>\n

\u201cJacksonville is not getting smaller; it is growing, and it is growing at a rapid rate, so we have to grow with it. So if we cannot grow by bodies and manpower as quickly as we would like, this is a way for us to do that,\u201d said Sheriff T.K. Waters<\/a>. \u201cThis does not replace officers. It gives them better information to make more informed decisions, another tool in our big tool box, and I am very excited about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Some of the drones used by the Jacksonville Sheriff\u2019s Office to search for missing children or criminal suspects. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today<\/p>\n

State Rep. Wyman Duggan, R-Jacksonville, filed the request<\/a> for the $610,000 state allocation for the Drone First Responder Program. It will pay for a large mapping drone, 10 for outdoor use and 25 smaller ones to search indoors for missing people or suspects.<\/p>\n

The allocation almost did not happen, Duggan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrograms were cut across the board, but this program was not and, in fact, this is the only drone program in the entire state of Florida in this year\u2019s state budget that survived the governor\u2019s veto review,\u201d Duggan said.<\/p>\n

Drones in action<\/p>\n

Drones have been in use by the Sheriff\u2019s Office since 2018 to track missing children or look for suspects. By September 2019, police operated five and firefighters used three during natural disasters, searching for missing persons and helping SWAT find barricaded suspects.<\/p>\n

In November 2019, the Sheriff\u2019s Office used drones to search for 5-year-old Taylor Rose Williams <\/a>when her mother reported her missing from her Jacksonville neighborhood. Police eventually found the child buried in Alabama, and mother Brianna Williams was sentenced to life in prison.<\/p>\n

In December 2019, drones joined a massive search for two missing Westside Jacksonville children ultimately found alive in the woods off West Beaver Street, police said.<\/p>\n

Live demonstrations Wednesday showed the drones\u2019 capabilities before an officer arrives.<\/p>\n

In one, drones spotted men breaking into a truck and finding a gun \u2014 which responding officers learned about from the drone operator before they arrived.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Sheriff\u2019s Office demonstrates a recent truck burglary caught by a drone. The image shows a man, hands up, surrendering to an officer, at right. The drone had detected him taking a gun from the truck minutes earlier. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today<\/p>\n

Letting officers know what they could face before they get there is an advantage, said Chris King, technology and operational support chief.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting that information to the officers on scene, especially in the (Drone as a First Responder) program, they can see it in their cars, see what the suspects look like, see what the scene looks like,\u201d King said. <\/p>\n

Waters was asked about Florida statutes<\/a> prohibiting police from flying a camera-equipped drone over private property to gather evidence from its owner or tenant. He said drones will be used only if officers get a call that a crime is occurring or a missing person needs to be found. Police cannot just \u201cfly over a house and surveil it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you have SWAT that\u2019s got to serve a high-risk warrant for a murder suspect or drug dealer, we know there\u2019s guns in that situation,\u201d Waters said. \u201cWhen they have to make a forced entry, before they go inside, they can breach that door and send those interior drones inside and they have 100% the ability to do that. And hopefully we can get that person in custody without any officer getting hurt or having an officer-involved shooting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few weeks ago, a 911 caller reported that a 15-year-old boy with autism was missing. A Jacksonville…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[265,6121,43323,88005,116,118,117,1415,28983,115,1576],"class_list":["post-349160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-crime","tag-criminal-justice","tag-distribute","tag-government-politics","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-jacksonville-sheriffs-office","tag-jaxtdy2","tag-news","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}