On 1-19-24 the Bates County Sheriff’s Office received two DJI Matrice 30T drones. The drones were ordered and purchased from the FY23 budget.
The Sheriff’s Office currently has two smaller DJI Mavic Enterprise drones that have been in service for approximately 3 years now. The Matrice 30T drones have far superior technology and flight time over the Enterprise drones.
The Matrice has almost 2 times the standard flight time, 200x hybrid zoom camera, 2x better thermal imagine with 4 total cameras. The Matrice also has synchronized ground to cloud software that helps with air to ground coordination from a command center.
The Sheriff’s Office drone program is not new to Bates County but is in its 4th year of service. Since the program began, the drone team has been deployed on multiple search and rescue missions and was credited with finding the remains of two deceased individuals on separate calls for service.
The drones have been deployed to document crime scenes from arsons to homicides. The drones were also deployed on multiple occasions to the Adrian MFA grain bin explosion to assist investigators with observing structure integrity of the building in places that would have been too dangerous to deploy live personnel.
The drones were instrumental in helping search teams find an 80 year old male who had fallen in the woods and was injured in a large rural area of Butler.
The Sheriff’s Office currently has one licensed operator with a second graduating the FAA course in the next few days. The smaller Enterprise drones will remain in service with one of them being utilized as a flight training unit and the other unit being assigned for the use by the Bates County Sheriff’s Posse.
Drones have become a vital tool in Law Enforcement operations. Our primary use will be search and rescue and aerial crime scene documentation. “This is one more tool in our tool bag that will help us serve the citizens.” Says Sheriff Anderson. “We have UTVs, ATVs, Horses and physical manpower to conduct search and rescue operations but no one tool is the perfect fit for every situation.
These help us cover large areas in a short period of time which is invaluable when we are talking about your loved ones whether it’s a little child or an elderly person with dementia that walked away from home.”
The Sheriff’s Office is always looking for better and more efficient ways to serve the Citizens of Bates County through modern technology and continued top of the line training of its employees.
