Newport Beach approves over $2 million for drones designed to respond to 911 calls

The Newport Beach City Council moved forward with the creation of police department’s new drone program with the purchase of seven remote-controlled aircraft greenlit at their meeting Tuesday.

A $2,176,037.60, five-year contract with Seattle-based BRINC Drones Inc. was unanimously approved as part of the meeting’s consent calendar. It includes the purchase of a total of seven drones, the charging stations and software necessary to operate and maintain them as well as the cost of obtaining approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and other startup expenses.

Six of the new aircraft are a model BRINC Drone that founder and chief executive Blake Resnick described as “the world’s first purpose built 911 response drone.”

“It’s designed to take off from a citywide network of recharging stations and then hook into computer-aided dispatch,” Resnick said. “So the second someone calls 911, we grab that GPS coordinate and then we use it to automatically dispatch an aircraft to that location. So we can respond to 911 calls with this technology in tens of seconds.”

A map shows the range of drones that will respond to 911 calls in Newport Beach, which were approved for purchase by the City Council Tuesday.

(Courtesy of the city of Newport Beach)

The drones can provide live surveillance of a situation without risking officer safety. Five will be spread out at strategic locations so they can quickly reach any corner of the city and will be operated by civilian detectives at the police department’s newly established Crime Information Center. A sixth will be set aside for use by patrol officers.

The seventh drone is designed for crisis negotiations and other SWAT operations. It’s smaller and more maneuverable than the Responder model, so it’s capable of going in and out of buildings and other confined spaces. It’s equipped with night vision and thermal imaging technology and can use those sensors to create a 3D floor plan of any building it’s sent to in real time.

BRINC Drone offered the city a 30% discount on the list price for its equipment and services, city staff wrote in a report. Their contract includes a provision to upgrade the police department’s drones to the company’s latest models in the third and fifth year of the agreement.

The new Drones as First Responder program is the latest in ongoing efforts to incorporate tech into the police department. In addition to opening the Crime Information Center in January, the city completed the installation of 69 automated license plate readers in October. Those constantly monitor the roads and automatically alert officers if a suspicious vehicle is spotted.