Within line of sight – personal issue police drones are on the horizon By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner The announcement by the Metropolitan Police Service that they are to deploy drones across all 32 London boroughs shouldn’t come as a surprise – at least not to anyone involved in providing police aerial capability. The popular image of police air support is the ‘Blue Thunder’ model from the old TV series set in Los Angeles. The reality in the UK is very different. British police helicopters are not used to land SWAT teams, and the policing environment doesn’t yet need the advanced armed functionality of the semi-military engagements in many US police departments. The numbers underscore the differences: while the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has 17 helicopters to cover the city’s 1200 square kilometres, the National Police Air Service (NPAS) for England and Wales has just two more to cover the entire country (150, 000 square km). When we established NPAS in West Yorkshire in 2012, air support’s principal contribution to policing was eyes in the sky. Think of the police helicopter as a flying camera platform – then the real surprise from the Met’s decision is how it’s taken so long to adopt cheaper, adaptable technology that’s already proved itself in many other fields. Although the rotary vs fixed wing debate has rumbled on in policing for years, there are many settings in which drones offer more than either of them – and for a lot less. Examples of where uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) are already upstaging old world airframes include wide area searches of hostile terrain in Australia, traffic monitoring and incident management in Vietnam and air quality sampling in California. Although providing an undoubtedly valuable service, the highly dispersed NPAS police