A special demonstration was held this morning to introduce the force’s new Unmanned Aerial System.
The drone will help with accident reconstruction and searches, be it for missing persons, fleeing suspects, or trying to spot marijuana grow operations from above.
Sgt. Matt Stezycki is one of four officers who’ve been trained to operate the drone, and says it’s been used almost a dozen times in the last three months.
“The majority of our deployments so far have been for motor vehicle reconstruction we’ve also used it for missing person investigation and police assistance to locate objects or persons,” says Stezycki. “And for surveying land, we recently used it for the school system to take overhead shots of the schools for future use.”
The purchase was approved by the Police Service Board about a year and a half ago as a way to reduce time and resources used in investigations.
Officers have been specially trained through Transport Canada to pilot the device.
