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Drones helping to catch out wrongdoers
From:Shanghai Daily  |  2017-06-12 01:29

A man who robbed a woman this month and then disappeared into a sprawling, muddy village in Minhang District was captured an hour later by police using a drone.

Law enforcement officers and their colleagues in traffic control are increasingly turning to drones for surveillance, tracking and monitoring.

Wen Jia, an officer at Tianyuan Xincun police station on Jindu Road that handled the Minhang robbery, told Shanghai Daily that the station has two drones in use. “In the case of the June 1 robbery, we didn’t have enough manpower to quickly search the whole village,” he said. “A drone did the work for us.”

Drones have many applications. They can be used to monitor construction sites, looking for welding work that violates fire codes. They can hover around a building where a suspected gambling den may be operating. During Spring Festival this year, they patrolled residential areas looking for illegal use of fireworks.

Tianyuan Xincun police station often deploys an unmanned aircraft to just fly around its territorial jurisdiction, making sure every thing is in order.

“A fully charged battery lasts 20 minutes, which is enough for a small drone to cover 7 square kilometers,” Wen said.

In suburban Qingpu, Huang Xinlong, an experienced crime squad officer, is leading the district’s effort to apply drones to police work. “When you’re on the ground, you only have a limited view,” he said. “But a drone can provide a panorama — a view that would require many officers to provide.”

Qingpu police said drones work particularly well in a suburban district like theirs because there are so few tall buildings that could provide a bird’s-eye view.

In addition to nabbing criminals, the drones are also used to map street grids for installation of surveillance cameras.

Useful in crowd control

Huang said he started flying drones as a hobby two years ago. Now, he and three other officers with licenses to operate drones help to train other officers in their use.

“A person just starting to learn how to fly a drone could pass the tests and get a license in two months’ time,” he said.

But it takes an old hand to master some of the trickier elements of drone policing.

“Sometimes we have to steer a drone to a certain distance where its noise won’t alert a suspect in hiding,” Huang said. “It takes a while to get used to the idea that a drone may be gone from your sight but that’s no reason for anxiety.”

In other Shanghai districts, drones have also been used in crowd and traffic control, especially for large public events such as the Cherry Blossom Festival in Gucun Park in the Baoshan District. The festival draws tens of thousands of visitors on peak days.

Zhang Minghua, a Pudong traffic police officer who is also a drone specialist, said the use of unmanned aircraft has a potential to expand in the future.

“Traffic police, for example, could use drones to record traffic violations on crowded elevated roads and bark out warnings to offenders with the loudspeakers they carry,” he said.

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