McMinnville Police Department (MPD) recently acquired a new drone which has taken the department’s ability to quickly become apprised of a situation to greater heights.

The drone was paid for in the MPD budget and is utilized for a wide variety of tasks, such as search and rescue, tracking fleeing suspects and investigations pertaining to criminal matters and crashes. In addition to those uses, it is also reportedly a great resource for checkpoints as it can show a wide aerial shot of everything the department is doing on the site.

Presently, Officers Mark Mara and Andy Aguilar are trained pilots for the department’s drones. The drone has also been used to assist other agencies, including Warren County Sheriff’s Department, Tennessee Highway Patrol, DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department and Van Buren County Sheriff’s Department.

“We don’t fly for everything, but we find it’s really useful for crashes,” Mara said. “We have the capability of taking pictures of intersections before there are any cars there, and the officers can download that picture and add vehicles to it for the TITAN crash reports. It is more professional and accurate, and saves officers a lot of time. It can easily take 30 to 45 minutes doing that alone.”

Mara went on to explain it made it easier to figure out what happened with a wreck, citing a recent incident where an aerial view made quick work of deducing where a vehicle began to backslide, something which would have been harder to decipher at ground level.

“The drone is in the air and it’s our eyes in the sky. The quicker we can start looking for a missing person, for example, the better. Every minute matters when you have someone who is lost, especially if they’re panicking,” Mara said. “This drone is better than the other one we had. The thermal imaging is better and it starts up much easier. In under a minute, the sensors on the new one are fully operational and it's in the air. The other one takes a lot longer, making it more difficult to use.”

There are regulations regarding drone use, and Mara indicated the department always collaborates with and informs the district attorney and all applicable parties when the drone is deployed to ensure it is being used in a legal and permissible way.