The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office in Durango, Colorado will start using UAS for certain emergency situations, after La Plata County Sheriff Sean Smith said he planned to sign a policy allowing the department to use the county’s UAS on Jan. 25.

According to Smith, procedures will be in place to give approvals to use the county’s three UAS only during emergency situations after they have been requested by responding deputies.

​UAS would offer the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office a variety of benefits, according to Deputy Henrik Krog. One example in which UAS could be used, according to Krog, is for quickly obtaining a bird’s eye view of a major traffic accident. This type of view would allow the highway to be cleared more quickly because on-scene investigators would not have to take measurements and other analysis, being that a lot of the on-scene procedures could be accomplished later by using video footage from a UAS with a camera.

Another example in which UAS could be used is to assess the danger of a rockslide in an area susceptible to slides after a heavy rainfall.

“It’s dangerous to send people to assess a situation like that,” Krog says via the Durango Herald. “It can take a half day, a full day. With a drone, you can do it in half an hour, an hour. They help us in doing the things we have to do anyway without the danger to personnel and for much less cost.”

According to Smith, UAS would only be used in “an exigent” situation. If a court-obtained search warrant was not secured, then a UAS would not be used as part of an investigation by the department.

Krog adds that data collected, such as videos and still pictures, “would be used only for the mission assigned to the drone,” such as getting information on a traffic accident. Krog also says that the data would not be shared with any other county department and the data would not be released to outside parties “without county authority or unless it is required to be released by state or federal law.”