Hawthorne Police Department has added six commercial drones to their operations to assist with handling 911 calls, according to the department.
The city has partnered with Brinc, a company that claims is the first fully functional police unit designed to be fully integrated with a department’s 911 system.
According to Hawthorne Police Captain Eric Lane, the drone can often get to a crime scene before an officer can.
“The response time is three to four minutes faster than a police officer’s,” Lane said.
The department currently has roughly 90 police officers and one helicopter in a City with close to 80,000 residents living in the 6.1-square-mile-city.
“We’re a small department,” Lane said. On any given day, our officers are responding [to] a lot of calls for service.”
Brinc was founded by Las Vegas-based Blake Resnick who came up with the idea in response to a deadly mass shooting that occurred in 2017 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
Despite the low workforce, Hawthorne has a mutual-aid agreement with the city of Inglewood that provides officers to special events at either the Kia Forum, SoFi Stadium and soon the Intuit Dome.
“With as much activity as Inglewood is seeing with the influx of crowds in the Sports and Entertainment District we do not have a drone program that enables Inglewood Police Department to be a world-class police department,” said an Inglewood officer who isn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Hawthorne is expected to take control of the drones by the end of this year.
