The city of Lenexa will expand a new program that uses drones to respond to emergency calls before police or firefighters arrive.
On June 3, the Lenexa City Council voted 7-0 to approve adopting a resolution amending the 2025-2029 Capital Improvement Program (CIP) to include the Drone as a First Responder Program. The resolution included an agreement with Paladin Drones Inc. to purchase six drones along with other operational infrastructure. Councilmember Chris Herron was absent.
The Drones as First Responders program is a unique one to Johnson County and the Kansas City area. Whereas other police departments, like Overland Park, Shawnee and Olathe, have certified drone operators deploy drones at the scene of an emergency, the Lenexa program uses them remotely.
The drones are docked on top of city buildings and are deployed by dispatchers to survey and livestream footage from emergency situations before police or firefighters arrive.
“While successful DFR programs are in use around the country, we’re proud to be the first agency in Johnson County (and) the Kansas City metro to deploy this type of real-time drone response model,” Master Police Officer Danny Chavez, a Lenexa Police spokesperson, said in an email to the Johnson County Post.
There’s a chance that the Lenexa Police Department will be leading by example, as the program has caught the attention of the Overland Park Police Department.
“We have looked at the DFR program also. We do hear good things about this program,” John Lacy, an Overland Park Police Department spokesperson, said in an email to the Post.
Other departments like the Olathe Police Department are aware of the program, but don’t have plans to adopt it in the near future.
“We’re just kind of focusing on the tools that we have right now, and then seeing if maybe that’s something we can come to down the road. But we haven’t really sat down and discussed what that looks like yet,” said Sgt. John Moncayo, a spokesperson for the Olathe Police Department.
Prior to the purchase of the six drones, Lenexa’s DFR program was using one drone, docked on top of the Old Town Activity Center at Santa Fe Trail Drive and Pflumm Road.
The total cost of the five-year program is $995,335, including $300,535, for the implementation of the first year of the program and $173,700 annually for maintenance costs.
Lenexa has been using drones for more than a decade
The Lenexa Fire Department has been using drones that firefighters deploy at the scene of emergency calls since 2015, while Lenexa Police have been using them since 2017.
Launched as a pilot program in March, the city’s Drone as First Responder program is considered an evolution of the use of drones for emergency services, Lenexa Police Chief Dawn Layman said during a Lenexa Committee of the Whole meeting on May 13.
Sending a drone to a 911 call as human first responders are en route allows for emergency services to get an idea of the scene and how they should respond, said Lenexa Police Cpt. Curtis Weber.
Weber cited an incident in May when a drone was deployed after a suspect ditched his vehicle following an attempted stop by police officers. Thermal imaging from the drone helped Lenexa police see where the suspect was in a grassy area near I-435 and Lackman Road and make an arrest.
The program has cut down on response times
Since the pilot program launched in March, the drone has taken 335 flights for a total of 64 hours and flown almost 800 miles, Weber told the city council during a the May committee of the whole meeting.
In that time, the drone has cut down on arrivals to emergency situations by two minutes and non-emergency situations by four minutes, Chavez said.
“The drone gives first responders a clearer picture of what they’re walking into before they arrive on scene. That kind of information can be critical,” Chavez said. “For example, it’s helped us confirm or rule out threats, allowed us to locate fleeing suspects more quickly, and in some cases, even prevented unnecessary in-person responses due to unfounded calls.”
Weber added: “(If) we know what we’re walking into, where our dispatchers are able to communicate, ‘There’s a car in the driveway’ (or) ‘There’s someone holding a gun on the front porch,’ that’s incredible information for us.”
Assurances drones don’t use AI or facial recognition
During the Committee of the Whole meeting last month, councilmembers spoke highly of the program.
“I really appreciated seeing that example of how helpful this technology can be in the moment, how frustrating it must be to try to do your job, but being limited by natural elements, and so, this is one of those scenarios where I absolutely support technology coming in and support the work that you do,” said Councilmember Melanie Arroyo.
Members of the Lenexa Police Department, including Weber and Layman, answered several questions from the councilmembers, including confirming that the drones don’t use artificial intelligence, do not have facial recognition capabilities and have a system of transparency and accountability to make sure that they aren’t used for anything beyond emergency services.
Before the meeting closed, Arroyo asked Layman for a guarantee that the drones would not be used to target vulnerable populations.
“That will not happen in Lenexa unless there’s some criminal nexus or there’s some public safety issue, where we have somebody and something bad is going to happen,” Layman said. “But usually, there’s a criminal nexus to that and absent that criminal nexus, we are not going to to do that.”
In closing, Mayor Julie Sayers expressed her support for amending the city’s capital improvement program to add more drones.
“(It) really seems like a no-brainer for me,” she said. “It’s a measured way to get it into CIP and I’m happy to support it.”
Want to hear more?
The Lenexa Police Department will give a presentation on the program during its Lenexa Police Community Advisory Board Meeting at 6 p.m. on Thursday at the Lenexa Justice Center, 17371 Prairie Star Pkwy.
