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In the hands of a kidnapper, the young girl was thought to be in serious danger. Authorities had tracked the pair to Pasco County, Florida, and located them to a particular house. But as they closed in, the suspect fled, taking the child with him. A neighbor said they’d headed toward a wooded area across the street.

Officers on scene called for air and canine reinforcements and set up a perimeter. Forty to 50 LEOs responded, but the pair remained elusive.

As the operation progressed, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office put a drone in the air. The department, which covers more than 800 square miles and serves a population of around 700,000, had launched its program in 2015, becoming an early trailblazer for the technology in the state. On this day — chilly by Florida standards — the pilot chose its thermal view to look for telltale heat signatures.

He found one — small, located next to a stack of cut wood on the edge of a forested patch. He zoomed in for a better look. “What they ended up realizing,” Captain Andy Denbo of the Pasco Sheriff’s Office detailed during a 2024 webinar, “was that it was actually the feet of the missing juvenile.”

She was lying in a small depression partially under the woodpile next to her abductor, who’d pulled wood over the space to hide them.

Switching to a color view confirmed the victim’s purple clothing, and the pilot used the drone’s mapping features to direct colleagues on the ground to their hiding place. They apprehended the kidnapper and rescued the victim safely.

Denbo’s take-home point from the experience was that, as valuable as aviation units are to law enforcement, drones can fill some more delicate roles helicopters can’t.

“Due to equipment limitations, some of the angles and some of the approaches they were using on the scene didn’t allow them to see what we were able to see” with the drone, Denbo told viewers. “This particular drone footage, I think [we were] only about 150, 200 feet off the ground.”

Photo/Pasco County Sheriff’s Office

Drone program success stories

That’s the kind of best-case scenario Pasco leaders envisioned for their police drone program, and it’s far from the only one. “The success stories are plentiful, and in all different areas,” said Denbo, who leads the department’s Innovation and Readiness Division.

The agency initially used its drones in tactical cases, where they immediately improved the situational awareness and safety around tasks like executing search warrants. That’s few officers’ favorite activity — it’s stressful and highly dangerous. But with drones, much of it can now be done without inserting humans.

“We’ve gotten to the point now, between using all our drones and robotics, that we can clear the majority of a home without ever sending an actual person inside,” said Denbo. “That’s a huge win. You can’t really measure how many times something doesn’t go wrong, but it’s huge because we can effectively clear multistory homes and resolve standoffs with people in crisis in a way that’s safer for everybody.”

From there the department’s use grew to event coverage. For a good-size county, Pasco doesn’t host a lot of large festivals, but cities like Zephyrhills, Dade City and New Port Richey have holiday events, and New Port Richey hosts an annual multiday arts event, as well as a motorcycle festival. “We use it to keep an eye on large groups of people — looking for outliers in the crowd, vehicle threats, things on rooftops that don’t belong, stuff like that,” Denbo said. Pasco deputies also support larger events in the neighboring Tampa Bay area.

More recently use has expanded to in-progress calls. Deputies are embracing the capability, with a few hundred activations in 2022 increasing to around 1,600 in 2023 and 2,400 in 2024. This year the department expects to reach 3,000–5,000 uses.

Photo/Pasco County Sheriff’s Office

That growth is fueled by a steadily increasing number of drones and a dual approach that includes both fixed launch sites and mobile patrol deployment. With the latter, requests from the field generate automated messages to all pilots, and the closest typically respond.

It’s all led to reduced response and scene times, safer operations and a workforce that’s enthusiastic about applying the new capabilities.

“We’re seeing a lot of proliferation in what they’re used for,” said Denbo. “If a drone can reduce the time to set a perimeter from an hour to 10 minutes, and your guys get some time back to be out handling calls and resolving things, that’s an easy sell.”

Drones boost flood forecasts

Additional uses for Pasco County’s UAVs have included missing persons searches and both pre- and post-disaster surveillance. In hurricane-prone Florida, that watchfulness around weather events is valuable on both ends. When a storm is imminent, the department will dispatch craft to photograph infrastructure like schools and police and fire stations and document their condition before any damage occurs. This helps facilitate repair afterward. Deputies also do pre-storm mapping to help track erosion, road damage and missing property like boats.

That was especially useful in the fall of 2024, when hurricanes Helene and Milton struck the region in quick succession.

“We were able to track flooding in some of our affected neighborhoods,” recalled Denbo. “We flew hundreds of flights a day and directed emergency crews and boats to get people out of houses and perform ongoing search and rescue. We’re very fortunate to have as many pilots as we do. We have some large specialty command vehicles that have Starlink and portable Wi-Fi hotspots, and we set up base stations where we created postdisaster maps that were very useful.”

Those postdisaster operations took an unexpected turn when, several days after Milton, the nearby Withlacoochee River flooded. In low-lying Florida, coastal storm surges are normal with hurricanes, but this delayed river flooding wasn’t. It crested more than seven feet above flood level, filling collection areas over hundreds of square miles. That led to a slow-motion flood event where affected areas swelled slowly over days.

Deputies used Starlink to relay key images and video from the ongoing disaster to state hydrological authorities, who used them to help anticipate where waters would go next. This helped guide deployment of Army Corps of Engineers resources and citizen evacuations.

“It let them say, ‘Hey, go observe this area, and if you see this particular berm structure being inundated, evacuate this neighborhood,’” said Denbo. “We went back and forth with the chief hydrologist all day long, and it was very helpful.

“Predicting flooding is something I never would have thought drones could be used for, but we were able to get a good visualization from the Army Corps and National Weather Service and have a really good idea of where that water was going to end up. We were able to move our assets and get equipment where it needed to be more intelligently, because we knew where things were going to go.”

[Complete the “Access this Police1 resource box” on this page to download a one-page summary of Pasco County’s drone-driven disaster response for handy reference.]

Resources support a successful drone program

Much of the success of a law enforcement drone program lies in its supporting structures. In a decade of operation Pasco has developed those thoroughly.

Internally, the UAV program is well-integrated with traditional aviation capabilities. The Pasco Sheriff’s Office has six helicopters, including a pair of Bell UH-1 Iroquois (Hueys) capable of heavy lifts.

“We see a partnership there,” said Denbo. “We don’t see drones as a replacement for helicopters at all. We may shift how the helicopters are used — we may use them more for purposes like transporting personnel and supporting fire-rescue when those things are needed — and maybe we can handle some of the low-hanging fruit with drones to save some fuel costs, but by and large we always see a need for manned aviation units.”

Collaboration is also advanced externally via a countywide drone task force. This involves the sheriff’s office, Pasco County Fire-Rescue, the county’s small handful of municipal PDs, and local emergency management. Everyone operates the same kinds of drones with the same protocols, and their pilots all get the same training. This facilitates regional operations and interfaces with state organizations like the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Florida State Guard.

Everyone also has access to the Pasco Sheriff’s Office’s elite training facility in Land O’ Lakes. Known as Florida’s Forensic Institute for Research Security and Tactics (F1RST), it’s an advanced research and training hub that supports public safety with the latest technology, tactics and science. It hosts comprehensive trainings for a range of first responders.

In Pasco like in many places, deputies initially needed convincing of a drone program’s value. The key to generating the buy-in needed, Denbo noted, was simply showing skeptics what UAVs can do and letting them experience the benefits.

“Sometimes, if you haven’t seen what the drone pilot sees, the difference can be hard to describe,” he said. “People remember the drone they got for Christmas one year and took out in their backyard and crashed into a tree — they’ve never seen the benefit. But the first time you find somebody for them or fly for the SWAT team, they get it — they understand why we’re doing this.

“When we first posted for drone team positions, I think we got like 5–6 people interested. It wasn’t a super popular thing. But the last time we posted, I believe we had 20–30 applicants. People are very interested in getting into this now. And not a day goes by that we don’t get like three or four requests for drones.”

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