Sergeant Andy Jenson: It's fun because I know that it's getting used. I know it's getting used in a way that keeps people safe. I know it's being used in a way that makes calls get resolved more quickly. So to take a perimeter search that might last an hour and turn it into 20 minutes, that's not just 40 minutes, that's 40 minutes times the six to eight cops working that perimeter. You saved hours of work with one relatively cheap piece of technology and a trained operator knowing how to use it. If you come into this, express interest, stay a little bit nerdy and try to stay up to date on technology, you've already got a leg up on honestly a lot of folks. Officer Saud Badri: Welcome back to Talking Beat. I'm Officer Saud Badri with the Portland Police Bureau, one of the recruiting officers. Here I'm going to introduce one of my sergeants, actually, have him talk about one of the newer, I should say, programs we have. Sergeant Jenson, would you like to introduce yourself? Sergeant Andy Jenson: Sure. I'm Andy Jenson. I'm a sergeant in the police bureau. I've worked here for 14 years and for over 10 of those, I've been in police aviation. I'm in our air support unit as a pilot and I've been part of our drone program for about a year and a half now. Officer Saud Badri: Nice. Okay. Well, this is my first podcast, first time hosting one of these things. The way I'm probably going to start this is just tell me a little bit about yourself. How'd you get into law enforcement in general? This is a recruiting podcast, so we want people to know the startings before the greatness. Sergeant Andy Jenson: I fell into police work actually. No, serious. I'd never really considered it as a career. I thought I was on a path toward becoming a lawyer. Officer Saud Badri: Big money. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Maybe. I'm also a veteran. I did five years in the Marine Corps. I got out, went to U of O, went on to UW Law School and pretty quickly realized this is not the job for me. I do not want to sit at a desk drafting memos, doing research. Not many lawyers do the fun litigation stuff and even the ones that do it don't get to do that very often. It's a very thought driven job. It's not an action driven job. I think I realized I need a job that lets me get out and about and do work, not just write about work. I fell into it. My brother fell into it before me. He was a Portland police officer and he was the first police officer in the family. When I was going to law school and kind of having second thoughts about that, I went on some ride alongs with him. I saw the work that he and his partners were doing out in East Portland on the night shift. It was a eye-opening for me where I was like, "I could do this job. This looks like something that it's both fun and like you leave at the end of the day feeling like I did something good today." That appealed to me. Coming from that service background in the Marine Corps, it really appealed to me as something where it's like, this is a job I could do and not be miserable for decades. Officer Saud Badri: Oh, 100%. I think you totally touched on the good point. I feel like there's three major groups of people that want to get into policing. There's the people who don't know, the people who really know, and the people who fall into it kind of thing. And like, yeah, the fact that your brother was already here was like a great jumping off point, especially because you were like, "I don't want to push paper all day." We do that a little bit. Sergeant Andy Jenson: We do a lot of that. Officer Saud Badri: But there's also cool stuff in between all of that that makes it a lot better. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Absolutely. Officer Saud Badri: Local, not local? Sergeant Andy Jenson: I'm local. Grew up in Gresham, just across the city limits and this is the big city for me. The Portland Police Bureau, as far as like... Because I wanted to stay local. I wanted to get a job that let me put down roots because I flirted with the idea of like working for a big investigative agency for the federal government was like, "I don't want to have to live in Ohio one year and Chicago the next and maybe come home." I wanted to work for an agency that I felt like home. I knew that the Portland area was home already and Portland also offered all the opportunities that I wanted. I was already a private pilot before I became a police officer. I knew we had an air support unit. There was stuff about the city of Portland's Police Department or Police Bureau that was attractive to me more so than like Gresham's just a little smaller. There's less in the way of extra duties that I could find that fulfill my desire to do stuff beyond the basics of the job. Officer Saud Badri: Well, that was actually a great segue into what I wanted to talk about. The goal of this kind of podcast moving forward is each one being a little vignette of spots that we have in the bureau and special groups that can do special things. The one that I want to talk about today is the drone program, relatively new and everything. And you being the lead of it, I wanted to get you... Pick your brain about some things and then inform people about what it is. What do you think like the typical call for the pilots program would be? Sergeant Andy Jenson: Well, there's no typical call, but I can tell you what we do fly for, Because even what we'd call typical calls, they all end up different. our drone program is really divided into three main missions, I would say. I'll go from the least exciting to the most exciting. All right. The least exciting. We use our drones to capture evidence at crime scenes. The biggest user of this part of our drone mission is our traffic division. If there's a major crash on a public highway, somebody killed, somebody seriously injured and they want to document that crash scene super thoroughly, that's a viable drone mission because drones can map a crash scene in a fraction of the time that sort of what I'll call legacy technologies, but are still super high-tech. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. Sergeant Andy Jenson: LiDAR mapping technologies that are ground-based can do the same thing, but they take hours depending on the size of the scene. A drone can accomplish that task in about a battery, significantly less time, lower durations of road closures, quicker clearances of those calls, and the evidence they capture is rock solid. We'll do that for major investigations, major crime scenes or crash scenes. A little more exciting than that. The area that you're most familiar with, and I'm most familiar with, responding to patrol calls. The patrol calls that we fly for are calls in which a crime has been committed, and there's an exigent reason why the drone can actually help us either mitigate harm to somebody who's been harmed or catch the suspect in the crime. A reason why we need to fly in a hurry because a crime's been committed. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. Sergeant Andy Jenson: That is actually most of the calls that the police bureau flies on are these crimes in progress type calls. Officer Saud Badri: And search and rescue. Sergeant Andy Jenson: We can also fly for search and rescue. That's a rarer mission, but we do do it. We did it fairly recently. Then the highest intensity call, but not super often, is our CERT team, Portland's version of a SWAT team. Under the authority of a search warrant, we'll use drones to help them execute search warrants. Those missions are often flown indoors, in support of bomb squad robots and CERT team operators. Those are the three big missions we fly. Crimes in progress, search warrants, and capturing crime scenes for a crime that's already occurred or crash scenes for a major crash that's already occurred. Other than that, we keep it to training flights, the occasional search and rescue, but when we do fly for those missions, it makes a huge difference to the people who are either collecting evidence, trying to stay safe on a search warrant service, or just trying to catch somebody who committed a crime in the community. Officer Saud Badri: True. You said you had aviation background. Were you flying just like little mini Cessnas on your own for fun beforehand, or were you doing other stuff? Sergeant Andy Jenson: Nope. Purely a hobbyist in small Cessnas, kind of a similar store to a lot of private pilots. Learned in the Cessna 152 and 172s with an instructor, got my license, realized this is a really expensive hobby. I got to find a way to have somebody pay me to fly airplanes because just renting a plane by the hour adds up really quick, which I think any private pilots or student pilots can sympathize with that feeling of like, "Oof, I need to get a job in this profession if I need to keep doing it." Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. For me, I knew that like... So one of my sergeants at nights became a pilot because of the bureau. The bureau paid for him to go get his pilot's license and everything like that. He's also smart, so that also helped and everything. That was a pathway that I had really thought about. Also, the emblem for them is so cool. It's a dragon. Who doesn't want to wear that all day? Then the drone program came out and I was like, "I can do all the cool things and not have to do all of the extensive work that a pilot does and provide a lot of cool benefits to the bureau." How did you fall into being the head person for the drone pilot program? Sergeant Andy Jenson: The sergeant who built this program was in our bomb squad. He put in a ton of work building the program. I think somewhere between running a full-time bomb squad, helping out our CERT team on tactical deployments and building a drone program, I think he just hit a point where he was like, "I could use a hand. I could use a hand with this. You guys over at air support, you deal with the FAA, that's the side of this that I want to do the least." You have to ask him why, but I got tapped for like, "Hey, can you help us apply for our appropriate, basically our certifications with the FAA so that we can do law enforcement with our drones?" Got in on the regulatory side, helped with those applications. Then I went to the drone pilot school. I already had my pilot's certificate for drones, but practically I didn't have much drone flight experience. I went out to Gresham, went to the basic flight school, and then I think that opened up things for the bomb squad sergeant to go, "You know what would be really nice? If I could just run the bomb squad again. Now that we're growing this drone unit, it seems like you're well situated to start working this program." Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. You basically got to be right there in the ground floor of the inception on the patrol end of things. Like myself being one of the first people to get onto the drone program on the patrol end, it was like 18 of us or so that got it and that was like the big launching off point because everyone else had to either be on the bomb squad or some other specialty unit to have a drone and then they were finally giving it to patrol to use for things. What was one of the cool things that you envisioned like getting into this position, seeing that you were going to be on the forefront, the jumping off point really? Sergeant Andy Jenson: As a police officer, it excites me a lot that a tool that used to be very specialized and slow to get there. If the airplane is flying, it's the fastest thing to your call, but if the airplane's not already in the air and you need an airplane to help with a perimeter, a suspect search, a search and rescue, what have you, the crew's got to go get the plane ready, they've got to take off, they've got to get to your call. Those are slow to spin up, but the drone program takes that lag in time and it makes it that a patrol officer asking for a resource, you can get that help in minutes now because his partner in another car a half mile away drives there, sets up a drone, takes off and you have an air support asset, a small one, able to work that call quickly and it's available to anyone on patrol almost all the time. It just depends on if we've got the staffing that day. That excited me more than anything is it's taken a resource that used to be honestly kind of hard to get and it's made it available to anyone. Any patrol cop in the bureau who needs help and an eye on something from a drone, it's available to them. Drones have matured tremendously. They've gone from something that's not super reliable, but a good idea to something that's becoming essential. I don't know if we're there yet, but becoming essential for modern police work. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. Makes it definitely way safer to do a lot of things too. And like you said, quicker, that kind of puts me onto two tangents. I'll talk about the first one of like the exponential growth of technology in general. I remember when we first started this program, we were flying the M30s, which are these big, good, bulky drones, two giant batteries in them. Now we're on the M4s, which for us didn't seem like a big jump, but for the old sergeant who was running this program, he was like, "This is the craziest. This is awesome." How did that feel for you being able to prototype, test these things, and then put them out into the street and see how much better they were literally like a year and a half, a year after the program just started. Sergeant Andy Jenson: It's great. Those are the things that make me super happy in the job I do is when I can actually bring a little incremental improvement because it is an incremental improvement, but it is an improvement and it makes a difference. I think the game changer for me is they put a map overlay on those drones. When you're looking at the screen on the drone, you can confidently say like, "Yeah, the thing I'm looking at is on Division Street." It's going west on division. You don't have to guess, it's right there for you. The old drones didn't do that. Small quality of life improvement, but huge, right? Just the ability to keep this moving forward as the technology keeps advancing, I think it's super... It's fun. It's fun because I know that it's getting used. I know it's getting used in a way that keeps people safe. I know it's being used in a way that makes calls get resolved more quickly. We're constantly short resources out on patrol. To take a perimeter search that might last an hour and turn it into 20 minutes, that's not just 40 minutes, that's 40 minutes times the six to eight cops working that perimeter. You've saved hours of work with one relatively cheap piece of technology and a trained operator knowing how to use it. Officer Saud Badri: 100%. And even jumping off to that, to the second point I wanted to get to are the boxes, because that's the movement in general with law enforcement policing is not having them as much in a car that needs to be deployed, but having a deployable box on a roof on a building somewhere, usually police building and having a drone lift off from that. How was it like integrating what are basically essentially the DJI boxes onto our building at East Precinct because that's where it's housed right now. Then looking at the next generation stuff that's coming out and how it can apply. Sergeant Andy Jenson: I wish I knew the answer to that so far. I can tell you it's not that hard, but it's also hard because all our box drones actually belong to Gresham, so we work with them on that. It's their drone first responder projects when we get to participate. A lot of that headache wasn't mine, but looking forward, I like to draw the comparison to body worn cameras in 2015. A lot of agencies are picking them up. I think most agencies realizing this is what's coming. I think it's coming. It's just a matter of when we start to see the value in it enough to build that here. When we do that, I'm super excited for it because that will take a lot... I think it'll make things more efficient. I think the partner driving a half mile to your call, pulling the drone out, getting it ready, flying. It's only a couple minutes, but that's a couple minutes we could cut out of the equation with that next model, that drone first responder model. If you're not familiar, I know you're familiar, but that means that there's a police officer or some kind of drone pilot sitting at a computer, listening to the police radio and he hears the call, looks at a map and says, "Okay, I'm going to fly a drone there." He's sitting there able to fly the drone basically via the internet instead of hand controller looking at his drone. He flies it, uses the computer as his control, goes to the call, he's still monitoring the radio and able to interact with police officers. The drone takes off out of a little hanger, its own private little dock, and it gets to the call at 40, 45 miles an hour, depending on the model, and that's probably going to get quicker as time progresses. There's no need to unfold the arms. There's no need to throw a battery in it. It's kept in a ready to fly state. It's going to speed up the workflow. I think as the technology advances and the drones go from basically they're talking to each other on WiFi networks at this point, but they're all going to move to cellular LTE connections. Those drones are going to be able to go farther and faster and I think that's going to scale the ability of this technology to get to calls way quicker, which makes you more effective. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah, especially with like the growth of ultra-wideband frequencies, some of these tools that we have now, potentially in the future, like in a couple years or not, like there's going to be almost zero latency, even though we're on one side of Portland flying a drone on the other side of Portland. We just added the spotlight and the speaker to it now so that if we need to give commands to someone we can, or in the dark, if the IR camera isn't working, we can literally flood a light down there and see what there is visually with the other camera sensors is awesome. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Yep. Officer Saud Badri: Where we're talking up this great program, if someone's like, "Wow, I really want to get into the drone program right now." What are some of the tips that you would give them? Sergeant Andy Jenson: It's not very different from getting into most specialty jobs in the police bureau. Show your interest early and start working toward that interest. I say working toward it. I wouldn't expect somebody, especially a brand new officer, to just come to me and say, "Hey, I want to be in the drone program." That's good information for both of us to have. It doesn't get them much. Nobody in the police bureau really gets to go right to some cool job right away. Officer Saud Badri: Nope. Sergeant Andy Jenson: I sure didn't. You got to take a test, you've got to compete with some peers, but if you're into it because you're like, "Aviation's cool, but I'm not very techie." Start working on becoming a little bit more techie. I found that the best pilots in this unit are nerdier than the average cop and that's okay because they're still good cops. They still have the same motivations, but they're comfortable around technology, they're comfortable learning new technology, using new technology because it can be daunting. It's daunting for me when I'm looking at a new model of drone or I'm contemplating buying a new piece of software, it's daunting to learn new stuff and it gets more daunting the older you get, but you have to stay willing to do that. If you come into this, express interest, stay a little bit nerdy and try to stay up to date on technology, you've already got a leg up on, honestly, a lot of folks who just don't put in that extra effort to stay caught up. As a practical matter, get your Part 107 license. If you come in saying, "Hey, I'm allowed to fly these things commercially already," because that's a couple days of studying and a written test. It at least shows like this person is really interested because time's being what they are. We can't just pay for everybody who's interested to go get their 107 license on company time. Most of our pilots came to the unit with those already, which it makes you more competitive. It shows this is something I really want to do because it's an interest I took outside of work. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. I think that's probably another thing that a lot of the people, myself included in this have is like an interest in drones outside of police work because they're just a great tool. Again, we've been talking about how I think maybe at the onset drones were more of a novelty than anything else, but now they're like a filmography tool that professionals use because it's angles that don't require nearly as much gear to fly out and make these incredible shots with. Think if you tried to rig something up like scaffolding to do the exact same thing, it'd be 10 times the cost. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Yeah. Hollywood beat us to it for sure. They figured out that it's so much of what they do as a matter of perspective. And I think cops are finally catching up on realizing if we can get a different view of something, we can change our approach to problems, tactical problems, and that's what drones give us. I think cops all over the country are realizing and leaders all over the country are realizing like, this is a perspective that helps and drones are great for giving us that perspective without buying $10,000 and rigging to get there. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. One of the things that I think the bureau tries to do a lot, especially with the community is be very transparent about the work that we're doing. We've had community members come and sit down and talk with us about what is the drone program, but we even have the app that leads into the website that people can view. Want to talk about that a little bit? Sergeant Andy Jenson: Sure. Yeah. Part of why I enjoy this job, it makes it easy. Prior to me getting there, we set up basically a public facing portal where every mission we fly is visible to the public. They all show up on the public website. It makes it super easy when people call with concerns, "Hey, there was a drone in my neighborhood. Was it you guys? What's going on? " It's really easy for me to go, "Yeah, that was us and this is why." Or, "No, that might have been privately owned drone. That may have been somebody else's drone, but I can tell you that's not important police bureau drone and here's the website to look at." Like I said, it makes it easy. I'm happy we work that way because it makes it really easy to get support inside and outside the organization for what we do because really there's no reason to use these in any way that's sneaky because we don't need to. Officer Saud Badri: That's the thing is like there's so many people and you've seen it probably too, whether we're out doing a patrol or a training or something like that, you've got the people who are rubbernecking and turning their heads to see, well, what are they doing? As soon as they see a drone, their phones are coming out because they're just like, "This is so cool." It's so interesting. It is a cool technology and this job isn't necessarily technology forward all the time. It wasn't long ago where we're still using pen and paper to write reports and stuff and filing it that way. Now we're using a drone to help capture criminals and whatnot or help someone that's been lost in the forest. Just a cool little step up with all the technology we got. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Yeah. It's super exciting to see technology integration speeding things up because like you said, I haven't been around that long, but I was here for the era of paper reports and nowadays, we've reached the point where if you're on a call, you can import some of the data from the call into your report, which that's probably 15 year old, 20 year old technology, but to us it's like, oh, it's more efficient. It's quicker. Drones have a space in that where the evidence we collect, I think within a couple of years we'll be able to integrate stuff just as easily into our CAD systems and make things more efficient. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. That's an interesting... Maybe that's a good segue into the ending here of maybe the most optimal view of how the drone program moves into the future. I'm giving you Sergeant Jenson the magic wand right now. If in five years you're still in charge of this program, where would you like it to be? What would you like to see? What kind of integration level would the program have in your mind? Sergeant Andy Jenson: I would love for us to have a citywide drone first responder program, not as an expansion of what we do, but just a way to make it modern and efficient. I think it would take what we do with our patrol drones. It would make it faster. It would make it safer because you wouldn't have to have a police officer standing there on the perimeter doing this. You have someone in an office doing that, handling that tech police work, so the police there on the scene can actually do the job they want to do when they're there on the scene. That's my goal. If we could get a citywide drone first responder program in the next five years, I'd be ecstatic. I think that would be- Officer Saud Badri: I'd be ecstatic. Sergeant Andy Jenson: I think it would make cops safer. I think it would make the community safer. I think it would help us occasionally catch the people who victimize community members and try to get away from the police. Ultimately, I think that's what most cops want to do. It's like, well, they hurt somebody in my community. I'd like to have them held accountable, so we have to identify them and finding them tonight's the best time to do that the night the crime happened. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. To something that we were talking about earlier maybe is like the response to that drone first responder program, especially by East Precinct, like you're getting to a location in two minutes or less, in most cases. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Yeah. The initial stats from that program are super exciting. We're the first unit on a call more than half the time. We're able to, I think, beat... We're first on scene over half the time. When you look at average response times, we're getting to calls in like one fifth or one sixth of the time that overworked patrol officers are able to get to... The whole Portland Police Bureau is not as fast as it once was due to staffing, but this technology is a way to help cover that shortage because we can get anywhere in range pretty quickly and at least get eyes on a call and figure out what the appropriate resources are to send. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Sometimes the appropriate resources are no police. We'll get to a call and say, "This is over. It's already left or it's not what the person said is happening." We're able to put that information out. Sometimes we're able to clear police officers from going to a call. That's one of the huge sales techniques I use to sell this program to police officers is like, "We don't make work. Sometimes we actually make your job easier. We'll go to a call first and see this unsafe thing is now safe." We'll tell you that on the radio, we'll tell you what we're seeing. Then if you say, "It sounds like we're not there anymore," we've resolved that call and you can go to the real emergency that somebody's already waiting on hold with 911 for because ultimately that's where the community needs us more. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. No, 100%. So cool. I'm thinking in my head right now, the technology of cars and how much they've improved and whatnot. I'm thinking, yeah, in five years, having a greater drone first responder program, but then not also that. We look at our body cams and all the technology that's getting thrown into those as well and probably the technology that's going to get thrown into our cars. Policing in the next five years is going to be very tech heavy and probably in a good way, but maybe some bad way just because you have to learn all that stuff, but it's going to be really interesting and cool. I think this place, and you can chime in too, is like, this place wants to do good police work and it wants to do police work safe and well. We get so much training. We do training every month or every other month just for the drones, just so we get that time under our belt so that when that critical incident happens, we're out there knowing what we're doing and got all that experience. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Yeah, and my experience here in the police bureau, this goes back to talking about our dashboard and how we show our work. We do things responsibly. I feel like never in my time here as the Portland Police Bureau said, "Here's a cool toy. Let's go play with it." There is so much consternation over these tools, which I think we ultimately benefit from because it's sometimes frustrating on things are slow to roll out, but the end product is a super easy to use and easy to defend product when people say, "Hey, why are you using that technology? I don't get it or I don't trust it." Because we spend so much time making things are done in a way that's transparent and safe, it makes it really easy for police officers or supervisors to say, "No, this is why we use it now and these are the rules we operate under." I'm happy that we work in that environment, sometimes frustrating, but the reality is it makes it really easy to sustain that progress because we don't develop and deploy something and then have the community say, "We don't like the way you're doing that and we don't want you to use that tool anymore." I would much rather deploy it right the first time in a way that people trust because then I can keep using that tool and using it well. I like the way that we do stuff like that around here because it ultimately makes our job easier. Officer Saud Badri: Yeah. No, I can't wait to see what the program looks like in five years and hopefully you're still wanting to do it and still wanting to be the head of it in five years. Kind of the beauty of this place is every five years people like to change and go into a new area if they want to. I feel like the people that are in the drone program, most of them want to stay in it for the long haul just because it's such a fun and interesting thing and you never know what's around the corner with technology and whatnot. Thank you, Sergeant Jenson for joining us. Thank you for talking with us about the drone program and anything. Is there anything else you want to say before we end the podcast? Sergeant Andy Jenson: No. Officer Saud Badri: I think we covered most of it. Sergeant Andy Jenson: I appreciate that. Officer Saud Badri: Well, thank you so much, man. I very much appreciate it. Sergeant Andy Jenson: Thank you. Officer Saud Badri: If you want to hear more about the drone program or any program at all, look at joinportlandpolice.com. We have all the information there, how to join the Portland Police Bureau. You can always reach out to us as well and we'll be happy to talk to you about the drone program and all the other cool programs we have here at the Bureau.