[Webinar] Drones and public safety
While crimes and accidents can have long lasting effects on the victims and their families, often the evidence they leave behind disappears all too soon.
Crime scenes can be disrupted inadvertently. Car accidents must be cleared so traffic can keep flowing. As time passes, the exact sequence of critical events may be forgotten by witnesses.
This challenge is faced daily by public safety organisations. This information must be captured if it’s to be admitted in court, or for learnings to be taken from it.
In a recent webinar, one of Pix4D’s geospatial professionals, Sam Pepple discussed drone mapping for public safety. Expert guests Mark Johnson, Founder and President of Visual Law Group and Walter Chomentowski, Geospatial Intelligence Specialist from Michigan State Police shared real world case studies and best practices.
Having handled legal cases in every US state (with the exception of Vermont and Delaware), Mr. Johnson has a wealth of knowledge, and shared several cases. These include a freeway collision where the offices on the scene took incorrect or incomplete measurements. Mr. Johnson was able to combine photographs taken at the scene with crime scene photos to create an accurate 3D reconstruction of the incident.
As well as use cases, Mr. Johnson also shared tips on finding accurate crush measurements in traffic accidents, and answered questions about the admissibility of drone data in court, and creating animations and videos from the data.
In his role with the Michigan State Police, Mr. Chomentowski helped ‘bootstrap’ a UAS (Unmanned Aerial System), flying more than 300 missions between 2015 and 2017, including a fugitive search. Mr. Chomentowski shared use cases (including a 53 vehicle crash documented with 0.5 inch details) and a nighttime crash.
Mr. Chomentowski spoke to privacy and legal considerations when using a drone for police work, and emphasized that documentation and approval are always essential. He highlighted the exact workflow used by the UAS team to get the results while adhering to the law.
