SAN ANTONIO – The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office showed off its new fleet of drones.
The two Federal Aviation Administration drone operators with the department demonstrated what the four new drones can do at the North Substation on Thursday morning.
The small fleet consists of two commercial and two compact drones.
The smaller aircraft have fixed focus cameras and thermal imaging capabilities and can go places helicopters can’t.
“It’s really cool. The technology is awesome. We’ve learned so much in doing this,” said Detective Trace Shannon, with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. “We started out with the traffic portion and doing the crime scenes, but now it's expanded into tactical operations, which gives our SWAT operators that technical advantage.”
The total price for each drone is between $25,000 and $30,000.
The drones will be used for tactical operations such as standoffs or barricaded subjects, accident reconstruction and for intelligence-gathering purposes.