Mokena police preparing for drone implementation
By JON DEPAOLIS, Publisher
The Mokena Police Department will soon be able to use drones to assist their policing efforts.
Earlier in July, a total of eight employees of the department were trained on how to operate the drones. Sgt. Robert Williford said the training sessions included information on maintenance, orientation, setup and operations. He added that the drones will be able to assist police in ways that law enforcement would typically use helicopters.
“I think the best way to [describe it] is that not only is it an extra tool but a force multiplier,” said Williford after one of the training sessions on July 21. “If you have a child that wanders off in the middle of the night, this would be able to be launched. With the night vision flare capability, we would be able to see somebody moving down a street or in the grass. If a person with Alzheimer’s [or dementia] wandered off, we can put this up and hopefully be able to locate them faster. It will be able to cover more ground.”
The implementation of the drones follows after the police department installed Flock Safety cameras throughout town in 2020 and 2021.
“Items like this help us with our job, because our job is to help the community,” Williford said. “Any tool that becomes available and we’re able to go ahead and implement into our operations, it benefits the community. A lot of times, it [matters] more than that initial investment.”
The Village approved the purchase of two DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced drones and one DJI Mavic Air 2 earlier this year.
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The effort was spearheaded initially by Interim Police Chief Tim McCarthy prior to new Chief John Keating being hired by the Village.
“Over the past couple of months, drones borrowed from Orland Park have played a key role in at least two cases in which the [police department] was called into action,” according to a press release issued by the Village at the time.
The Village was able to purchase the drones using approximately $10,000 in asset forfeiture funds, meaning they were purchased at no cost to Mokena taxpayers.