Lakewood Police Department to buy thermal drone

An almost $14,000 thermal drone approved by the Lakewood Village Board will be used primarily be used for search and rescue purposes, Lakewood Sgt. Sean McGrath said.

The purchase of the $13,710 DJI Matrice M30T thermal drone was unanimously approved by the Lakewood Village Board last week. The camera can pick up on heat temperatures, helping police spot people in wooded areas and under various weather conditions.

The police department is covering the costs of the drone through a Starcom grant and 35% of village’s annual vehicle sticker revenue, Lakewood Police Chief Mike Roth said. Half of the cost will be paid now and the department will have until next year to pay the other $6,855.

Roth described a hit-and-run on Algonquin Road last week that could have benefitted from the drone. A driver hit a pedestrian Aug. 3 near Lakewood and Ackman roads. Roth said if the department had a drone, he thinks the driver could have been found that day.

“This would have really came in handy at the time,” Roth said. “We did get a warrant on the guy today [Aug. 8], but we had to go the long route.”

McGrath will be the licensed operator of the drone. The department is working on getting another officer trained so someone on staff licensed to operate it is always available, he said.

The drone will be delivered to the department Friday, McGrath said.

The department could also use the drone for crash investigations instead of relying on the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office, McGrath said, adding he is open to conversations about sharing the drone with neighboring communities for searches and investigations.

“We’ll be the only agency in the county that has this (kind of thermal) drone,” McGrath said. “That is a benefit not only to our community but to the communities around us.”

This model has the highest “ingress protection rating,” which means it can handle almost any kind of weather. McGrath said that other departments have drones that can fly in only light rain or no rain at all.

“We wanted the ability to have a tool that isn’t going to be dictated on when it’s going to be used based on the weather,” he said.

The drone will be equipped with a spotlight, camera and microphone. Officers would have the ability to speak to people the drone sees, but would not be able to hear what they say, McGrath said.

The department chose this drone out of three options, this model being the most expensive of the three. Originally, the drone was priced at over $18,000, but the manufacturer recently dropped the price by about $4,000 because a newer model was released, Roth said.

This year’s Lakewood Police Department budget is just more than $2.1 million, about $200,000 more than last year, according to Lakewood Police Department records.

When asked by a trustee about whether the cost made sense in light of the department’s size, McGrath said he picked the costlier model because it can be used year-round while non-thermal drones cannot because of harsh weather conditions and the visual impairment of rain and snow on standard cameras.

“Kids with autism tend to wander and they tend to wander toward water,” McGrath said. “It would be frustrating to us to know that we cannot deploy a drone because it’s raining.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the type of drone the Lakewood Police Department purchased. It was a DJI Matrice M30T thermal drone.