Minnetonka Police Department receives 2026 City of Excellence Award for their DFR program
Minnetonka Police Department received the 2026 City of Excellence Award for its Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, recognizing the city’s innovative approach to improving emergency response and public safety operations. Supported by the Real-Time Operations Center, the program uses drones to provide immediate visual intelligence for 911 incidents, helping dispatchers and first responders assess scenes faster, deploy the right resources, and improve outcomes. With drones often arriving ahead of ground units, plus strong privacy policies and a public transparency dashboard, Minnetonka’s award-winning DFR program has become a model for efficient, accountable public safety innovation.
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- Here today we're in the real-time operations center here at the Minneton
- Police Department, so this serves as our main location to connect information
- and criminal intelligence while also supporting our officers in the field,
- including our firefighters and paramedics as they respond to 911 incidents.
- The Drones as First Responder Project is a project that allows our public safety
- personnel to send a drone out to get eyes on a situation when we get a call
- that comes into our call center, the dispatch will let us know,
- and in appropriate instances they'll send a drone out to better understand
- what the issue is and to give our dispatch and our responders the
- opportunity to deploy the appropriate resources.
- We have roughly 700 cul-de-sacs in the city, and so that makes it very
- difficult when you don't have true north-south east-west roadways,
- and so with the drones they're able to get to calls within two minutes.
- That's happening 68 percent of the time where our drones are responding
- before a squad car or a public safety personnel member can get there.
- Overall, crime has not been increasing in Minnetonka,
- but call volume has increased, and so this gives us an opportunity
- to create some efficiencies without having to bring on additional personnel
- to deal with those call volume increases.
- I think when you talk about safety, it's beyond just criminal activity.
- In fact, I would say it's more so to assist our fire department,
- our public works department, we all have a responsibility to provide public safety.
- What we did was make sure that privacy issues and surveillance issues
- were addressed at the outset to make sure that everybody's rights were being
- preserved, that we weren't gathering information or data that wasn't otherwise
- appropriate under the circumstances, and made sure that our ordinances
- aligned the state statute and also the expectation of our residents.
- With our dashboard, the public can go see all of our drone flights,
- have access to those drone flights, and so we're transparent about it.
- We've had folks call and ask us about the data and how it's protected.
- I mean, information's power, and the more we can have on the front end,
- we can develop good solutions and slow things down.
- We are shaving off seconds and minutes of responses,
- and that's something that is just remarkable for how law enforcement
- emergency response has moved in this century. It's remarkable.
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Watch Time
2 Mins 51 Secs