PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — A new technology is making our beaches safer.
Clearwater Police are using drones to keep an eye on crime and emergency situations.
WATCH: Clearwater Police use drones to keep people safe over spring break
"It feels very safe. It feels crowded but in a good way, lots of things going on, we love it," said Nina Race, who visits Clearwater Beach every year.
This year, Race is thankful for how safe she feels.
"I think it’s excellent, especially to patrol the waters, I think it’s really good," said Race.
"I can manually fly like this and see on the map where I’m going," said Hannah Hodges, who operates the drone. "These buttons would be the zooming, and then the back buttons would be going up and down," said Hodges.
From the comfort of the Clearwater Police station, she uses a gaming controller to deploy the drone and fly it out over Clearwater Beach.
"I think this could be a game changer in terms of providing the officers responding to real time information before they even get there," said Clearwater Police Chief Eric Gandy.
Police said the drone can get out to the beach within a minute giving them critical information.
"It gives us a real time intelligence on what’s going on, so we have a fight involving weapons and can get there quickly and determine that there are or there are not weapons involved," said Gandy.
Clearwater Police Chief Eric Gandy said the drone allows them to determine if they need to deploy crews out to a call and to identify what kind of situation they are getting into before they arrive.
He also said its helped a lot with the busy beaches during Spring break.
"We have lost children. I think we flown three times for lost kids. We’ve flown for medical emergencies and crimes in progress," said Gandy.
Clearwater Police will run the pilot program through the end of March, then decide whether to extend the drone contract.
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