The Green Bay Police Department and Green Bay Metro Fire Department showed off four new first responder drones, June 15, 2026. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Technology is helping Green Bay’s police and fire crews improve their situational awareness and response efficiency.
On Monday, the Green Bay Police Department and Green Bay Metro Fire Department showed off four new first responder drones. These fully-automated devices can provide officials with a birds-eye view of locations and, in some situations, even clear 911 calls without ever responding to a scene.
Both GBPD and GBMFD recently completed the required training to pilot the drones, which will be stationed at the Green Bay Department of Public Works’ east-side and west-side facilities. The contract for the drones is $80,000 per year.
“We’re working, as we always do, in an environment where we have limited resources, so this helps us get first responders’ eyes on the situation faster. It helps us allocate our resources,” said Tom Denney, captain of the GBPD Community Services Division and head of the Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. “Maybe we send [the drone] to a call where we think we need more officers or more firefighters; we can get that intelligence here. Maybe we send it to a call and once we have eyes on it, we realize we don’t need officers or we don’t need the fire department or we need less than we thought.”
It gives us real-time intelligence. For both of our departments, that concrete, real-time information is like gold to us. That’s what helps us make decisions, that’s what helps us allocate our resources and that’s what helps us provide public safety and just get the best outcomes possible.
Denney said as of Monday morning, the drones had been flown by GBPD to 19 calls.
And it’s not just the police department benefiting; so is the fire department.
“As far as a structure fire or even fire alarms, we can send the drone to get eyes on it right away, to see how big our incident is. It gives us the availability to upgrade our alarm level right away to get more resources there,” said said Ben Peters, life safety educator with GBMFD.
That teamwork and collaboration helps both of us out, and if we can make the most use of our resources and be most efficient, teamwork is the best part.
Denney said the drone software has a lot of great automation and safety features built in, but an officer or firefighter always has to manually launch the drone and monitor it as it flies.
An analysis from Flock shows in 2024, there were 4,248 calls for service in Green Bay that could have been cleared by a drone without a patrol response. That equals the work of almost two full time officers — an estimated value of $241,807.
What Green Bay is looking to do with these drones has already been in practice at the Grand Chute Police Department.
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