"Mobility is the ability to move to/from locations quickly to prevent, detect or respond, including to access difficult locations safely to maximise intelligence and minimise risk.
Autonomous vehicles, and particularly a combination of drones and fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, offer a faster, safer, cheaper, and more sustainable means of frontline deployment and advanced evidence capture. The National Police Air Service and the National Police Chiefs' Council’s National Lead for Drones have a joint strategy that sets out in detail the technical challenges we must overcome to be able to operate a suite of complementary response options. These relate to concerns over line-of-sight flying, safety, cybersecurity, costs of replacement and maintenance, expertise required to use, and poor battery life. Each of these need to be addressed alongside extensive consultation to ensure policing’s use is understood by the public, considered proportionate, and supported."
"We welcome your engagement with our ARIs in the following ways:
• If you have evidence that completely or partly supports or answers one of our ARIs, we invite you to share that with us. For any ongoing research relevant to policing and crime reduction, we encourage you to register your research on the College of Policing’s research projects map, which has been designed to promote collaboration and support requests for participants.
• If you are, or plan to be, carrying out research that relates to one of our ARIs, we’d like to hear about it. While we cannot respond to speculative approaches for research funding, we will where possible act to support your ambitions, including finding you policing partners where possible.
• If you are submitting a funding or grant application that aligns with one of our ARIs, we hope that referencing policing’s ARIs will help to strengthen your case for the possible public impact of the research.
• We will use the ARI document to structure our academic engagement, prioritise events and build new connections with external partners. We will be using our ARIs in our engagement with UKRI, and we will publish any opportunities for funding via our website https://science.police.uk/
Please send any correspondence and questions to csa@npcc.police.uk, including ‘ARI’ in the subject heading."
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
(1) RESEARCH CONTEXT: Following its establishment as a now-iconic warfighting tool, the drone increasingly features in domestic airspace. The domestic drone's meteoric rise is evident in the UK Government's ongoing inves...
Funded by: ESRC
Lead research organisation: University of Reading
Partially relevant as it focuses on the impact of domestic drones but does not specifically address safety and line-of-sight flying concerns in policing.
Prisons, aviation, utilities, borders, government estates, public events and individuals are increasingly seeking cost effective drone detection technology to counter the reckless and hostile use of consumer drones. Our...
Funded by: Innovate UK
Lead research organisation: HOUNDSTOOTH WIRELESS LIMITED
Partially relevant as it addresses the detection of drones to mitigate threats, but does not specifically focus on safety and line-of-sight flying concerns in policing.
This project consists of a consortium of organisations with expertise in engineering, aviation, and business to provide a clear path for development, testing and exploitation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The key a...
Funded by: Innovate UK
Lead research organisation: CAMBRIDGE SENSORIIS LTD
Fully relevant as it specifically addresses safety concerns, line-of-sight flying, and the use of drones in policing with expertise in engineering, aviation, and business.