BETWEEN January 1 and March 31 there were 868 individual drone flights across Devon and Cornwall, a Freedom of Information request has shown.

This is broken down to 187 separate ‘deployments’ – where one ‘deployment’ may involve more than one consecutive drone flight, or multiple drones operating at the same deployment/incident.

Officers will use drones in a variety of policing contexts.

The technology allows police to cover larger areas with less officers, to obtain images and information from different angles and to get views of areas where it would be dangerous to send a person.

Some examples include: capturing evidential images at crimes scenes and scenes of road traffic collisions; searching for missing people and offenders; supporting incidents where people are in dangerous positions or in hazardous terrain, and supporting partner agencies such as the fire brigade.