Bend Police Embraces Drones, Grapples with State Limits

On May 30, the Bend Police Department received a report that a Bend resident had threatened to execute a mass shooting in the area. The man, identified as 36-year-old Nathaniel Benjamin Wright, was known to own multiple firearms.

Bend PD officers responded to Wright’s home on NE Waller Avenue and saw his white truck parked in the driveway. Given the high-risk call, an officer deployed a drone in the air while another officer observed from a distance.

Through the use of the drone, officers were able to see Wright exit the home, carrying an AR-15-style rifle and a duffel bag while wearing a ballistic vest. Officers saw Wright remove the vest, place it in the vehicle and proceed to get into the truck to leave the residence.

While Wright was still in the driveway, officers stopped the vehicle and ordered him out of the car at gunpoint. Wright complied without incident and was taken into custody and transported to St. Charles Bend, according to a press release.

“There was a really positive outcome in that, and a big part of it was the drone being able to see real time what was happening with that individual, and that was relayed to the first responders that were all out there,” said Bend Police Officer Brian Beekman.

According to Beekman, drones allow police officers to obtain a bird’s eye view of a situation and form a plan that best serves the incident.

Bend PD has one of the longest-running public safety drone programs in the state, going back to 2016. Almost immediately after gaining access to the technology, Beekman said, the department saw its benefits.

An example was when Bend PD was locating the body of an individual who drowned in the Deschutes River in July 2017. A Bend PD drone officer flew the drone over the water and was able to find and recover the body.

“Through our eyes, and public safety at that time, we saw a technology tool like that could be used to resolve a very difficult incident, to keep first responders safe, to function in a way that we couldn’t,” Beekman told the Source.

To get that type of visibility on a call, in the past, Beekman said there would have to be a helicopter or a fixed-wing airplane, to the tune of likely millions of dollars.

“What we saw was huge potential, benefits and very, very few drawbacks. So, we got pretty excited about the technology, and we’ve grown our program pretty significantly.”

If not for the drone during the May 30 shooting threat, officers would’ve had to walk up the driveway and confront the individual face-to-face, Beekman said, which could’ve led to an incident, confrontation or an officer-involved shooting.

“We can now put technology in the middle of that and hold the first responders in the reserve to come up with a better plan to deal with that person. And so that’s exactly what happened on that call,” Beekman told the Source.

State limitations

While the shooting threat fell under the allowable uses of a drone, under current state law, there are limitations on how and when officers can use drones to assess an incident.

In 2013, House Bill 2710 established that law enforcement may only use drones in certain circumstances, including with a warrant, with probable cause and for search and rescue and crime scene reconstruction, among others.

In addition to state laws, the Federal Aviation Administration has its own set of rules around drone locations, the size of drones and how far above ground they can go.

A proposed bill in the Oregon legislature, Senate Bill 238, could address some of the current limitations, widening the scope of drone usage.

“There’s a whole slice of public safety calls that drones could play a positive role in that we’re not able to do at the moment,” Beekman said.

According to Beekman, drones can currently be used at crime scenes, traffic crashes, search and rescue operations, criminal events with probable cause and criminal exigency – an emergency situation that justifies a warrantless search or arrest. Officers can also deploy a drone through a search warrant.

“It sounds like a lot of things, but it actually is a pretty narrow sliver of all the public safety stuff we get involved in,” he said.

The bill, if passed, would allow police departments to deploy drones in response to any call for service, with certain limitations.

The Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs is a state entity that’s in support of the bill.

According to Aaron Schmautz, president of the Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs, SB 238 would allow the state to develop and further laws for drones as officers develop new ways of using them within their communities.

“As technology develops, laws have to develop along with them to ensure they’re keeping up with those technological improvements” Schmautz told the Source.

With this, Schmautz said, they could deploy it to see if dangerous circumstances still exist and see where to best send police officers, in a world where there are not enough police officers.

“They’re very useful in tactical circumstances, getting them into tight spaces and observing environments where you’re not sure if police are the best deployment. You’re also seeing expansion into deploying them from a static location, as opposed to having a police officer drive them to a location and deploy them from that location.”

Opponents to the bill have raised concerns around increased surveillance and issues of privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon has been vocal about its opposition to the bill. In written testimony on the bill, Michael Abrams, policy counsel with ACLU of Oregon, said the bill would provide a “legislative blank check for law enforcement agencies to begin deploying seemingly unlimited quantities of drones in a wide variety of situations.”

“This massive delegation of power to law enforcement could easily usher in an era of mass aerial surveillance that has a severe chilling effect on public speech, assembly, and movement, potentially in violation of Oregonian’s state constitutional rights against unreasonable searches,” Abrams wrote in the testimony.

He said the bill would risk exacerbating existing biases in law enforcement, particularly with respect to the over-policing and mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color.

Beekman with Bend PD said he’s read a lot of the opposing arguments. He agrees that the technology should have some good safeguards but argued that a lot of public safety calls come with unknown risk. A drone, he said, can help size up a call for service, rather than a department sending an officer into a situation that could lead to confrontation.

“I would make the argument that it’s a much better tool with much lower risk to everyone involved, where we can see what’s happening in the moment and then come up with a good solution for that issue,” he said.

While privacy and surveillance is a large complaint for drones as a whole, Beekman said they are not intended to be a “sneaky” tool – since people can typically see and hear them.

According to Beekman, Bend PD has made an effort to be transparent about its drone usage and has taken initiative to publicly report its drone flights on its website.

“I think when you marry up transparency and good policy, there’s a real opportunity for better public safety,” Beekman said.

The House Committee on Rules scheduled a public hearing for June 11.

This article appears in Source Weekly June 12, 2025.