Most people wouldn't think of drones when talking about policing. But it's a growing area of operational support, run by the team at our Remote Piloted Aircraft and Systems Unit (RPAS).
Transcript: Get to know Victoria Police - Remote Piloted Aircraft and Systems Unit (RPAS)
[Constable Brad Hopwood voiceover]: RPAS stands for Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Systems, otherwise known as UAVs or drones, more commonly.
And the RPAS unit sits under the Air Wing and manages and has oversight of all the remote pilots flying drones for the organisation across the state.
We’ll often find ourselves working with Missing Persons Unit, or Homicide, clan labs, intel gathering, and crime scene documentation.
We do training for the remote pilots across the state who have other roles, but also fly drones.
RPAS also does counter RPAS which is all the counter drone ops for all major events.
A lot of them might be benign, harmless hobbyists, but still accidents can happen. So our job is to keep those drones at bay by detection and mitigation.
Often we’re called upon to assist in search and rescue, and it can be in different environments.
It can be marine on the bay, or could be alpine conditions in the mountains where people have been hiking, and the drone offers a means of quite effectively covering large bits of area, using both visual and thermal imaging to search for the people that need our assistance.
What I find most rewarding about what I do is that I know well and truly it does make a difference.
Whether it's to police on the ground doing what I need to do on a day-to-day basis, or whether it's in a courtroom getting the evidence across in such a way that it's indisputable, and keeping Victorians safe.
It's that sort of thing that, yeah, gets us up in the morning.
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Specialist roles and areas
Learn more about RPAS along with other specialist roles and areas for police officers.
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