In Yamhill County, Oregon, the police drone stopped being news years ago. The Newberg-Dundee Police Department became the county’s first agency to certify pilots and deploy drones back in 2022, and today it flies a six-aircraft fleet while the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office operates four more. Between them, the two agencies have quietly built something DroneXL sees more often in big-city programs: a department where the drone is standard equipment, reached for as naturally as a flashlight. The photos accompanying the Newberg Graphic’s reporting show DJI enterprise aircraft doing that daily work, including what I identified as the Matrice 4TD.
The Drone Goes In Before The Officer Does
Building clearing is where the change shows most. A reported burglary or an open door used to mean sending in a K-9 or officers moving room to room. Now a small indoor drone goes first. It can’t open doors, but it clears a house faster than a dog team and it reports back in live video instead of barks.
Deputy PJ Morrissey of the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office put the case for that in one sentence: “We’d much rather they shoot at a drone than us.” That is the entire argument for interior drones, delivered in nine words by someone who flies them on real calls.
The fleets split the work deliberately. Newberg-Dundee runs a mix of indoor and outdoor models across its six aircraft, and the Sheriff’s Office pairs two indoor drones with two outdoor ones. Different aircraft for different rooms, the same way a patrol rifle and a sidearm serve different distances.
Six of Newberg’s 37 officers hold FAA remote pilot certificates, with recurring in-house training on top. That ratio, roughly one pilot for every six officers, means a certified operator is usually on shift without the department needing a dedicated drone unit.
Thermal At 400 Feet Ends Foot Pursuits
Detective Ariel Siqueiros of Newberg described the outdoor mission that pays off most: “The drone (is) very useful in being able to go up 400 feet in the air, turn on the thermal imaging at night and see someone running.” A fleeing suspect can outrun an officer. Nobody outruns a thermal camera at 400 feet (122 m).
The mission list beyond pursuits reads like a small agency’s whole caseload: missing person searches, crime scene documentation from above, directing responding officers to a suspect’s exact position, and following up on vehicle pursuits. Oregon has had drone guidelines for public agencies since 2013 and a state registry since 2016, which today counts 1,172 public drones registered with 690 active. Yamhill County’s ten aircraft are a small piece of a state that normalized this early…