UAS are being used across China to help police conduct a variety of missions.

Recently, a UAS was used to help search for, and capture, a man who robbed a woman and then disappeared into a “sprawling, muddy village” in the Minhang District.

Through the Shanghai Daily, officer Wen Jia of the Tianyuan Xincun police station (which handled the Minhang robbery) explained why the UAS was so beneficial in this situation by saying, “in the case of the June 1 robbery, we didn’t have enough manpower to quickly search the whole village. A drone did the work for us.”

The Tianyuan Xincun police station regularly uses a UAS to fly around its territorial jurisdiction to make sure that everything is okay.

In the suburban district of Qingpu, UAS are also seen as extremely beneficial, as Huang Xinlong, an experienced crime squad officer in the district, says, “when you’re on the ground, you only have a limited view. But a drone can provide a panorama — a view that would require many officers to provide.”

Huang, who is leading the district's efforts to make UAS a regular part of police work, adds that it would take just two months for a person who just started learning how to fly a UAS to pass the tests and get a license.

But Huang says that it would take longer for an operator to adjust to some of the more intricate details of flying UAS for policing operations.

“Sometimes we have to steer a drone to a certain distance where its noise won’t alert a suspect in hiding,” Huang says. “It takes a while to get used to the idea that a drone may be gone from your sight but that’s no reason for anxiety.”

Other Shanghai districts use UAS for crowd and traffic control. A traffic police officer in the city of Pudong, who is also a UAS specialist, says that UAS can also be used “to record traffic violations on crowded elevated roads and bark out warnings to offenders with the loudspeakers they carry.”