From ground to air: How police use drones in their search for missing people

Sergeant Steven Pollock is part of the Air Support Unit, helping to provide a Scotland-wide eye in the sky to help trace vulnerable people.

Meanwhile, the search unit will be at ground level, carefully combing terrain to find and bring back those who are lost.

The Glasgow Times is this week meeting the Police Scotland search teams who work behind the scenes to bring loved ones back to their families.

Steven, who was previously a firearms officer and has been four years with air support, has had a busy few days finding a person who was lost in the Ochil Hills and tracing a man in Pollok Park.

Air support will help with vehicle pursuits, patrols and crime-related searches but its "bread and butter" is missing people.

While Steven is a trained air observer - specialist officers who fly with the helicopter - he is also one of only four drone operators in the west of Scotland.

In 2019 Police Scotland introduced high-tech drones to supplement the work of air support with one based in Glasgow, one in Inverness and one in Aberdeen.

Steven said: "We only have one helicopter covering the whole of Scotland, which is why the drones are important as well.

READ MORE: Police Scotland's dive and marine unit hunt for missing persons

"The drone is limited in that it can't respond as quickly, it's more slow-time stuff, whereas the helicopter can respond straight away, so you do require both of them.

"The drone has the same capabilities as the helicopter in terms of it's got optical and thermal imaging cameras."

If the area is small enough or conditions aren't right for the helicopter, the drone officers will be sent out to the scene.

They are called in by a Police Search Adviser (PolSA) who gives specialist advice on the overall search.

Always working in pairs, one officer will fly the drone while the other keeps watch on live camera footage.

Steven said: "In the initial stages of the inquiry you might only have two officers out looking and then the helicopter above.

"If we can get there quickly, and if the person is in that area, then it's a great asset because the officers could be walking about for ages and missing them, whereas, especially at night time, we've got the thermal image cameras so they will stand out."

There's no such thing as a typical day for the air unit but after a weather and safety briefing at the start of shift from the pilot, it's a case of "waiting for the phone to go" – and the phone rings often.

The pilot and the helicopter are supplied by Babcock and the chopper will fly with two police air observers on board too, one in the front manning the front camera and one at the back covering everything from ground communication to navigation and photography.

READ MORE: Police Scotland's dive and marine unit hunt for missing persons

As well as using cameras, the air observers carry out open door searches, which sound terrifying - but Steven insists are not.

He said: "The air observer is harnessed in and will open the rear door and sit on the edge with their feet on the skids.

"I'm terrified of heights but I'm alright with that.

"It's quite weird, it's strange, I don't like open heights like the top of a building but once you're in that seat and fastened in there's so much going on you don't really notice."

Finding a missing person is really pivotal to Steven and, like the other officers we speak to, the absolute highlight of the job.

"You're ecstatic," he added.

"It doesn't matter what role you're doing, your specialist role or as a response officer, you need to help people.

"Ultimately you don't know what that person that day is going through. If we get them at the right time, it could help them going forward."

While Steven is in the air, police constables Steven Markey, Allison Scott and John Gibbons are part of the team on the ground.

Between them, the trio has more than 50 years of policing experience, and they put their skills to use as a search unit tasked with finding high risk missing people, searching crime scenes for evidence, working in counter terrorism and taking a role in public order.

Allison said: "If a call comes in to us it's because the person is deemed as high risk.

"That could be through different vulnerabilities: they could have dementia, they could have previously stated they had thoughts of suicide, or their mental health is just particularly low.

"If it's a child, that would be a vulnerable missing person."

The officer supervising the missing person case will map out an area that needs searched and direct the team to where they are needed.

The person's home will be searched first and the search unit has specialist skills to do this.

Steven Markey said: "Folk can go missing for hours, days, however long, and turn out to be underneath the insulation in the loft.

"We're trained to a more advanced level than divisional cops so we'll go into places they might not think to go in and we'll take any doubts away that they are in the house."

They will then move on to an identified search area where they look for the person but also anything that might show them what way that person has gone, such as a phone or bank cards.

Covid-19 has taken its toll on the team with an increased number of missing persons due to the pandemic.

At the start of lockdown the search team was asked to go to homes and remove bodies where undertakers were unwilling to do so.

Allison said: "The majority of our work now is missing persons.

"More people have had poor mental health due to the pandemic so a lot more people are going missing, a lot more high risk people.

"I would say about 90% of our work is searching for missing people and I think that will be an ongoing issue, particularly in the generation that's come up through the pandemic.

"There's obviously a lot more people going missing so a lot more searches but the resources aren't as good because there's a lot of absences due to Covid so it's been pretty full on."

Steven said resources had been hard hit, particularly with shifts having to go out in two vans instead of one.

He added: "It started off and we were wrapping ourselves up in white paper suits, taping ourselves in, and that was horrible.

"Unfortunately a lot of the time we were getting kitted up to go and carry people out of houses because undertakers wouldn't take folk out."

The work is physically demanding and Allison says sometimes their legs are "shredded" from the terrain they are searching.

But, while intensely physical, the job is its own reward.

Finding someone safe and well is "amazing", Allison says.

She added: "You're returning someone to their family and they are - 24/7 - up, worried, relying on us.

"A lot of the times families are out looking themselves but if we can say we've found your loved one safe and well then that's the only reward we're looking for.

"If the person is found but not safe and well then to return them to their loved ones, rather than years of not knowing, is better, where they can be laid to rest."