It is just north of Disney World. But to the men and women of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, the 1,600 square miles they patrol is no fantasy. Marion County’s highways, forests, and suburban neighborhoods are crime scenes to over ,7000 felonies a year. But with a jurisdiction larger than the state of Rhode Island, it’s impossible for ground units to have eyes everywhere. With so much territory to cover, the Sheriff has a secret weapon: state-of-the-art helicopters manned by elite police pilots. Known as Air One - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - these chopper cops are equipped with high-tech infrared cameras and augmented reality mapping capabilities, allowing them to see in the dark and locate the bad guys for cops on the ground in hot pursuit. As the Sheriff’s “eye in the sky,” they detect where perpetrators are hiding, where they’re running, and whether they are armed. It’s like a real-life video game of hunter and hunted. The POV toggles between hair-raising 100-mile-an-hour car chases and crosshair aerial views that make residential areas feel like a scoped-out battlefield. Chasing down carjackings and shooters on the run, guiding an armed SWAT team to an elusive suspect, or locating a family lost in the woods - it’s all fair game for these high-tech cops in their tricked-out flying machines. Failure is not an option. They are “chopper cops.
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