A paedophile who used a drone to follow children around a primary school playing field — reducing at least one pupil to tears — has been handed a suspended sentence and walked free from court, despite having previous convictions for similar offending dating back more than a decade.
Jeremy Bird, 48, from Salisbury, flew the lightweight aircraft over a primary school in the Wiltshire city on several occasions in September 2023, using it to track children as they played in the grounds. In one incident captured on video and described to the court, a child was followed by the drone while running and crying. Prosecutor Elizabeth Valera told Winchester Crown Court: “There’s one video where a child is actually followed, and they’re running and crying while he follows them with a drone.”
At around the same time, teachers from a second school in Salisbury reported a man recording children on his phone and attempting to chat with them during a trip to a harvest festival. The same man was then spotted in a nearby vehicle appearing to take further photographs of the children. Police identified the suspect as Bird.
When officers arrested him and searched his electronic devices, they uncovered what was described as a “considerable number” of indecent images of unknown children, including Category A material — the most serious classification. Bird pleaded guilty to two counts of making indecent images of children and recklessly allowing an aircraft to endanger people or property. His defence counsel Paul Jones sought to distance the drone charge from the wider picture, arguing that Bird had accepted flying the equipment recklessly only because he lacked the appropriate qualification to operate it.
Bird was sentenced to 19 months in prison, suspended for two years, at Winchester Crown Court on Tuesday. He was also made subject to a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order, which restricts his internet use and travel, prohibits him from owning or operating a drone and requires him to allow police to conduct checks at his home address.
The leniency of the outcome drew a pointed response from Wiltshire Police’s Complex Crime Investigator Debbie Quayle, who said Bird had “taken no accountability for his actions and the fear he put into the children when flying his drone near to them to film them.” She credited the schools with coming forward and making the prosecution possible. “Without their support we would be unaware of the extent of his offending,” she said.
The case is made more troubling by the fact that Bird had previous relevant convictions. In 2011, he was handed a community order after being found in possession of indecent images of children — suggesting that earlier intervention had done nothing to curtail his offending.
