Winston-Salem PD slashes response times with Skydio and Prepared
The Winston-Salem Police Department used to lose 4+ minutes before a patrol officer even started responding.
Now, a Skydio drone is airborne within 10 seconds of a 911 call and on scene within 120 seconds of launch.
The difference: a direct integration between Skydio's command platform and Prepared, which feeds live 911 audio, call transcriptions, and AI-generated summaries to DFR operators in real time.
Pilots no longer wait for dispatch to relay information. They identify response need the moment a call comes in. Assistant Chief Manny Gomez explains how the old workflow created compounding delays at every handoff, and how the new workflow eliminates them.
- If you look at it as a whole, we are now arriving on scene
- in what it used to take to just ingest the call. That's Guiles.
- The essence of DFR requires getting there quickly and having the right context
- for
- the operator to team with the people on the ground, which is why we are
- incredibly excited
- to announce our partnership with Prepared, which is really the future of 911.
- To tell you more about it, I'm very excited to be joined by Michael Chime, the
- CEO Prepared.
- Yeah, thanks so much, Adam. What we do is when a 911 call comes in, we have
- assistive AI that
- helps that operator, helps that person handling the call, process it as fast
- and as high quality
- as they possibly can. The second that we transcribe it, that information is
- accessible,
- whether that's in the field, whether that's for DFR, that could be in your real
- -time crime center
- platform, like a FUSIS, that information's there, and we save those seconds or
- we save those minutes.
- Prepared, I think, is really the single most valuable source of information for
- DFR operators,
- because it can get the call data with very low latency, it shows up instantly,
- and then it provides
- all the context they need to do their job. It tells them what they're heading
- into, they can get the
- live audio, they can get the call transcription, they can get the AI summary,
- and that gives them
- everything they need to do their job as effectively as possible. And we're very
- fortunate to be joined
- today by Assistant Chief Manny Gomez, who oversees criminal intelligence for
- Winston-Salem Police
- Department. So thank you for joining us here. Can you describe the before
- situation, so before
- you had Prepared and DFR integrated, what was the time response, and then what
- does that look like
- now? Yeah, so that was, that was, call comes in, this call taker, ingest the
- call into the CAD system,
- and then sends it over to dispatch. The dispatcher then sends that call to our
- virtual personnel.
- That was a workflow that we had to go through to get that call for service, to
- get an officer to
- even begin to respond to that call for service. So now what we're doing is, as
- soon as the call
- for service comes in, the pilot can go ahead and make a determination that he
- needs to respond
- to the location. By the time he hits the launch now feature within the Skydio
- command platform,
- we're averaging anywhere between five to ten seconds before the aircraft is
- airborne. We are
- sending that aircraft now or the Skydio X10 to the call for service upon
- arrival. We're averaging
- about 120 seconds to the call for service after it launches. So if you look at
- it as a whole,
- we are now arriving on scene in what it used to take to just ingest the call.
- So it's streamlined
- our operations. We can arrive to the scene faster, whereas before we were
- having to wait through that
- whole process, so two minutes plus the additional 120 seconds, you're talking
- about now four minutes
- for your average car response where now we're responding within time it used to
- take to ingest
- that call. Yeah, I mean it's so powerful I think we're saying again basically
- with the prepared and
- DFR integration, the drone is on scene before dispatch in the normal case would
- have even alerted
- the officers that they need to send. So it's collapsed all of that into
- effectively zero.
Watch Time
3 Mins 11 Secs