Deploy smarter: How Skydio uses your call data to scale DFR
Discover how agencies like San Mateo PD are using Skydio’s data-driven modeling to determine exactly where to place drone docks for maximum DFR coverage and minimum response time. Learn how Skydio ingests call-for-service data, simulates deployment scenarios, and helps agencies prioritize based on incident volume—not just land area. See how this scalable approach improves officer safety, reduces wasted resources, and transforms your drone program from patrol-led DFR to a full DFR hive network.
- No, we just got one.
- I just wanted to...
- I was wondering.
- Yeah, right
- All right, so welcome everyone. Appreciate you hanging out today.
- Um, this is a little bit awkward because I'm
- going to have to use my laptop to
- advance slides, so we'll get through it.
- Um, so today we're going to talk about the
- data-driven deployment that Skydio is
- using to help agencies determine the best locations for them to place
- their docks relative to the calls for service in their jurisdiction so
- that you have the best impact with your DFR program.
- Um, my name is Noreen Charlton. I lead public safety
- strategy on the marketing team here at Skydio.
- In a former life...
- I didn't press say that. Thanks. [laughs]
- You good?
- No, I'm good. Uh, in a former life, I worked for Las Vegas Metropolitan Police
- Department in the Crime Scene Investigations unit, um,
- and have kind of been in the
- public safety tech space for the last six-ish years, uh, really
- dedicated to helping agencies like yours build out their DFR programs.
- And I'm super honored to be, uh, joined by Lieutenant Riccardi.
- If you want to give a background on yourself, please.
- Sure. Uh, good morning, for those of you that just woke up.
- Um,
- my name's Anthony Riccardi. I'm a lieutenant with, uh, San Mateo PD.
- I've been there about 22, 23 years or so.
- Uh, I'm currently the daytime admin lieutenant
- and run our, uh, drone team.
- Excellent. Thank you.
- Uh, reach.
- Um, so a little bit about Skydio. I know you've heard a lot from our CEO,
- Adam Bry,
- over the last couple days in part of the keynote.
- Um, but currently we have more than 650 public
- safety agencies using
- Skydio drones in the field today. We are obviously dedicated to other
- industries such as, uh, utilities and energy and the
- gov- uh, the defense space. Um, but we are really, really focused on
- what public safety agencies are doing because we believe drone as
- first responder
- is truly changing the way that you all do your jobs on a daily
- basis.
- So I want to walk through how we see DFR deployments.
- Um, and we see this as a path to DFR. While there are definitely some
- agencies who kind of overnight decide, "This is for us, we want to do it,
- and we're
- all in," most agencies are going to start small with one drone,
- and typically that's happening in what we call specialized units.
- So in that image all the way to the left, you're seeing the evidence placards,
- you're seeing the vehicle crash. These are usually the agencies that are using
- drones for crash and crime scene documentation, for SWAT, for search and
- rescue. They are what we refer to as drones on a
- shelf,
- right? So you have an- uh, a unit that responds after a
- dynamic incident to come out to either do additional work,
- SWAT, search and rescue, or to do some post-incident
- documentation. We believe that most agencies will live in this
- space indefinitely. We don't think that people are ever going to give up
- their
- specialized units and their specialized drone team.
- But then we see this move into what we call patrol-led deployment.
- Oklahoma City Police Department has really evangelized this use of drones
- in public safety because they took them from drone on a shelf to what we
- refer to as drone in a trunk. Um, and this was a way for them
- to use the benefits of having drones in policing but
- put them out into patrol. So now we're getting better information
- without needing helicopters, and they were having them in patrol
- vehicles, several of them on any given shift,
- so that when a
- call came in, those officers assigned themselves,
- got somewhere
- nearby, got out, but they were married to that controller.
- So they were really focused on this controller, which was now removing another
- officer from the field.
- The next step along the path is what we call patrol-led drone as first
- responder.
- When we released the X10 with the 5G capability, that
- enabled remote operations, and to us, that's what makes drone as
- first responder. So now that same patrol officer has
- that drone in their trunk. They don't even have to be Part 107
- certified.
- They literally just have to take it out of the trunk, put it on the ground,
- and get it up, and they can tell someone in a dispatch
- center or
- RTCC, RTIC, whichever acronym you choose, um, to
- remotely operate it for them. And so now they're back in the action with
- everyone else on the ground. We're not removing an officer from the
- field.
- We're leveraging the fact that they were close by.
- A lot of people are asking about docks on vehicles, and we truly
- see that as kind of the solution. Your patrol vehicle is
- a moving dock throughout your city, and really all it takes
- is an officer pulling
- that out and powering it on. They do not have to do anything else.
- And then we move into the world of dock-based DFR, which
- is what we're all talking
- about today. Um, and that's particularly what this session
- is for and how you
- deploy docks throughout your jurisdiction.
- And we see that in two phases. One is piloted, so if you've been
- outside or you've been down at our booth, you've been able to remotely pilot
- drones. We see the next phase of that being more autonomous, so
- less people in the loop, more drones, uh, autonomously and
- automatically responding based on signif- or different triggers that you set
- up on your system.
- With all that said, Lieutenant Riccardi, I'd like you to talk about your drone
- program, where you started and where you are today.
- Yeah. So we started basically, like Noreen said, with, um, a couple of
- drones, and we flew for... Just by a show of hands,
- how many people in here have a
- drone program already?
- Okay, good. And how many of you guys are, are doing DFR in some, some way, shape,
- or form?
- Okay, perfect. All right, good. Um, so we started,
- and so probably like many of
- you, we started with a couple drones like
- three, four years ago. We had two drones.
- Um, the lieutenant, um, that ran the program before me, um,
- started our program,
- got it going, got us our, our first, um, waiver and, and we had two drones that we
- would fly at SWAT call-outs or parades or, uh, the county
- fair or any large event that we had, we would, we would fly drones.
- And
- like all, all of you, you saw with your, with your couple of drones or however many
- drones you guys are flying, you saw the value, right?
- The like the immediate value of having a drone in the sky and the safety that
- it brings to the officers on the street and what it allows you to do.
- So seeing that we were like, "Well, why are we just using
- them on special events," right? We need to,
- we need to expand this program.
- So, um- We went to the chief and, um, I
- asked him a question and I said, "How big do you want to go?" Before we,
- um, this
- is when I was taking over the program.
- Before we jumped into anything further, I said, "How b-
- how big do you want to go?"
- And he said, "I want to go big." And I said,
- "Be careful what you ask for." Um,
- because these guys, these guys know that, that, uh, if you're going to be a bear,
- be a grizzly. So,
- [lip smacks] um, we jumped into our DFR program and we s-
- we jumped
- into Axon Air and we purchased like a dozen drones and we put them
- on patrol cars. We have a dedicated patrol car,
- we have a dedicated patrol van, and
- we made that leap, um, I think in a matter of six months.
- I mean, it, it, we went really fast.
- So as we're building out our program,
- um, now we're doing in a matter of six months,
- we went from two drones and two
- pilots to about a dozen drones and about a dozen pilots
- or so, 10 or so pilots. And what we found was, um, when you have
- a drone in a car, it's great and when it, when it works really well.
- But you got, now you got to get the car to where you're
- going, so you got to drive
- somewhere, right? And then you got to find a place to
- launch, 'cause launching a
- drone is not always easy. You got to find a, a safe place to launch,
- land, and then
- how do you, um... There's, you know, wires, trees, you
- know, where do I go? Do I drive around the block trying to find
- a, trying to find
- a, a place to launch a drone while I got a code three request for cover
- or
- ca-call I'm trying to go through? So, um, that led us to the dock.
- And I was like, "Well, what's our next solution?" Like, here's,
- here's a great tool
- that we have and it works, it works great when everything is planned
- perfectly, but what's our next step for efficiency in
- our program?
- And that was going to the dock. So going to the dock and flying
- remote is the way to go. Um, you still need your patrol
- drones. You still need your drones out there in
- your cars because flying remote
- gives you the ability to commandeer those drones, and we've done that several times
- and it works really good. Um,
- but that's in a
- really short timeframe. That's kind of how we got from two drones
- flying special
- events to having a dock on our roof.
- Um, as we speak, we are testing, uh, our s- our second site for our
- second, uh, second dock. We're going to end up putting two docks on
- our roof.
- Um, we found that, uh, we kind of got, we kind of got lucky in that
- Skydio's in our backyard, right? They're literally up the road.
- So, um,
- our partnership works out really well.
- We got a dock from them and we were going to put it on their roof
- and they were
- like, "Well, why don't we just put it on your roof?"
- I'm like, "Well, that's
- genius." I don't, you know, I didn't want to, you know,
- ask for too much, but
- they're like, "Yeah, we'll put it on your roof." So we put it
- on our roof and what
- we found was
- we could cover
- a large chunk, and I'll show you on the map
- when we get there, but we can cover a
- large chunk of area just from our roof alone.
- So that kind of led us into, well, how many docks do we need?
- And we'll, we'll get there in, in the rest of the PowerPoint, but we,
- we keep
- identifying problems. Um, not problems, but like, you know, there's w-
- inefficiencies in the, in the program that, that, uh, led us
- to, um, the dock-based, uh, DFR.
- Excellent. Um, so we are here today to talk about dock-based
- deployments and
- the best way to figure that out for your jurisdiction.
- Um, so Skydio DFR is currently live in
- agencies of all different
- sizes, so different, uh, land area that they serve, number of officers that
- they have on the agency, and the number of calls for service
- that they have each
- year. And what this has helped us do is figure out, well,
- if we can figure out how
- it works in New York City, that's great. Nobody else is them. They're very unique.
- They're a unicorn in this space. Uh, but if we can figure it out there in,
- you know, a city with the highest skyscrapers
- and connectivity and all of that,
- certainly we can figure it out in other agencies.
- But they're all very different and you all operate very differently
- despite
- potentially being neighboring agencies. You all just do things differently.
- And so we now have a lot of different agencies that we're working with and we're
- figuring out what works best for them.
- Skydio has employed, uh, almost two dozen now former
- law enforcement from various agencies all across the country
- who can really just put their input into how we develop our products and why
- it matters to agencies like yours.
- So we're going to start, um, a little bit with a study
- that we did in the fall
- because I want to just kind of show you how data-driven we are as a
- company, and we're doing this based on what you
- are already doing in the
- field.
- So back in the fall, we looked at it about a 60-day time
- period
- and we looked at Skydio X10 flights that were being conducted by just
- our public safety agencies and there were about 27,000 of those
- flights. We found on average that those agencies were
- flying at an altitude of 143 feet. And these are
- agencies that didn't have restrictions.
- They weren't required to fly around under 200 feet.
- They certainly could have flown up to 400 feet.
- These were not DFR flights. These were just controller based.
- You can fly wherever you want. Even without restrictions, we found that
- agencies are flying lower.
- They're getting into tight spaces.
- They're getting into car, carports where they can go in GPS-denied
- environments.
- They're getting really close to vehicles to clear them before officers approach.
- And so this is kind of how we really started to lean into this under 200 feet
- altitude for DFR flights.
- 99% of the time the flights were below 203 feet.
- So this is all just based on data that we were getting from our agencies
- using
- X10.
- And then we looked at the agencies that were using Skydio X10 just
- for drone as first responder program.
- So remote operations is how we define that.
- Skydio DFR Command was how they flew these flights.
- And we found that 28% of the flights were relieving another
- drone on scene. So this became very important to us to
- realize
- that 28% of the time when a drone was on scene,
- they were getting to a point where the battery was running low and they
- knew that they would need another drone.
- 28% of the time they were bringing another drone on scene,
- what we call
- on station relief, to take the, the spot of that first
- drone before sending the first one home.
- That required con- or that enabled them to have continuous
- overwatch. They were never losing eyes on the scene.
- 17% of those, um, required a long response time.
- So when we look at our battery life, we're looking at like, this
- is dependent on so
- many things and your weather and the environment and how you're flying,
- 30 to
- 35 minutes on a charge.
- We found that 17% of the agencies, um,
- were on calls that were longer than 30 to 35 minutes.
- So we realized very quickly we're going to have to do something that enables
- agencies to have continuous overwatch.
- And we also noticed that DFR is mostly a night operation.
- Uh, 58% of the flights occurred between 8:00
- PM and 8:00 AM.
- I know when I was in Las Vegas, air unit went down every night around 4:00
- AM without fail. Maintenance, coffee break, I don't know what it was,
- but they were down for like, until 7:30 in the morning.
- So from 4:00 to 7:30, the entire valley didn't have air support.
- Drones fit that gap, right? So now officers can get
- the coverage that they need and the support they need from the air
- without
- having an aviation unit if your agency's lucky to have access to
- one. So this was also super important to us.
- We need to make sure that our agencies can fly just as they do
- during the
- day with autonomous operations, low friction, and they
- can do that at night.
- So when we started to look at all of this, there's really two competing
- architectures. Um, I think that Adam may have touched on this at some
- point this
- week. But there are DFR programs that,
- um, look at single docks with battery
- swapping,
- and they look at it as land area. One dock for a
- given land area.
- We look at everything in what we call dock hives.
- So when we talk about continuous overwatch, one drone
- is not going to provide you that.
- If you have that long call for service, you now have to send that
- one single drone all the way home.
- It's got to get back. So I'm going to be, like, very liberal with this.
- Let's say it takes two minutes for it to get home.
- It's got to get back down into the dock. It's got to do its battery swapping.
- It's got to get back up in the air, and it's got to fly back.
- You are losing minutes of aerial overwatch on a scene, and in a
- world where seconds matter, minutes is just, like, not acceptable in this
- space.
- We also look at it from an incident volume perspective.
- We think what matters most is your histo- historical call for service
- data. It's not how big your jurisdiction is,
- it's how busy you
- are in certain areas of your jurisdiction. And we really look at this.
- We, um... Of course, I don't have my speaker notes because
- technical difficulties,
- but so I don't have the exact numbers.
- Charlotte Mecklenburg is roughly the same size in land
- area as U- NYPD. However,
- NYPD has 36,000 officers and Charlotte Mecklenburg has,
- I'm going to make this up, 1,000. Very different.
- Their staffing is not relative to the land area
- that they serve. It's relative to how busy they are as
- an agency.
- So I want to use this video real quick.
- This was a very long, drawn-out string of crime.
- But basically, the suspect, uh, broke into a house where the people
- were there.
- They were able to get out. He barricaded himself.
- SWAT was outside. He decided he was going to get on a motorcycle in the
- garage,
- bust through the door and, and take off on the motorcycle.
- They hit him with some less lethal rounds.
- He crashed the motorcycle, and he took off on foot.
- So this is a nighttime operation with Skydio X10.
- A very violent fleeing felon, because he had multiple felonies
- throughout the
- day,
- in residential area. If that drone had to go back
- to be swapped by another or had to go back to,
- for battery swapping,
- we could potentially have missed that and lost that person in a residential
- neighborhood. And in Vegas, which is, which is where they did this flight,
- pretty
- much all of the homes are surrounded by cinder block walls.
- So the second that guy's jumping into yards, now we've added more,
- uh, risk for officers because they don't know
- where he's going.
- I was going to say they must not be in California because we don't have felonies
- anymore, so [laughing]
- You have them.
- We don't know what that's like.
- [laughs] Um, so I kind of want to relate this
- back to as cities are growing and they realize
- there's a more need for police, there might be another need for a police
- station, a
- substation. They don't look at that based on the
- land area they serve. They look at their calls for service data,
- and they're
- going to put a new substation in an area of town that
- now has higher crime volume. We're looking to put it there to reduce
- crime, but also it makes your officers closer for
- a response.
- And so we really look at this as like the dock being a substation
- and the drone, the drone is first responder being another one of
- you
- that can get out on scene. You wouldn't want to put
- that in a place just based on
- the land area that you serve. You want that close to the calls
- that matter the
- most because they're high priority.
- One other thing to look at when you're looking at where you want to
- put things,
- most of your fire stations are going to be, uh,
- strategically placed in your city
- for response. So if you look at where your fire stations
- are, that's going to kind
- of give you an idea of your response times throughout your city and that's,
- that's... We're going to end up putting our second
- dock like two blocks away from
- our fire station, uh, just because it didn't have, uh,
- enough roof space for us
- there. But, um, we s- we looked at our fire stations as we start
- to expand and we
- have another fire station on the east side once we get some, um,
- changes to our, uh, our COW. I hate calling it a COW. Our waiver.
- Um, once we get our waiver, uh, changed and hopefully the FAA will light-
- lighten
- up on some of the restrictions in a, in a custom airspace,
- then we'll move over to
- the east side, um, as well. So check out your firehouses.
- That'll give you a decent idea.
- Yeah. Excellent point.
- Um, so we have developed a system where we
- can use your historical call for service data, and we can build out a deployment
- in a crawl, walk, run method to help you determine how many
- docks, how many drones would serve your agency
- based on
- percentages. And so I'm going to walk through what
- that looks like for San Mateo
- because we've obviously done their data.
- But this is kind of how we're looking at DFR deployments.
- Um, hands down when anyone a- says like, "Hey, we want to go in.
- We're, we're all about DFR. This makes total sense to us." Like where
- do we put
- these and how many do I need? And again, we just don't think it's based on land
- area. So this is the system that we go through.
- Our system will ingest your call for service data.
- So that is one thing that you do have to provide to us.
- Um, and then we choose a whole bunch of
- different parameters, and I'm going to go
- through what those look like.
- But basically, the system allows us to say, "These
- are your desired
- outcomes," and it will tell us, "These are the best places for you to put your
- docks."
- And so basically what we're considering are your calls for service,
- your airspace, and then the parameters just of X10 based
- on flight times and distance of call and all of that kind of stuff.
- So first we look at calls for service.
- Um, and we ask you, like, what, what are you trying to achieve with
- DFR? Are you trying to eliminate burglary
- alarms
- where you just don't want to send officers?
- Or are you trying to get eyes on scene on your priority zero, one, two,
- however you want to look at it, calls so that your officers have
- that situational
- awareness before they arrive?
- And then what is your contingency for simultaneous calls?
- Inevitably, you're going to have things happen at the
- exact same time.
- You don't want to be the pilot that has to choose which call
- is more important.
- If you have redundancy and multiple drones in the same location,
- you can
- send multiple drones to different calls.
- And then what's your average call duration?
- That's part of the historical call for service data that we look at.
- We see how long... Like when the officers arrived and
- when they cleared.
- Um, so for San Mateo, what were you guys super focused on for
- DFR and your response with that system?
- Yeah, I mean, we, we just... We, we really wanted to try and fly as,
- as many calls
- for service as we, as we could. We had...
- We, we... There's really no one type of call, right,
- that, that we were focused on.
- We wanted to get drones out there. It's a second set of eyes. It's a backup,
- right?
- It's a... It's almost like a cover officer watching
- you.
- Somebody's watching what's going on, right?
- So
- if you picture it this way, if you had a drone on every patrol car,
- right, and the
- officer's walking up to traffic stops, one of the most dangerous things we do,
- right? So you walk up to a car, you're like, "Eh, eh,
- this doesn't feel right."
- Just launch a drone, now you got a set of eyes on.
- Someone else is watching what's going on, and they can,
- they can call for help. They can, you know, give you information.
- They can provide intel that you wouldn't otherwise have, right?
- So, um,
- we wanted to get drones out there and get to as many calls for service,
- not just for backup purposes or for intel purposes,
- but also to help us clear calls
- that we don't have to send officers to, right?
- Um, there's this thing called de-escalation
- that they make us all do now.
- So, um, one of the things that we wanted to do is, uh, get out there
- and, uh,
- maybe we don't have to send cops to the 5150 that's walking around the front yard.
- And we've, we've cleared a handful of those without
- sending a uniform, and we don't
- have that confrontation, right? So, um, all those...
- You know, it's not just about fighting crime, right?
- Uh, it's about, it's about providing a solution to,
- to complex
- problems that happen, and you can do that in many different ways with,
- with a dock.
- But that was kind of our, our outlook on, on
- our de- drone deployment and, and get as many out there as we can.
- Excellent.
- Um, so then we look at airspace. Um, how large is the coverage area that you're
- looking at to fly DFR flights? Um, do you have any no-fly
- zones? You have zero grid in your area, so we do bring in the FAA map when
- we do this deployment model. And then do you have the appropriate
- waivers in
- place to do beyond visual line of sight flight?
- Um, and if you don't, what's the process to get there?
- We have teams in place to do this. As you mentioned, the new COW that's out,
- the
- certificate of waiver, which I'll touch on at the end here, um,
- those are going
- through very quickly now, so agencies are getting up and running with DFR beyond
- visual line of sight very quickly.
- And then finally, we look at the vehicle parameters.
- We put some information in here regarding our X10.
- So flight time, average cruise speed, um, the battery life, and our takeoff
- time. From the dock, from the second you hit launch to go to a
- scene, dock up at
- or drone up in the air is roughly 20 seconds.
- Um, and then you're, you're off to the races to get to your
- call.
- So now we're going to jump into San Mateo and the PD, and we'll talk through their
- deployment model and kind of what we, uh, pr- proposed for them for
- DFR. So you want to talk a little bit just
- about your city?
- Yeah. So we're about 105 or so thousand people.
- Daytime population probably close to 165, 170.
- We have a, we have, uh, two major shopping malls.
- We have a community college, um, and a
- ton of, uh, businesses that have, have recently moved into town over the
- last 10
- years or so. So our daytime population grows quite a
- bit.
- And then, uh, about 12 square miles or so. Um, we do...
- We are kind of uniquely situated, um, between San Francisco, San
- Jose, and Oakland. So if they ever blew up the,
- the San Mateo Bridge, we
- would literally have nothing to do.
- We'd be bored out of our minds because most of our crime and our criminals are
- transient. They're coming from Oakland. They're coming from San Jose.
- They're coming from San Francisco, and they're coming through our town.
- Some come from out of state. I don't know if anybody in here
- is from California,
- but people fly to California just to commit crime and then fly home because,
- because for a while there we weren't really doing anything about it.
- So, um, we're getting better. We're getting, we're get-
- we're getting back at it.
- But, um, uh, so that's kind of, kind of our, our,
- our city. We do have some bay front. So we have some waterfront.
- We have some lagoons. So we have a little, kind of a little bit of everything.
- Um, and like Noreen said, um, with, with New York, right, there's how
- many LAPDs, how many New York PDs, right?
- We probably represent, you know, mid- mid-size PD, which is probably,
- probably a lot of you guys out there, and we're,
- we have a lot of the same data and
- a lot of the same situations.
- Yeah. So you want to talk a little bit about the
- PD?
- Sure.
- We got 120 officers. Uh, we average about
- 85,000 calls for service.
- Um, we, uh, we are in between SFO and San Jose
- and airports and, um, San Carlos Airport. So we have a...
- It's not too complex, but kind of a, a little, little bit of a complex, um,
- airspace situation. Um, our guys, uh, here, our team has
- worked... You know, we've been through like four COAs now.
- Um, working with our airspace, working with, um, Skydio's regulatory
- team. Uh, we've got a custom grades.
- Like airspace shouldn't stop you from doing this, right?
- Uh, airspace is not going to stop this.
- So, and the FAA is, is getting much better at, at, uh,
- allowing the agencies to do what they want to do in, within their
- airspace, right? Make friends with your towers.
- If you guys live near airports, make friends with your towers.
- We, we had a good relationship with SFO Tower
- and San Carlos.
- San Carlos is a municipal airport.
- Obviously, SFO is a a major international airport.
- We have really good, uh, relationships with both those towers.
- When we need anything, I don't think a tower's ever told us no,
- uh, for a call for
- service, ever. Um, they've always given us clearance to, uh,
- to fly.
- So, um, that's, that's just really...
- Anything else about the PD, guys? No? All right.
- Q&A. [chuckles] Um, all right. So we took the San
- Mateo PD call for service data from January of '24 through December of
- 2024, so a full year of calls for service.
- Um, and we found that there were about 27,000
- P1 and P2 calls for service that were listed there.
- So that was what we were focused on for this assessment,
- just P1 and P2.
- Um, and we did all of these calculations based
- on 30 minutes on scene,
- which obviously most scenes will not take that lo- that long, but we looked at it
- as 30 minutes. Um, and then you can see they do have,
- uh, a zero grid located within their
- jurisdiction, so we took that into account
- from the FA, um, flights. And we also looked at this as X10
- with Night Sense. So you were interested in doing night flights,
- correct?
- Yep.
- Yeah. And so, um, Night Sense is an attachment.
- It's a little bit of extra weight, so that does, as we put this into our system,
- affect the numbers. So we just wanted to make sure we set it
- up exactly as they
- planned on having their drones, uh, for DFR.
- Yeah, you're, I mean, you really can't limit yourself to,
- to daytime only, right?
- And every- everybody's calls for service volume
- is gonna be a little bit different.
- For us, at about 11:00 or 12:00 we start to
- pick up. At about 1500 to 1700, our calls for service take off,
- and then they
- kind of level out till about 2300, then they go up again,
- then they kind of start
- to mellow out as you, as you get into 0200, 0300 hours.
- So, you know, we take, we took our call volume on a timeframe,
- and that's kind of how we figured out where our deployment was gonna be.
- And nighttime is a big part of that.
- Every SWAT, almost every SWAT operation, preplanned call-out is gonna be 4:00 or
- 5:00 in the morning, right? It's dark.
- So you guys should be planning on, on flying at night.
- Yep. Um, so you are currently in what we call phase
- one. You have a dock.
- Can you talk a little bit about where that's located and how you are
- operating the dock system?
- So the, the dock is on our roof at the PD, and again, just
- by, by happenstance, it turned out to be a great location.
- And there's gonna be growing pains as you, as you go through these programs, right?
- That you're building up something new.
- You're gonna have people internally that are gonna not like it or like it and,
- and
- you're gonna be like, "Well, this didn't work," and,
- "That didn't work." So just,
- you know, be patient, work through those, work through those issues.
- We got lucky with, with our location on our roof,
- and we could fly to Hillsdale
- Shopping Mall, and we could fly to Bridgepoint Shopping
- Mall from our roof.
- We're like, "Wow, that's, that's fantastic."
- That worked out really well for us.
- Uh, we could also hit, um... Our city's divided by, uh,
- two major highways, 101 and 92, right?
- So it kind of splits our city into quads.
- So that also kind of works out for us geographically like, oh, we have a dock.
- Our city's in, in the, in the s- southwestern portion of the, of that quad.
- Well, we can fly that, that entire quad from our roof, right?
- And we're like, "Well, that..." Again, that, so now we ended up adding a second.
- We're going to put a second dock on our roof because of the flights that came from
- that. So, um,
- I know I'm rambling on about, about docks, but, um-
- [chuckles]
- ... look, look at, uh, look at how your city's laid out
- geographically
- and take your calls for service and your volume.
- We set up four stations in the PD. We didn't want to limit, we didn't want to
- limit
- the, the places you could fly from, right?
- So if we don't have a pilot, again, this, um, I'll get into the full-time pilots
- and all that stuff, but we didn't want to limit where you
- could fly from because
- we want people to be able to fly. So I can fly from my desk.
- We have a station up front. One of our, one of our, uh, team leaders on our dock
- team has a f- a station he can fly from.
- We have a station in our arctic where we can fly from.
- And that way if nobody is sitting in the arctic,
- if we don't have a pilot, 'cause
- we don't have a full-time pilot right now.
- Everything we're doing right now is overtime or part-time or light duty.
- So if something's happening,
- I want to be able to fly. I want to be able to get eyes on.
- So if I'm at my desk, which I am at all the time, unfortunately,
- um, I can fly, right? So don't, also don't limit yourself
- to where you can fly from 'cause you want to...
- If you have this tool on your, on your roof,
- you want to be able to get it up in
- the air and get it to calls for service.
- All right.
- Um, so then we're gonna go into a video if you want to talk
- through this. And I sped it up a bit just so you-
- Yeah. So this is just like one of our standard
- flights.
- Um, we're in remote flight deck, take off from the roof.
- And I think Marcelo's flying this flight. So we're gonna... He's gonna head west.
- And in flight deck with, with the integration with, with Axon, you
- can see all of our cars.
- Um, see the drone up there in the, in the top portion on the right-hand
- screen
- there.
- You notice our guys like to hang out at the station.
- There's a lot of cars that are at station.
- [chuckles]
- I don't know why they're all there. They should be on the street.
- [chuckles] You got a, looks like you got a body cam
- icon down here where your drone's heading.
- Oh, good. Somebody's working. That's good.
- [chuckles]
- So, you know, this is, this is just one of, kind of one of our,
- one of our typical
- flights where we'll come out. Uh, I think this was a 1066 on the train
- tracks or
- something. Um, so, you know, why would I send two cops
- when I can just clear this with a drone in, in about 60 seconds, right?
- Um-
- What's a 1066?
- Uh, sus- suspicious person.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- So you're gonna fly out. He's gonna scan, scan the area, check the area, and this
- whole flight, I don't know, was like a couple minutes.
- Yeah, I do have it on 2X speed, so-
- It, it is-
- ... well, fast, not that fast.
- The drone does fly that fast. It's really fast.
- It flies-
- [chuckles] Awesome. All right. Um,
- so now we'll talk about phase two. Um, and so this is, this
- is all just because of
- the model that we've built out. So phase two said that with nine
- docks in three different hives, um, San Mateo could
- respond to 81% of their P1 and
- P2 calls for service. And so that assumes, again, a 30 minute, uh,
- 30 minutes on scene. So what does that mean?
- Let me explain, let me explain that.
- Priority one and priority two for us are like robberies,
- shootings, stabbings
- ... homicides. Uh, those are, uh, physical 415s, physical fights.
- Those are all our priority one calls.
- Those, uh, have to be dispatched, I think, within like a minute and a half.
- Where they, I think, they have a minute
- and a half to two minutes or something to
- get, to get that call entered. Um, and then our priority two calls, um, are,
- you know,
- various levels of disturbances or alarms or that usually
- have to be dispatched within, I think, 10 to 15 minutes.
- So those are the calls that, that we're referring to here.
- Cool.
- Um, so what does that mean? So nine Docks and three Hives.
- Now you'll notice that my last slide did not say 74%.
- My last slide said 81%.
- 81% means that a Dock in that location could
- respond to any ca- any 81% of those calls for
- service. It's just limited on battery life.
- Um, but this means that 74% of those, we could
- get there in under two minutes. So we're looking at a sub
- two-minute response time. That is typically what matters most to
- agencies. What is your current response time for
- patrol officers?
- Like s- seven-ish or so. Six, seven minutes.
- Yeah. So cutting several minutes out from that,
- and that's actually pretty quick.
- Most agencies are much higher than that. Um, so this is how we look at it.
- We put this all in, and what you'll see on the right side of
- the screen, you see
- these red circles. That is a Hive. So that means there's one
- location in that area with three Docks.
- So you have three drones that can respond to calls,
- and then you have three of
- those. So it's a total of nine Docks in three
- Hives.
- On the left side of this, you're seeing how this gets plotted out.
- And so on the X-axis, you're seeing seconds.
- On the Y, you're seeing the percent that we can respond to.
- Um, if I look at like f- 50% of calls, we're at like, what,
- 75-ish seconds? Um, so that's just giving you an
- idea of how quickly you can respond to these calls, again,
- given the data that you provide. So we know where your calls are
- happening minute by minute through the year in your jurisdiction, and that's how
- we're kind of looking at this.
- And so then we look at call coverage, um, versus Docks per
- Hive. So if you have more Docks, obviously, in a Hive, so in this
- case, if you have three Docks in one single
- Hive, meaning one single location,
- uh, you will be able to cover a lot more of
- your calls.
- You have more manpower in these drones to
- respond to more calls instead of just having one drone on one rooftop.
- And then we look at how many operators you would need.
- Um, and so this says that 81% of the coverage would
- require two operators, um, to staff your peak demand
- time. You'll see that peak demand time is kind of out...
- Well, you can see where the hours of the day on
- the bottom of the X-axis.
- We have from midnight, uh, to midnight far on the right.
- So this is where you can see where San Mateo is the busiest in this partic- these
- particular locations. And so we're saying on average,
- you would need
- about two operators during these peak times to manage all of these
- calls. That is assuming that while you are flying
- to a call, because the drone is going there autonomously,
- that you have zero
- attention to it. You're just saying respond
- and it's on its way out there.
- And then 100% of your attention is on it while you
- are on the call.
- But deployment's scalable. So like,
- obviously we don't have agencies putting eight Docks in a Hive.
- But just to show you, the more Docks you add to the Hive,
- obviously the more coverage you have. You can respond to more calls.
- You can have more continuous overwatch.
- It's just making sure that you have basically a drone on every
- call for service so that one officer isn't feeling like, "Hey,
- you guys are on two
- calls and I needed help and I had, like, I didn't have the situational awareness I
- needed because you didn't have a drone for me." So it's just making sure that
- everyone's having the coverage that they need.
- So then we looked at, well, what does it look like
- if we cover their entire
- jurisdiction? Like, what does it look like citywide coverage
- for San Mateo
- where it matters most in your, your crime hotspots essentially?
- And so that looks like 15 Docks and five Hives would respond
- to 86% of their calls in under two
- minutes.
- Um, so as you're seeing here, five Hives, so the red circles are your
- Hives, and then a certain number of Docks in each
- Hive to
- cover all of that area on the map. I do want to point out, because
- I know this is a little bit of misinformation out in the world right now,
- we are
- not limited by this two-mile radius.
- Skydio X10 can fly indefinitely as long as it has
- connectivity via vi- 5G, and our Connect Fusion helps with
- that,
- or, um, the battery life. So obviously you can
- only go as far as you have time to get back because you have about 30 to
- 35 minutes and if you're full throttle you might have a little bit less.
- We are only limited by battery life which inevitably will
- only get better as this technology gets better.
- You can, you can push that too. You can, you can push those boundaries because we
- can, we can fly. If we, if we have a serious enough call,
- we'll fly.
- It'll tell us we got to come back. We'll just stay there because we can land.
- If you're flying remote you can just land in the field, right?
- And then we'll have, we'll have officers with batteries-
- Swap
- ... they can just swap it in the field and take off again.
- So-
- Yeah
- ... we will, we will take off and fly and not worry about the battery if it's an
- important enough call and we'll just, we'll just land it out there and,
- and like I
- said flying remote gives you so much flexibility in your program.
- Um, so don't think that you're limited by b-
- you're really not limited by, you
- don't, your amount of time to return, right?
- You're like, "Well I'm going out 15, you know,
- whatever minutes I'm going to eat up
- all..." Just fly.
- Yeah.
- Land it wherever and go get it later.
- And that's kind of the Hive concept is that you have an additional drone
- that could
- fly out, take over and send the first one home so you don't
- lose that overwatch.
- Um, we've flown about 10-ish miles in
- Manhattan and brought it,
- brought it out and brought it back remote op so we are definitely not limited by
- range, uh, of miles but just by how long it takes you to g-
- you know, get it back or land it or whatever you need to do.
- Yes.
- In that concept of the multiple Hives-
- Yes
- [sighs] Um, that's on the roadmap. Currently not.
- That's not something that we have it doing.
- Um, it, the-
- You could, you could land right next to it.
- Yeah.
- You could literally just land right next to it.
- So we have, we have emergency landing spots around,
- around the docks.
- So if we're, if we're coming back, we just land next to there
- and take off the
- other and then have somebody... The, the inefficiency is when you gotta have
- somebody run up to the roof and swap batteries and take off again, so.
- Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines
- if I had, uh- Swap in docks. Yeah.
- If I had empty docks- Mm-hmm ... somewhere so far out, could that
- thing forge in there to just get a battery?
- So not currently.
- Throw it in there.
- Yeah, not currently. Um, we do have a lot of agencies putting
- batteries in their
- patrol cars so that if they didn't want to bring it home
- or didn't
- have another drone ready to bring it home and didn't want to lose a whole lot of
- time, they would land it, officer would swap the battery
- and it'd go right back
- up. So that's kind of what people are doing now,
- but that's why we're just leaning
- into having more in these locations.
- Um, and so you'll see the phase three
- deployment is, um, at the,
- what? 86.4% is going to respond in less
- than two minutes.
- And so again, 90% coverage would require two operators.
- So we've pretty much told them like at a full city deployment, in your peak
- times you're gonna need two operators.
- And I think one question that's constantly asked of me is like, "I'm already
- short-staffed. I can't afford to put commissioned
- officers like full-time patrol
- officers in this position. How are people staffing this?" So do you want
- to
- talk how you're thinking about that?
- Yeah. So it was one of the challenges that we thought about.
- Uh, and again, we didn't want to let that stop us, right?
- Like this is not gonna s- not having a full-time FTE in this
- position is not gonna
- stop us from doing this program. We'll just figure it out as we go.
- Um, and what we've done cur- what we're doing currently is we have a,
- we have a
- handful of pilots that we've trained up, I think six or so right now that are on,
- that fly the dock, right? And they're either flying after their
- shift.
- Um, chief's not always happy with me, but I authorize a lot of overtime to fly
- and
- these guys love flying so they come in and fly.
- Um, but again, like this is a tool that is gonna save lives, right?
- So we're not gonna limit – money's not gonna stop us here, right?
- So, um, right now we're authorizing overtime.
- Our guys are coming on their day off.
- We have a, a light duty officer. She flies, um, from the Arctic
- but she's also
- running the Arctic at the same time so, um,
- you know, the, the... We are looking at other bodies as well. So
- if you have...
- We're looking at our staffing levels right now and we have a, we have two, um, two
- vacant spots in traffic and it's like well
- if we steal one of those and put that in
- the Arctic or we have a, a, a gang, we have a gang unit called Crew.
- We have a vacancy there and it's like well we haven't had a f-
- a fourth officer on
- Crew in, in five years so do we really need
- that spot there?
- But it's being held there. So, uh, dispatch is moving some people around to
- find
- some money. Um, so like those positions are,
- should be out there somewhere.
- We
- are lucky enough to be fully staffed.
- Um, I don't even like saying that because I don't even want to put
- that out in the
- universe right now but we are actually fully staffed. It is, it
- is wild.
- Um, it's a good thing for us but it's a bad thing for me because now I
- don't have
- m- as much money to play with, right?
- So when we had 10 vacancies I had all kinds of money to play with.
- I had all kinds of overtime that I could dish out.
- Um, but now that we're fully staffed we've got
- to watch our overtime and watch,
- actually watch our budget so there's a lot of challenges there but, you know,
- you can, you can overcome, you can overcome all those challenges.
- Don't let that stop you from moving forward with your program.
- Yeah. A lot of agencies are leaning into civilian positions for
- pilots.
- Um, Miami Beach PD, uh, one of their remote pilots is a
- civilian and he just decided like, "I think this would be pretty cool.
- I've never flown drones but like sign me up.
- I want to sit in there and fly drones." We went out there.
- We did training.
- Within 15 minutes of him completing training, he had never been on the sticks,
- he
- had never flown a drone before. He was in DFR command responding to a
- call for service, found a subject, full arrest.
- Like it was, it was a huge moment for them. Um,
- and he's a civilian.
- I think the rest of their unit is. OKCPD is using civilians so,
- um-
- So are we.
- Yeah.
- We are as well.
- Yeah.
- We opened it up to everyone. Our IT guy is a, is a pilot and he flies so we, we
- opened up to everyone in the building.
- Yeah. So that's awesome. Another thing to think about.
- Um, so call response and what kind of calls you're responding
- to is one piece of
- the puzzle but the other one is this whole concept of using the drone
- to clear
- calls and not require officer response.
- Um, and so when we looked at it, if we looked at the full citywide
- coverage, 15
- docks in San Mateo could free over 14,000 officer
- hours annually for San Mateo and I'm gonna walk through those numbers
- and tell you
- how we got there.
- Um, so we looked at the annual calls for
- service in those particular
- deployment zones. So again, we have access to their data because they
- shared it
- with us. We know how many calls happen in those
- areas.
- So that was roughly 16,000.
- Then we said of those 16,000 in these areas with your
- docks you are going to respond to 86% of them in less
- than two minutes.
- On average, agencies who are already using
- DFR are saying that they are freeing up 21%
- of their officer time by sending the drone out and saying, "Hey, you guys don't
- need to respond." And a lot of times it is a burglary call or it's,
- "Hey, I think somebody's dying on the sidewalk,"
- but they like tripped and fell and
- they're up and walking and they're fine, right?
- People call in ridiculous stuff all the time, um, and you're, you're
- essentially wasting officer time going out there. It's gone on arrival.
- It's unfounded. It's cleared without action.
- It's whatever disposition you have,
- 21% on average are clearing those calls with DFR.
- So when we do that math we're looking at just under 3,000
- calls that are eliminated just by having this DFR program.
- So then we look at the time the call was received to time cleared and this was
- roughly 15 minutes for San Mateo. So once you guys arrive you clear out
- these
- calls, these unfounded calls, roughly 15 minutes.
- And if we say like on average two officers are responding,
- um, we are looking at about 1,400 hours of
- officer
- saved annually. So this is something that your officers could be doing
- something
- else. They could be out in high crime areas
- being more visible in the community,
- community policing, whatever it is that you want them doing
- but they don't have to
- waste time on calls that they really just don't need to
- respond to.
- So then we've looked at kind of the average, and obviously this varies,
- and this is
- not specific to San Mateo. This is just kind of on average the
- hourly wage of a police officer in the US is $52 an
- hour.
- Um, I heard, did I hear some laughs?
- Um, so then we're saying if two officers are responding, that's
- 126. So we're saying at 1,400 calls, uh, a
- year at $126 an hour, the agency is roughly
- saving $75,000 in response time that they could be doing something
- else with. And so this is just kind of another piece of the
- benefits, especially for command staff where dollars
- matter,
- um, on, on the benefits of what DFR can do for
- your agency.
- But those are just a couple pieces of the puzzle.
- Obviously, there are a multitude of benefits to
- having a DFR
- program. Obviously, saving lives, officer safety, community safety.
- Uh, when we talk about improving response
- times, we check that box.
- That's sub two minutes. Um, saving money, reducing use of force
- incidents. So we've had agencies say, like on average, when they have
- responded to calls where there were weapons
- involved, um... And actually, if you did not see, uh, the
- Bernalillo County Sheriff speak about this yesterday with Adam, they had a
- seven and a nine-year-old in a backyard with a gun, um,
- and firing, but the gun jammed. And he'll tell you till
- like 10 out of 10, if my deputies walked into that,
- like they could have shot these
- kids. But they had the drone overhead that told them, "This kid's got a
- gun in his hand, and they're just waving it around." So it
- provided them the time
- and distance they needed to have a better tactical, uh, approach
- to the situation. We talk about reduced use of force.
- A lot of agencies say like 50% of the time we're eliminating a use of force
- because the drone is providing that time and distance we need.
- Yes, we are, um, concerned with like rapid response
- times. We want to get there fast, but then we want to have the
- information we need to like slow it down and make better decisions,
- and that's what the drone's enabling people to do.
- And obviously with reducing that comes like reducing liability
- and lawsuits and all
- the other stuff that comes into all of the fun of use of force in law enforcement.
- Yes.
- Yeah, and, and-
- Absolutely. Like Judy. Yeah
- ... on that, on that exact topic, um, we had a swatting call a few months
- back at one of our local high schools, and, uh,
- I was at my desk where I always am.
- And, uh, I'm like, "Well, I'm, I'm going to fly." So day shift I got a
- sergeant and
- about six cops, uh, working a couple SROs on the north end,
- and a
- call comes in. Um, and when we fly, we listen to live 911.
- So we are hearing the 911 call as it comes into our dispatch center.
- So we know before dispatch starts a keystroke that we're going to
- fly. We're listen... Hey, you hear – I don't know
- if you guys listen to your live,
- your, if you guys have live 911 or if you listen to 911 calls,
- you'll know exactly
- what I'm talking about. You know those calls like
- when they come in, like, "Okay,
- I'm flying that call." Right? So this call comes in, it's like, "Hey,
- um,
- I just, uh, planted X amount of devices at Serra High
- School, and they're
- all going to blow up in 15 minutes." And I'm like, "Okay, that's a bunch of
- bullshit, but okay. We're, we're going to go fly." Right?
- So w- we get swatting calls all the time in our
- town.
- So
- what... It's a school, right? So when we respond to a call like
- that to a school,
- normally we come in hot and heavy. We want to make sure
- that it's actually not
- happening, make sure everything's okay.
- But because I'm listening to the call, I flew and I was there in about 60
- seconds,
- right? So as our officers are kind of s- still getting the
- call, I'm on scene orbiting the campus, seeing that everything's fine.
- Uh, nothing's going on. I'm calling, I'm calling the school security.
- They're walking campus. Um, so we already have our response happening
- as our officers are approaching. That gave our officers,
- our sergeant the time to
- rally, have a rally point and just say, "Hey, look, we're going to...
- This is what we're going to do." I'm providing intel, right,
- from the sky without a
- bunch of cops rushing through the school trying to figure out everything's okay,
- right? Because y- schools right now, um, depending on where you live, uh, in, in
- the People's Republic of California, um, cops on campus is kind of a, um, a
- touchy subject. It's, it's a sensitive issue.
- Uh, luckily we have a good relationship with
- Serra High School, but still you
- don't, you know, you wouldn't want 20 cops with AR-15s
- running through campus
- thinking, thinking that all hell's breaking loose, right?
- So the drone provides us the ability to, to have the appropriate
- response for, for what's happening, right?
- And we're doing that, um, time and time again.
- So it makes a big difference in, in not just officer safety
- as in responding to a violent criminal or, or something that's, that's happening.
- It gives us the appropriate response for our community members as well.
- Yeah. I think everyone in this room can agree
- that oftentimes just police presence
- alone is escalation. Like as soon as you show up,
- like things just get crazy when
- they otherwise wouldn't have. Um, and a lot of times people don't know the
- drones
- above. So there have been a lot of incidents
- where drones have been used on
- suicidal subjects where they were literally like,
- "As soon as I see a cop car, like
- I'm doing it." And we can bring the drone in and they can communicate with a
- speaker, and we can encourage them to pick up a
- phone and talk to a negotiator and
- like walk away from this, you know, uninjured.
- And it works all the time because the drone is like
- less intimidating than the police officers walking up in
- uniform.
- Um, and of course with all of this, uh, improving community relationships, I think
- every community member is complaining that the police don't arrive fast enough
- when
- they need them. They also don't want you there
- when they don't want, need you.
- Um, so this just helps with that. Hey, we're, we're improving our response times.
- We're coming to calls for service faster.
- We're de-escalating because we have better information.
- And then additionally, your mental health and wellness.
- Like obviously this is a huge topic in law enforcement.
- I feel very passionately about this myself.
- Um, but when we can reduce use of force, we can reduce the incident where
- the deputies could have potentially shot a seven and nine-year-old with a
- gun in a backyard. Like imagine the life of like
- mental stress that would take on those officers, even though they
- were in the right
- and they absolutely could have done it.
- The drone put them in a situation where they could go home at the end of the night
- feeling a lot better about the, the work that they did,
- that they took those kids
- out safely and got them to a better place.
- Um, so, so many things that account for DFR,
- and I could spend hours talking
- about this alone, but just other things to c-
- to contemplate when you're building
- out your program.
- Um, none of this is, uh,
- able to happen without the BVLOS waivers, obviously.
- Um, we have an excellent regulatory team.
- NYPD, again, a unicorn, but, like, very difficult airspace.
- Some of the most difficult airspace ever.
- Was the nation's first citywide, uh, BVLOS waiver without a
- visual observer. They are currently flying out of two hives from
- us at two
- precincts, so they've got three docks in each
- precinct.
- Um, and they are doing hundreds and hundreds of flights, uh, monthly,
- probably weekly. I should probably get an update on that.
- Um, but since then, we've had multiple agencies who have
- gotten the same
- waiver. And to your point, now we have this certificate of waiver
- that's out that
- is able to approve you a lot faster for public safety agencies, and I just
- wanted to, to show kind of what that looks like.
- So in Decem- or October of this last year, which, you know, not
- too long ago, um, it was taking over a year to get these
- approvals. Um, but now you'll see in April we've gotten
- multiple approvals. Some are happening in, like, 48 hours.
- So agencies are getting these a lot faster now that FAA has just really streamlined
- this pr- approval process. Um, it is not the barrier that it
- once was to fly DFR.
- So I wanted to put this QR code up here if you want to fill out some information
- just to have us run through this with your historical call for service data,
- or I'm happy to awkwardly tap on all of your things as you walk out here.
- Um, but basically this is just giving you an idea of, uh, what we
- need from you. Um, so when you provide your data,
- we need the call date and
- time, uh, we need the latitude and longitude of the
- call, and then the priority classification from
- your end.
- That's just important for us to know.
- If you come in and you say, "We're interested in P1,
- P2," we'll only filter for
- those. If you're interested in s- a lower priority,
- we will only filter for those.
- So that's kind of how we're looking at it from that perspective.
- And then if you have additional information, this is not pertinent, but,
- like, if
- you have it, that's great. Hotspots and specific locations where you would
- like to install docks. We can put a layer in there with locations
- where you
- think, "Hey, these are my fire departments.
- This would be a great place." It'll help us adjust our sim based on the
- locations that you provided for us.
- So with that, um, we have a couple minutes for Q&A
- if anyone has some
- questions. Yeah, go for it.
- You did a lot of great, uh, data that you talked about.
- On the back end of every flight, do you guys have, uh,
- somewhere where the pilot puts in all that data collected or is most of that
- data all, like, done by hand?
- The, the data that we're putting into the
- simulation?
- Yeah. So like some of the da- data of like, uh, how
- much, how much you're saving for officers along
- that kind of-
- Yeah. So that just comes from your call for
- service history.
- So we're, like, if you were, if you gave us data that had, um...
- We're, we're basing it off of 21%, which is the average from DFR,
- so that's kind
- of like a blanket number that could change, right?
- Um, if you provided us with information on
- your dispositions, like, hey,
- in our call for service, like we have a disposition for false
- alarm, gone on
- arrival, no action taken, you name it, we will take that into account and say the
- drone could have gone out there and cleared this and an officer wouldn't.
- Um, so it's all coming from your CAD data. It's logged in your CAD system.
- It's not something that you have to do manually.
- Yeah. We've added, we've added things to our CAD system.
- So, uh, when we go, um, available with the drone, uh, it's r-
- it's on
- the CAD as Rover 1, 2, 3, or whoever's flying that day.
- And then so we'll have rovers responding, so we'll have the response times based on
- the rover call sign, and then we also have a special dropdown
- where we can click
- cleared with the drone. Um, and we're gonna add some more special
- dropdown boxes in
- our CAD. So, um, we are going to set up our CAD system so
- that we can
- get good data to compare, um, with as, you know, we're, uh,
- hopefully a few months
- away from, uh, having, uh, three docks, right?
- So we'll have a good, a good, um, amount of data to go through
- over the next year to say, uh, how efficient this, this program's been.
- Yes.
- Oh, gee. How did you deal with the civil liberties,
- like the community
- So we're, we're pretty lucky where we are.
- Um, our community actually likes us, um, unlike our neighbors in San Francisco.
- I said this before, they, they wave at us with all five fingers in
- our town most of
- the time, unlike San Francisco, where you get one.
- Um, but we, um,
- you know, we went out and we, we kinda...
- We, we took a very slow approach, right?
- And I think it just kind of worked out for us where the first couple of years of
- flying drones, we didn't really put a whole lot out.
- But when we went to the community, like we were flying SWAT calls at 5:30,
- and we
- weren't putting that out on social media, right?
- Like, "Hey, we got a SWAT call this morning." Um,
- or when we fly events, we
- weren't really putting a whole lot out, and we were just...
- We kind of s- slowly rolled out the program over the,
- over the
- course of a year or so, right? And then when we started to take off
- is when we
- started putting more information out on social media, watching our feedback, um,
- and we have had zero complaints. I don't, again, I don't even put that out in the
- universe, but knock on wood, we've had zero complaints.
- Nobody complains about our drones.
- Um, you know, we, we, uh, we get out there in the community.
- We do, uh, I just did, we just did the PAL dinner.
- We flew the PAL dinner.
- We fly, um, the emergency preparedness, um,
- events that we put on. We fly for neighborhood watch.
- We, like, we get out there with the drones in the
- community.
- We do, we, I think we host four, um,
- civilian police academies at our PD where anybody can come in, anybody lives in our
- town can come in for, it's like one night a month for like six
- months, and
- they get to see all the stuff that we do.
- So we, we fly for them, so they get to understand.
- We just, we, we get our, our people out there
- and do a lot with our community so
- they see. I had, had somebody ask me, "Well, well you're flying drones o-
- over our
- town. Uh, don't, why are you looking at all of our backyards?"
- I'm like, "Clearly
- you've never seen a drone fly." So I, I showed him. I happened to...
- We were flying that day, and I pulled it up on our command post
- and took off.
- And when the, when the drone flies, the
- gimbal comes up to the horizon and you fly where you're going.
- I'm not looking down, right?
- And I'm like, "You can't even see." And once he saw that we're not looking
- down as
- we're flying over yards to our target, once he saw that, he's like, "Oh, okay.
- I get it." Then it was like, it was done. There's nothing else to talk about.
- We also have a transparency dashboard.
- Um, so post-flight you can choose whether
- or not you want to publish those flights
- on a public dashboard that you could share with your community.
- Um, also we have a great program called Skydio
- for All, where we would love to
- partner with agencies. We come in, we help you set up at like an as-
- at-risk school. Um, we bring in police, fire,
- people that these kids can like get on the sticks and learn about tech and learn
- about STEM and drones and robotics with police officers
- and firefighters, and
- it's less intimidating, and they're realizing
- that we're all just people too, and
- just these great events where we try to bring as many people in to like just teach
- kids about drones and encourage them.
- You know, they'll go home, they'll talk to their parents about it,
- and it's just
- really great for community building.
- We just started a drone program, uh, with our PAL.
- So our Police Activities League, um, we now have a drone program with them.
- So it just, it, it, it pays dividends to get out there in your
- community
- and show people what you're actually doing.
- Uh, because if you don't show them what you're
- doing, they're gonna watch whatever
- BS is on YouTube and think that's a reality, right?
- So, um, get out there and show them what, what's, what's actually going on will
- help.
- I think one more question if anyone's got one.
- Otherwise, we'll wrap it up for lunch.
- Awesome. All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Susanna.
- [audience cheering] [audience applauding] Oh
- my God, you guys are nuts
Watch Time
56 Mins