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PredictionVideo · 1:41 — 3:11

Drones becoming a routine, pervasive part of public safety response—finding shooters, chasing vehicles, replacing helicopters—is essentially inevitable because the helicopter alternative is unsustainable.

Rahul argues drones will become a standard fixture of policing because they can do what helicopters can't sustainably do, like pursuing vehicles after a gunshot is detected. ✦ AI generated

Rahul · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-18 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 1:41

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Any- Anything else we should know, Rahul, about... Are people just going to start see drones flying around? Is that where we are?

That's something that it's kind of almost hard to see that it isn't inevitable. We can't do that with a helicopter today unless you just kept five helicopters up 24/7 and that's just not sustainable. This is the only way to actually achieve that level of safety.

verbatim transcript · starts at 1:41

Transcript · around this moment

1:41robots. Um and as we see uh robotics sweep every industry, we like all these industries are looking for ways to either automate things, make things more efficient, make things more effective. Uh drones are a similar piece of that. And in public safety, the short answer is we are going to see more drones. We're going to see also potentially more hostile drones that we have to be prepared for.

2:03Um you're going to see, you know, more police and fire department drones are, you know, responding to fire calls across the country. And Flock Safety, you know, we it's not just about drones for us. Like we have multitudes of sensors in in the communities. We have license plate reading cameras. We have, you know, gunshot detection capabilities. All of this is coming together. All this data, where, you know, you're

2:25able to determine, "Oh, that's an Amber Alert vehicle." And the drone takes off and chases the Amber Alert vehicle. Or you hear a gunshot, you know, go off and the drone finds a, you know, a shooter getting into a car and driving off and then pursuing the vehicle even on the highways, you know, with with DPS. That's something that it's kind of almost hard to see that it isn't

2:43inevitable. We can't do that with a helicopter today unless you just kept five helicopters up 24/7 and that's just not sustainable. This is the only way to actually achieve that level of safety. I I joked earlier that uh it's a bad time to be an enemy of America, you know, from Maduro to Al-Mancho to uh the Ayatollah. But it sounds like it's going to be a bad time

3:02to be a criminal uh here in America. Uh Colonel Glover, talk about some of the other technologies and capabilities that you've been able to deploy that really changes the equation for law enforcement either helping the officers uh or helping the general public or or most cases both. Yes, so there's a couple of different things that we're doing. Um sort of like an ecosystem or platform within the agency that we've

3:23done. Um One of it One of it is One of the piece of it is is being able to make sure that we're giving the officers what they need to do to be successful, but it's also about their own mental health and well-being. So, they have um we utilize Vitanya uh Heal the Heroes. It's uh basically, you know, brain scan sort of start off the day and everything to

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