Widespread drone deployment in public safety (replacing helicopters for tasks like pursuing suspects) is inevitable because helicopters can't provide 24/7 coverage sustainably.
Rahul argues that drone use in policing—chasing suspects, tracking Amber Alert vehicles, responding to gunshots—is inevitable because keeping helicopters airborne 24/7 isn't sustainable. ✦ AI generated
Rahul · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-18 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:23
“Are people just going to start see drones flying around? Is that where we are?”
Or you hear a gunshot go off and the drone finds a shooter getting into a car and driving off and then pursuing the vehicle even on the highways... 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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:23
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
3:42figure out exactly, you know, how are you doing, you know, temperature check. Um then they go out they can do their shift on the by behind the body worn camera. We have analytics. It's uh Trulio that's running behind the um the body worn camera just to see for the behavior and interaction. Part of that was, you know, looking at, you know, you can do a scorecard for how
4:02the trooper is interacting with the public, but it also gets a little bit of an of of information on how the public is interacting with that trooper uh to see if they're combative or not. And then it can it flag the situation as well for the supervisor. Uh outside of that, you have what will essentially is um it it it helps with them being able to have that
- ·Helicopters cannot provide 24/7 coverage sustainably
- ·Drones can pursue suspects, track Amber Alert vehicles
- ·Drones can respond to gunshots and follow fleeing cars
- ·Replacing helicopters with drones is the logical outcome
- ·Sustaining 24/7 coverage would require five helicopters
- ·That level of operation is not financially sustainable
- ·Drones offer a cost-effective continuous alternative