Rahul argues that police drone use is inevitable because drones can do things—like continuously monitoring for and chasing suspects—that keeping helicopters aloft 24/7 simply can't sustain. ✦ AI generated
Rahul · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-18 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:43
“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 2:43
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
4:24that uh feeling of, you know, I have a little bit of a layer of protection um because with this it's going to flag for the burnout as well. Uh and that was one of the things at the associations in speaking with them about this is was that from the advent of the our body worn camera and being able to take that technology, run those analytics behind it, be able to check
4:43for those that had burnout um where if we need to pull them from the field, if we need to do something a little bit different, um we started instituting well checks and uh sabbaticals for those that are at the 15 and 25-year mark to be able to help help optimize their performance so that way when they go out in the field, they feel good about what they're doing and they have job