Drones as First Responders

Questions

A couple of days ago I was listening to a podcast led by the famed venture capital firm A16Z. They are leaders in defense technology investing, and have catalyzed a recent movement in Silicon Valley to make American defense great again. They’ve had some success, but I think we’re just getting started.

The company they profiled on the episode was called Flock Safety. You can check out some of their stuff on their website, here.

Basically, they sell cameras and proprietary software to communities, businesses, schools, and the like. They install this infrastructure everywhere to run facial recognition, license plate checks, gunshot detection, and a bunch of other stuff.

A community that has Flock’s camera and software infrastructure can basically participate in the resolution of crimes by getting alerts when, say, a car has been stolen. People can ping Flock when they see that car and get a real time picture of its movement. This little democratization design skyrockets the resolution of crimes, and Flock Safety solves 2200 crimes a day across the 4000 communities that it operates in.

The premise is that if people think they won’t get away with committing a crime, they are less likely to do it. Based off of some of the statistics listed in the episode, they are correct.

But one capability of theirs really stood out - Drones as First Responders (DFR). Basically, drone docks are installed at intermittent locations throughout a community,

When Flock’s infrastructure detects a gunshot, a drone can be at the location of the gunshot - anywhere in the city - in a maximum of 30 seconds. It doesn’t seem to be limited to gunshots. Apparently any number of conditions can trigger a drone response.

It sounds like the drone just materializes to capture evidence at the moment of the crime, so it serves like a sort of tactical deterrence. But it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which it remorselessly fires pepper rounds or pellets into the face of an active shooter until they stop. Or live rounds. An ethics discussion for another time.

But it still begs one question.

How will ‘good’ drones respond to ‘bad drones’ - those used to conduct crime, and especially autonomous ones which are not jammable?

I imagine it will look like a miniaturized version of Anduril’s Roadrunner - its basically a drone designed to crash into other drones.

But this seems ripe for an arms race. What if the offensive crime drones are just more numerous than the defensive drones? If that is the only barrier that the aggressor has to solve for, then they’ll just stockpile.

While a community based counter-drone capability is a must, it is only a stop-gap until something more fundamental comes around and renders these things null.

If you know what that looks like and where it will come from, I’d love to know.

-LH