Drones as First Responders

00:04
Brent Hinson
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. We’re a podcast going beyond the badge to allow members of law enforcement, public safety, and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. Glad to have you guys along. I’m co-host Brent Hinson, and here at between the Lines, we’ve got a database of guests that we keep on file that we use as a resource for certain topics. And a couple of weeks ago, TBI director David Roush delivered a course focusing on generational gaps while he was visiting Shelby County Sheriff’s Office down near Memphis. And something he said during that course was the catalyst for today’s topic dealing with drones.

00:50
Brent Hinson
And at that point, I think collectively, we all said, hey, we got a drone guy. Don’t we get our drone guy on the podcast? And so that’s what we did, right? Michael Warren we’ve got a drone guy.

01:01
Michael Warren
We do have a drone guy. I enjoyed our episode last time. I learned a lot. So I’m hoping cross fingers that we can get some more information from you today that might give us a better idea about technology and its use in law enforcement.

01:15
Brent Hinson
Do you think drones are kind of this mysterious thing still? Because we see them all the time. I’ll go to the fair, I’ll see a drone. I go to the football game on Friday night. I see drones flying above me. I don’t know who’s manning them. I don’t know where they’re coming from, but they’re just there, and we just kind of accept it.

01:31
Michael Warren
To me, it’s interesting because I’m a dork. When we started putting cameras up in public, it’s kind of that same distrust, in my opinion, but they’ve kind of become part of the landscape, and now we hardly even see them. Drones are still relatively new to the landscape, and I think that’s why our attention is drawn to them. I also think that there is a general distrust right now in society of just about everything, and as a result, tend to think that they’re being used for nefarious means.

01:59
Brent Hinson
See, I put drones in the same category as metal detectors, toys that I’d like to have, but I’ll probably never have enough money to buy one.

02:05
Michael Warren
Yeah, and I’m probably not coordinated enough to operate them based upon my listen.

02:11
Brent Hinson
I played video game Thousand Dollars and.

02:13
Michael Warren
Crashed the have you ever watched those radio control airplanes? They’ve got these enthusiasts that do that. And you see some dude that’s bringing out his brand new radio controlled airplane that he’s been saving for years. Shortly after takeoff, there’s a catastrophic landing and the investment is gone. That would be me with a drone.

02:32
Brent Hinson
And he’s got to go home and tell his wife that check that he’s not married.

02:36
Michael Warren
There’s a reason why you can afford know, and let me apologize up front. I was actually with our producer Aaron yesterday down in Franklin recording a seminar, and I drove back to Michigan yesterday afternoon. My voice is a little bit hoarse thanks to your podcast, Crossing the Streams. The episode the week that we’re recording here was on Prism and Debbie Gibson. I couldn’t reach those notes when the music was brand new, but yesterday I still tried, and as a result, my voice is a little string today, so I apologize in advance.

03:11
Brent Hinson
You got to keep trying and keep going about it, man. That’s what life’s all about.

03:14
Michael Warren
Hey, listen, I had the best audience in there, though. It was just me, so it was awesome. But, hey, you know what? Why don’t should bring Mikey on. Let’s talk about drones because I want to get his input on things because I have a lot of questions.

03:25
Brent Hinson
Well, our guest today making a return to the podcast after first being featured in episode 14 back in August of 2022. That episode, by the way, conveniently located in the archives at between the Lineswirtualacademy.com if you’d like to go back and listen after you finish this episode, of course. He’s a United States Air Force veteran with nearly 30 years of experience serving in roles such as field training officer, investigative special agent, SWAT team operator, and aviation program manager. He spent four years working as an officer in Mike’s old stomping grounds in Novi, Michigan, before joining the FBI full time in 1998.

04:02
Brent Hinson
Went on to spend 22 years as an FBI special agent, and during his time in the Bureau, he managed and cultivated the agency’s UAS program, that’s unmanned aircraft system, a position that allowed him to direct equipment selection, training programs, and operational deployments. He’s currently the vice president of public safety for Skyfire Consulting. We welcome back to between the lines. Mike Rogers. Glad to have you back, buddy.

04:29
Mike Rogers
Well, thank you. It’s really good to be back. Talking to you guys again. One year later.

04:34
Michael Warren
It’s weird how fast time goes at our age, isn’t it?

04:37
Mike Rogers
It has. I actually was contemplating last night, what have I done in a year? When you’re not on your job, life slows down, it seems like, a little bit.

04:46
Brent Hinson
We like to think this was the highlight of your past.

04:51
Mike Rogers
As it will be the highlight of this year.

04:54
Michael Warren
I don’t know what that says about your life, but it’s probably not good just throwing it out there.

05:00
Mike Rogers
I’m jealous of the microphones, I got to say.

05:02
Michael Warren
Studio quality microphones, they come with their own problems. We’ll go with, you know, Brittan kind of alluded to it in the intro. And it really was one of those things where were doing some seminars with director Rausch, who, by the way, a previous guest on our show, and you can go back and listen to it. Fantastic supporter and member of law enforcement. But in the class, for me, it was weird how it came about because it was a class on generational differences, talking about the people in the workforce and one of the topics that came up were and I think it was jobs that didn’t exist ten years ago, and talking about how the job market has changed. He had a little blip in there about drones.

05:46
Michael Warren
When he talked about drones, he’s telling these executives, he goes, oh, hey, listen, one of the things that you probably should be familiar with and get to know, because it’s an up and coming thing, is this concept of using drones as the first responder. It really was. It was like three prairie dogs in the classroom, because as soon as he said that, me, Brent, and Aaron, our heads kind of go up, and we start looking around. And as Brent said, hey, we need a drone guy, we got a drone guy. But when we talked last time, you guys were doing some I hate using the phrase, but it’s only one. I know beta testing of the concept of drones of the first responder.

06:25
Michael Warren
But before we get to what you guys have found over the past year, kind of give me an idea what your work has been like over the past year. Have you been busy? Have you been doing a lot of traveling? Have you kind of been branching out? What has life been like for you?

06:39
Mike Rogers
Well, I’ll start by saying from a personal note, I finally got the courage to jump out of an airplane after years and years of flying them without denting any. So that was a big change this year. But from a work perspective, we’ve been.

06:50
Brent Hinson
Actually, you got to just detail what that experience was like, because a lot of us think about it, but we’re not going to follow through. So you got to just give me a taste of what that was like.

07:00
Mike Rogers
Well, I’ll tell you, for all those years sitting in an airplane spinning, looking down, I always wanted to jump out the door to strange, not in a narcissistic way, but I always wanted to jump out. And so I finally did it’s a little bit OD, I’ll be honest, strapped to another human being so tightly, it’s uncomfortable. But I thought it was going to be some big see God and have a conversation about life right before you open the door. But it really wasn’t. It was the door open. I looked at him, he’s like, all right, remember to do this, remember to do that. And you’re thinking about what you need to do, and boom, we rolled. The free fall is fast. All of a sudden, you’re floating. And when you’re floating, when gravity is off, that’s a pretty cool feeling.

07:34
Mike Rogers
So it’s really positive experience. We came in, we landed. I didn’t screw anything up. We didn’t break legs on the way down. For me, it was a great experience, but to be frank. It happened fast. Like, I would like to go do it again and actually take my time and look around because I was so focused on where do my hands go and what are I pulling at this altitude? I got to pull this, and I’m watching my watch, et cetera.

07:54
Brent Hinson
That sounds like a metaphor for life. Everything goes fast, we got to slow down and take it all in.

07:58
Mike Rogers
You wish you could do it a second time. Exactly.

08:02
Michael Warren
Slowing down. Before we started recording, were talking about how it doesn’t seem like it’s been a year since you’ve been on here.

08:09
Mike Rogers
It’s been over a year, yeah.

08:10
Michael Warren
And Brent, I was actually listening to one of his episodes on Crossing the Streams. He was talking about how his grandpa one day at the dinner table, talking about the need to slow down. And man, we as a society, we need to slow down. But one of the problems is kind of like the topic we’re talking about today is that technology is advancing so quickly, we often find it difficult to slow down. And when you’re in a business like you’re in, it would seem like you can’t slow down because if you slow down, the technology is going to pass you by, the market opportunities are going to pass by, you’re going to be out of a job. And so that has to be a very pressure field for you, for sure.

08:52
Mike Rogers
Coming from my previous life, that’s the biggest change to me is you’re in a field that it’s kind of like the cell phone industry in the 90s, where every three weeks, someone’s popping on LinkedIn with a new product. They’re like, that’s exactly what we needed this thing to do. We just bought this thing. So that’s a challenge for public safety, too. It’s a challenge for military. It’s a challenge for a lot of people that these things are changing every six months to every year, significantly changing in some cases in their capability. And you’re trying to, one, stay ahead of that. What is it? Stay on top of it, really. And two, way, I need that now. And it does create this constant pressure of we need to be looking at the next great thing.

09:28
Mike Rogers
And so one of the things you ask what I’ve been doing so a big part of what we’ve been doing this year is building, helping build DFR on all fronts, whether it’s working with software manufacturers, hardware manufacturers. My CEOs testified up on Capitol Hill about some of the rules and the regs regarding beyond visual line of site flight, et cetera. So we’ve been trying to tack it on all fronts to get this moving forward. When I talk to these guys about what system do they select and what methodology do they use to employ it? It really comes down to what’s good enough right now, because you can’t keep chasing. What the next thing that’s coming up on LinkedIn? You have to really sit down and say, this is what I need right now. Effectively.

10:05
Mike Rogers
And so if we do my job, this camera does it for us at this price. Let’s go with this, let’s employ it, let’s get good with it, and we’ll worry about the next great thing coming up pretty soon here.

10:15
Michael Warren
It almost seems like that you have this dual role where you’re trying to be an innovator in the space, but you’re trying to make it practical, where someone can take this technology and use it tomorrow if they purchase it today. I think that would be a very difficult thing to balance. Our old agency really liked to talk. We want to be tip of the spear. It’s very difficult to stay at the tip of the spear.

10:42
Mike Rogers
It’s really difficult to stay at the tip of the spear, especially at my advanced age. Mike, I’m not 22 and playing with computers anymore here. So it’s a challenge to stay out in front of what’s going on. It’s compounded by the fact that I don’t have the access to the clearance that I once had. Right. So some of these things I can’t see right now, they have to trickle down. But from a public safety perspective, yeah, it’s a balance of trying to figure out what is the best product out there, number one. Number two, and this is really becoming a challenge, it’s almost like Beta VCR, VHS and all that. What is compatible with what? So I’ve got this great new aircraft and I got this great software, but they haven’t been integrated yet. So who does that? Does the company do the integration?

11:19
Mike Rogers
Do I have to pay my own people to do an integration? So integrating all these software capabilities because tying it back to your discussion about slowing down, there’s too much data being thrown at us. There’s too much data collected in some cases by some of these systems for us to really reasonably understand it real time. So we have to find some way to either kind of parse that information down to what I really need and this is what I can effectively act on, or which is the way things are going. We use AI. So you’re going to bring in machine learning and AI to say not do all these things for me, but hit all these points that I can’t effectively hit real time, give me some data back and let me make the decision. So you’re basically human teaming with the AI.

11:57
Mike Rogers
But the idea is, all this information is being collected, let’s use it. Let’s pinpoint things that are most important to us right now. Let’s have the AI identify it, and then let’s let the human being make the decision and the reaction. So it is a lot to take in, a lot to stay on top of. But from a perspective for DFR, for Drone as a first responder, we’re really in the infancy of that technology?

12:18
Brent Hinson
Well, that’s what I was going to ask you. I know there are regulations in place, but it’s almost like I know this is kind of an over the topic comparison, but is this like the Wild West when it comes to technology where there are some regulations but there’s still a lot of people out there doing it and there’s a gray area involved?

12:33
Mike Rogers
Yeah, if you have a drone and a pilot and an observer, you can build a drone first responder program. It’s simply just launching it direct on a 911 call versus I can talk a little more about what DFR is specifically. But yeah, I mean, anybody can have a program, but the airspace above you, how far you can push that aircraft out and what you can do with it over people, all those kinds of things are hampered by regulation and you have to have understanding of that. And then secondly, again, like we said, where is my drone over space? How do I identify what I’m looking at and how to identify where my people are in relation to that?

13:07
Mike Rogers
So that you got software supporting you in that regard, and then you’re collecting all the data, so there’s a lot to it to do it right. And so the first agency to really do it was Chula Vista in California, southern California. They’ve been doing it for a number of years now and have a really strong program since then. We’ve helped a lot of agencies start with the FAA part, get the airspace clearance, the COAS or the beyondline of site capability to do this and then help them down, select the right software, the right hardware, and then there’s a lot of agencies that are doing it on their own now, some right there in Michigan.

13:36
Mike Rogers
So it is, in a sense, the Wild West only because each of these agencies, if they’re not going through a consultancy or some other group, are dealing independently with all of these manufacturers and all these software designers and all of these radar or camera builders are manufacturers. So you’re dealing with so many different entities that are telling you so many different things about how they’re the best that it’s really hard, if you weren’t pretty savvy on that technology to build it and do it right without some learning curve.

14:05
Brent Hinson
Well, the only reason why I ask is I’ll sit at a high school football game on Friday night. I got two drones up above me, and for my simplistic mind, I’m thinking, oh, well, they’re just getting footage of the game. Well, they could be and they probably are, but I don’t know who’s manning those, where they’re coming from, or maybe they’re not getting footage of the game. Maybe they’re trying to get shots of the crowd to find out if there are any crazy people. You know, how do we find out who’s manning these devices above our heads?

14:30
Mike Rogers
Yeah, that’s a whole nother discussion with Remote ID. So the FAA has implemented a program called Remote ID, which is going to require manufacturers. It’s already supposed to be in place as of last September. Really? It’s had some technical difficulties in full implementation, but the idea is that each of these drones will transmit a signal which will be the equivalent of a license plate. It’ll tell you the registration and serial number, information of the aircraft and the controller, and then who’s the owner and pilot operator. So the public safety in particular will have the ability to basically see all these drones around them and say who they belong to. But to your bigger point, if the drone is overhead, is it nefarious? Or it is it the stadium that hired the photographer?

15:11
Mike Rogers
Is it just one of the players parents flying a drone over somebody recklessly without knowing really what they’re doing? Or is it somebody that’s trying to run some assessments to see if they could do something more nefarious? So it is a concern on the counter UAS side? Huge concern. It’s been a concern that people have been chirping about for about five years, six years now. And of course, what happened in Israel is really Ukraine first, and then Israel has really exacerbated the need and the concern about how these things can be used. If you look at how Hamas was able to layer a drone approach first to really infiltrate and knock out defenses. So, yeah, it’s a huge concern, but probably a two episode discussion about what is out there, what are the authorities and what are we trying to do to fix that?

15:53
Mike Rogers
Look at that.

15:53
Brent Hinson
He’s already jockeying to come back for.

15:55
Michael Warren
A third look at that one. No, I’ll send you the experts on that one, Mikey. Just a couple of things I have to address. A couple of things you said there. Number one, you said, you’re not 22 anymore. Be honest with each other. You’re not even 52 anymore. Okay, I’m not I get what you’re saying there.

16:11
Mike Rogers
We’re just a little north of this.

16:13
Michael Warren
But would it be accurate to say that what’s going on, your company and companies like yours and operators, they’re not really testing the boundaries of these type programs. They’re really establishing the boundaries because it’s this dual thing that’s going on where, what are our capabilities? And at the same time, you’re trying to get the congressional approval or FAA approval to do those things because the technology is advancing so quickly, the other side isn’t keeping up. It’s almost like case law. So we’ll do something, and it may take two or three years for a case law to catch up and address that.

16:50
Mike Rogers
Exactly. And the pressure is really coming from industry as much as it’s coming from the public safety agencies. They’re just trying to figure out what these things are and what we can do with them. A couple of thoughts on that. I guess as far as the rules and the regs. The FAA doesn’t really the truth is the FAA is doing the best they can. We talked about this last time. They got this problem dropped in their lab. Hey, we’re going to send 10,000 drones into the sky from all these people, figure it out, and don’t let them hit airplanes. So you can’t fault them for being ho. Let’s slow down on this.

17:14
Mike Rogers
But I think the bigger issue is the technology is as new to them as it is to us, so they don’t have any rules or restrictions or boundaries on where’s the stop limit on all this. So what they’re saying is they’re saying to companies and people like us and some of the public safety agencies that are really kind of further along the line here, come up with a plan or a method, send it to us with data, and we’ll tell you, yeah, we think that’s a safe, let’s implement it or not. You know what I mean? It’s really about people in the industry giving feedback to the FAA and people in public safety giving feedback to FAA.

17:46
Mike Rogers
And the FAA has this out for public safety agencies called public aircraft operations, where you can do things that a commercial operator can’t, but it basically takes all the onus and all the liability on you as the agency. So unless you’re really up to speed and you have a solid maintenance and a solid training program that you can really stand by in testimony, it’s hard to play that card in the drone space. But yeah, to your point, there is no boundary or rule set yet. We don’t know. And we’re just basically saying, hey, we did evaluations on this. This seemed to work really well. It seemed to be as safe as we can make it. And the FAA says, okay, we’ll allow you to operate under those guidelines for the next two years or whatever period of time.

18:22
Brent Hinson
Sounds a lot like the Internet to where it’s come on. And we don’t really regulate it. We just have this common understanding of here’s where we’re at right now.

18:31
Mike Rogers
It’s a great analogy. It can be incredibly helpful and useful. It can be incredibly dangerous. No one really understands the full gravity of it yet, and we’re trying to regulate it in a way that makes sense, but we’re making this up as we go. It’s almost like American democracy, right? We’re making this up as we go, and nobody really has the end where’s this going to end? It’s a challenge for sure in that regard. But we do know some things. We do know kind of safety factors. We do know distances that you can safely operate these systems. We do know what the cameras are capable of doing, what they can collect.

19:02
Mike Rogers
So there is a baseline pattern out there, a program that we can put together with different hardware and software that can be really safely and effectively used with a very high level of safety to it. And yes, there’s other things out there we’re playing and experimenting with that we really don’t know.

19:16
Michael Warren
Well, Mikey, let me ask you this, and Brent kind of alluded to it. There’s almost a distrust when we talk about drones, especially drones that are used in the law enforcement context. But we’ve seen this before. I remember when FLIR started being used more frequently on helicopters and stuff like that and thermal energy imaging and all this type stuff. Well, that’s an invasion of privacy and everything. And went through the same process on okay, what are the rules of the game? FLIR is incredibly beneficial when we talk about locating missing kids in woods. It’s one of those tools that is invaluable. Now, can it be used inappropriately? Well, of course it can. Any tool can. One of the things that you brought up that I’m less scared, the drone side of things. But you started talking about AI. Okay.

20:12
Michael Warren
And about the furthest that I trust AI. I don’t have any of these systems. My partners here have played around with it, where you can clone my voice and you can make me say things that I didn’t say. That’s kind of a joke thing. You can play a joke on somebody, but that can be used nefariously. But what you’re talking about is AI actually being integrated into the use of drones. What value is for there to be AI in drone use?

20:43
Mike Rogers
All right, well, before I answer that, it sounds to me like you’re setting up an alibi for something in the future with this voice saying something I didn’t say.

20:49
Michael Warren
Listen, plausible deniability. Just throwing it out there, right?

20:52
Mike Rogers
Okay. A guy does a podcast. What could go wrong? So, yeah, a great question and something I’ve wrestled with a lot is someone who considers himself someone on the moral high ground, at least for now, looking at ways we can use it. I’ll give you some concrete examples. When you put a drone up, let’s say, on a search for a missing person, that person could be when you’re looking for someone that’s out there in the woods, it could be a person that is mentally unable to find their way out. There is somebody who’s on the spectrum, somebody who has dementia. There’s somebody who could be lost and injured and just can’t get out. Or it could be someone not wanting to be found. Right? So we’re going out there, we’re trying to find them with our traditional methods dogs, searches, aircraft, helicopters, drones, whatever.

21:29
Mike Rogers
When that drone is passing over all these different light levels of light, you have shadowing in the ground and shading and sunlight and all these things, and you’re passing over fields that are the grass is moving at different pace than the trees, and the leaves are moving, and all these things are happening. You have foliage and all that. It’s really challenging for a human being to watch that video and fly the drone at the same time, but also watch the video on a small screen the size of sometimes a cell phone and be able to really discern what they’re seeing, especially over time. If you’re doing this for 6 hours, staring at a screen, trying to discern things like that and fly the drone, you’re missing things. It’s just the truth. So there’s software out there, we call it AI’s.

22:07
Mike Rogers
Got a pretty range, a pretty wide range of definitions these days. But the intelligence I’m talking about is where the machine is trained to learn colors through pixelation shapes, objects, or movement that’s not natural. So if a camera is watching the movement of grass across a field moving, it can understand quickly the pace of that, and it can identify things moving in that field that aren’t moving at the same natural pace. So if it’s a human being sneaking between from point to point, it would box that human being based on movement in the pixelation in the image in the video that I might not see because of the lighting, they might be in the shadows, effectively hiding in the shadows for me. So that’s one example. Another example is the person missing is wearing a blue raincoat. And we’ve done this kind of testing.

22:57
Mike Rogers
Can I train my camera or not my camera, but can I train software running this video almost contemporaneously to say I want any pixelation in this part of the color palette, and I want to pull it out and box it and identify it to go back and look at a second time. You’re taking what a human being either can’t do because they can’t quite see that spectrum of that color, or they’re things that human beings could do, but they can’t pay attention long enough, right? And you’re using the machine to identify objects, things, motion, color, shapes and all those things, point them out to you and say, listen, dude, you want to make the correct decision? Here’s the four things in your image that you’re missing. Go look at those.

23:33
Mike Rogers
Look at them more deeply, and it’s almost like big brother giving you a hint. I think that type of machine learning is really valuable. If I can put this over the top of a search or crime scene that’s happening, that’s fluid, and this machine can start saying the person’s running. And I’m focused 100% on the movement of my drone and camera to follow a person running and what’s coming up in front of me and what airspace I’m in. Meanwhile, the dude just threw a gun while he’s running. I didn’t see it because he’s down in the dark and I’m in a low light mode or whatever. The machine can say there was motion, there was heat or something that I didn’t see and box that and say there was something on this GPS or this geocordinate that I didn’t see. So we.

24:11
Mike Rogers
Can go back and take a look. So I’m all in for that kind of sort of AI or machine learning, which is different than what some other people are talking about, where they’re asking the machine to make decisions. We’re asking the machine to prompt us to make better decisions, more so a.

24:24
Brent Hinson
Tool instead of relying on it. Because listen, we’ve all seen terminator two. We know how that scenario ends. So we want to use it when.

24:31
Mike Rogers
The eyes turn red, get out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s like anything else. We’re asking the machine to do things at a very high speed and a high capacity that we don’t have the capacity to do potentially on the scene at the moment in the fight. And we’re asking it to help us make better decisions. So in the end, I always believe the last result of all these things is the human making the decision. But I think that it’s a much better informed decision if we can add some of these elements into that decision making.

24:58
Michael Warren
Would it be safe to say this type of technology allows the drone operator to operate the machine more safely so that if it is, for example, over a city street, we’re not going to be crashing into people walking on the sidewalk or crashing into cars because I can focus solely on the road.

25:17
Mike Rogers
Yeah, I mean, you’re asking the machine it might even be a case where the machine can fly for you know what I mean? It can help you fly. It can alleviate those things. So there’s all these processes going on in a flight, whether it’s flying the drone, looking at airspace discerning, what’s going on in your video. We’re going to ask the machine to do aspects of that for us at the same time and then come back and make a decision based on that. But to your bigger point, absolutely. The idea is the machine might be able to tell me threats that I don’t see. For instance, machines now that can see and avoid obstacles. If I’m flying and I’m looking at the aircraft, I’m not going to see a thin wire, a telephone wire going across the space in front of it.

25:54
Mike Rogers
But we’re getting to the point where the cameras and the sensors and the lidars on board are designed to say, just like cars are now designed to say, hey, there’s an object in front of me, I’m going to climb and go over it. I wouldn’t have done that. I would have drove right into the damn thing and hung it up and sent yet another drone to the graveyard. So yeah, it’s making things safer for the operation of the drone. It’s making things easier for the person trying to make decisions and maybe more accurately. And then we can lead into there’s other safety aspects to everybody else too.

26:22
Michael Warren
I don’t have a fancy car, but I have a car that’s a year old and it has that feature on it where if you get too close to the car in front of you, it starts breaking for you. I have cursed at my car more for that going, I see the car, just let me drive. But it sounds like that if used properly, it can reduce the variables. So you mitigate the problems that we do have with human error. It makes the human more accurate and it focuses their attention more.

26:53
Brent Hinson
But it also dumbs us down a little bit because we start to rely on that beeping to say, oh wait, well I’m getting closer instead of turning around and actually looking. That’s my only reservation.

27:03
Mike Rogers
No, complacency is absolutely just like an aviation. You use checklists to make sure that you don’t miss stuff because you get complacent. So the same kind of thing with drones. Yeah, there’s the ability to get very lazy. But I think overall, I think to me, the value in bringing in those kinds of technologies into a search or into kind of a high threat operation outweigh that I think to me that’s going to be a good thing. There’s a whole nother discussion we’ll probably have right here, but the interaction of human on human and allowing the machine kind of Debuffer in the center now and help us make decisions, better, safer decisions on that. And there’s some clear examples of how that’s already starting to happen with these programs.

27:45
Michael Warren
Again, this is probably just me being dorky. It’s funny how we have unmanned submersibles that assist with searching on the seafloor and stuff like that, because they’re not visible and there aren’t people down there. It’s not regulated nearly as much, and people have less of a concern. It seems like it’s the fact that they’re visible and we are visible to these things that people have such trepidation with the technology.

28:12
Brent Hinson
When I heard that Amazon was using drones to deliver packages, that’s when I was like, wait a minute, this is way too futuristic for me. I just want a human to deliver my package.

28:22
Michael Warren
And the truth of the matter is, we’re honest with each other. We probably don’t want a human delivering our package. Just one more variable in this thing. What I would like for this drone.

28:31
Mike Rogers
Will get it on top.

28:32
Michael Warren
I just want to magically appear. That’s what I want. That’s ideally what I want. In a nutshell. For our listeners who maybe didn’t listen to the last episode, what is this concept of the drone as a first responder? Explain to me what that is in layman’s terms.

28:46
Mike Rogers
Sure, yeah, it’s really the same drones and the same technology and software. But what you’re doing now is you’re staging a drone, typically on a government building or on a police department, fire department, medical center, whatever. The drone is staged and manned 20 whatever period of time, but it’s ready to go. And when you get a 911 call or a call for service or an activation from a sensor. Whatever it is, the drone immediately launches to a location. So as an example, police department drone is staged on the roof of a police department. Their drone has a radius depending on the terrain and visibility. And whatever you can get as far as a discussion with the FAA or approvals from the FAA, it has a range of, let’s say a couple of miles. It can go out from the police department roof.

29:26
Mike Rogers
So you get a 911 call. The 911 call comes in and as they’re taking the information, they’re assessing the type of call and the location of the call first. While the 911 dispatchers are dealing with getting the information, you’re launching this drone directly to the location it’s posted. And now you’re getting a live image of the scene prior to essentially that’s your first person on scene. Your first image of the site is going to be through this drone. And so the drone, they’re not necessarily responding to everything that happens in the city or in the call center. You get a disturbance, suspicious person, alarm accident, those kinds of things. The drone can be there quickly. And that’s different from a patrol program where I’m trained. I have this in my trunk. I go out, I’m on a call, there’s a person that’s missing.

30:09
Mike Rogers
We put the drone up and start searching or there’s an accident, there’s a fatality. Now we’re going to do a reconstruction with drones. That’s more of a patrol function. This is DFR. Drone is a first responder and it’s really linked to either a 911 call or a sensor activation. A sensor activation example would be along the US border. Border patrol has motion sensors out and they get a hit, this drone will respond. That’s an example of where you could send a drone directly to that hit to take it a look at it first. But in the case of True DFR, there’s a handful of agencies across the US that have already implemented it. There’s a handful that are thinking about it or imminently going to start these programs. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

30:48
Mike Rogers
I think eventually that it’ll be a pretty common thing. But as an example of how it would work, you get a nine one call of a domestic call. Very common call in every community. As they’re taking the information, the drone responds to the address and is now watching over the top of the address. It might end up not being that valuable. Like there’s no activity in the front yard. The caller calls, the police respond, and the call is normal. But it could be a situation where the person has just attacked the other person is. Now you know, we’ve talked about this in the past, Mike. How many times have we driven past the bad guy while he’s leaving the scene as we’re coming in because we don’t know who.

31:22
Michael Warren
I don’t even like to think about how many times I drove right past a suspect because they’re going in the opposite direction.

31:28
Mike Rogers
Exactly. And you don’t know who it is yet because you have no eyeballs on the car or what. You just have a person who’s frantic on the phone yelling, I need help. So in this case, the drone response, as you talk to a lot of these agencies that have been doing this now, the few agencies that have done it for a year or two now and have good data, the drone response is usually somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes. That’s pretty average. So it’s on scene looking at the site within 90 seconds to two minutes. The average response time on these departments averages somewhere between three minutes and nine minutes, depending on the call and the department and all that. But let’s say it’s an average of five minutes in that time frame.

32:02
Mike Rogers
In that three minutes or so, three and a half minutes while you’re on the phone still dispatching cars, this drone is seeing someone leave and get into a car. The drone then can watch the description of the car. It left the subdivision, it went westbound. So now as you’re responding, you’ve got a heads up on what you’re responding to. And in some of the scenarios we’ve run with, we’ll go on site, we’ll actually demo these DFR systems live for agencies on their 911 calls to kind of give them a look at how this would go. And in those scenarios, we’ve had the person leave in a car. We’ve followed the car blocks away and put the car down in a parking lot, which is the classic wait for the police to leave, give it 30 minutes, come back and whoops them. You know what?

32:41
Mike Rogers
So now we’ve got no activity at the residence. We’ve got the drone posted over this car that’s sitting in a parking lot eight blocks away. We respond to two cars to the car first and we say, that’s your dude, and let’s resolve this now and not deal with this for the next six or 8 hours overnight as we’re getting more calls back and this person is being an idiot. So it’s given you the advantage to see what you’re walking into and it’s given us the advantage to really see this activity and catch the vehicle leaving or the criminal leaving and be able to follow that and be able to respond directly to them as opposed to the scene sometimes.

33:14
Brent Hinson
Now what you’re all saying sounds totally reasonable and makes sense to me. But to the general public at large, if they had no context, it might sound like a scene from Minority Report where they’re in this futuristic police state. How do we go about educating the public as no, these things are being used as a resource and a tool to help us in these situations.

33:35
Mike Rogers
Yeah, so community outreach is a huge part of these programs. I can tell you that first program I mentioned, Chula Vista, and some programs since then that are really doing well. Brookhaven in Georgia, Fort Wayne indiana, they’re very public about their data. So in the case of Chula Vista, for instance, every single drone call, when the aircraft is flying to a site, doing the imagery and coming back to the station, the GPS telemetry, and basically the geotagging of where the camera is looking, all that information is stored in a log on the aircraft. So when the aircraft comes back and repurchase, chula Vista is downloading and ultimately releasing that publicly. You can go on there right now. You can go up the Chula Vista drone program, look up their site.

34:16
Mike Rogers
You can see every flight they flew this year, where the drone flew and the direction of the travel. And then they’ll tell you the type of call it was, domestic, whatever date, time, location, all this. They’ll not necessarily put the location, I think, for security purposes, but where they ended up. But bottom line is, you can see the drone fly, you can see the trajectory of the track of it. So telling the community right up front, we’re going to be open about where we’re flying these things. Every flight is recorded, every video is tracked. The geo coordinates of where we’re looking are all recorded. And that information is stored in evidence. It’s available in FOIA, and we don’t need the FOIA because we’re going to publicly release where we’re flying this drone every time we fly. It really solves a lot of that problem.

34:52
Mike Rogers
This is not a case when you’re talking about DFR. You’re not flying around the city randomly looking at things you’re dispatched directly to a 911 call. So of all of the circumstances, when you look back about search warrants, arrest warrants, exigent circumstances, all the circumstances in which you would say, hey, we’re good with sending the technology, the 911 call clearly is kind of the top of the list of that. So they’re responding when they get there. They’re making an assessment. If there’s nothing there, they’re coming back. They can’t go inside your house with the drone, right? The body cams are going inside your house. That’s way more intrusive. These are simply tools that are 300ft above your house, looking at the front yard, giving you information. And it’s not just keeping the police safe, okay? The police are getting better information.

35:33
Mike Rogers
They know what they’re walking into, which is huge if you’ve ever had to walk into those situations. But more probably as important is I’ve used the example a lot, but firecrackers, right? You have a neighborhood, pretty rough neighborhood in your city. You get a couple of kids in the park at night, and they’re throwing firecrackers at each other. People hear that and they call shots fired in the park. So when the police are responding, they’re responding to teenagers with a weapon who fired it and are now they’re encountering them running away as they’re approaching the park. That mindset is tremendously different. You’re ramped, you’re expecting guns, you’re expecting kids who’ve pulled the trigger.

36:10
Mike Rogers
The propensity for some other further follow on violence there is pretty high versus the drone gets on site within 90 seconds, looks down, and can see kids lighting and throwing firecrackers and running around. Goofing. Now they’re telling the responding officers this is a firecrackers call in the park with teenagers. This is the kid who has the lighter. He’s walking this way. Now approach and meet him at the south end of the park. Way ramped down, fewer responders. They’re not going lights and sirens, putting themselves and the other people at risk. And those kids are at much less a risk of being shot in an incidental shooting or an accidental shooting. So I think there’s a lot of ways to look at that.

36:47
Mike Rogers
We’ve seen this, too, on SWAT operations where the drone goes inside, talks through a microphone to the bad guy, who then walks out and surrenders without having to stick three or four police officers into that front door with an armed suspect. So there’s a lot of ways that this makes it as safe for the public as it does for the police officer. But in the end, any technology like this can be misused, and there has to be a transparency to the use of it, and there has to be ramifications if you misuse it.

37:12
Michael Warren
Now, Mikey, one of the things that I think that the public oftentimes fails to recognize is that whenever we talk about officer safety, when we implement things that make officers safer, it has the dual benefit of making the public safer. Because in the example used with the park, making it safer for the officers, made it safer for those kids who are running away. But there’s these other benefits, because if you’ve got that type of call going on, everybody’s busting butt to get there, ain’t they? They’re driving lights and sirens. And no matter how safely you drive, when you’re driving code, it’s a dangerous activity. If we can get a drone on scene and they can say, hey, listen, here’s what’s going on.

37:54
Michael Warren
If we cancel a couple of those cars, well, we just made a whole bunch of families that were driving up and down the public roadways. We’ve made them safer because we’ve cut the emergency response as well.

38:05
Mike Rogers
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. You’re slowing them down and you’re cutting the number of people responding. I’m not comfortable yet waiving things off just on the drone. I still want a person to verify it. I’m actually stunned. This is a positive surprise to me, but when you talk to these agencies, they’re showing somewhere between a five and a 15% wave off rate with these drones now where they actually just send the drone on something and they just wave off the response. In other words, hey, reports of a serious accident in this intersection block. So now you’re sending all these people and you get there, the drone gets there and there’s two cars on the shoulder. They’re out talking, exchanging paper. So you’re saying we’re waiving off two of the other responders. One is still responding.

38:43
Mike Rogers
So now we have two other cars cleared for the call. So they’re seeing positive things like that where they’re able to save responses and save response times and all that in.

38:53
Michael Warren
A world where everybody’s short staffed. There are other benefits because if I’m able to cancel cars from this call, that means that they can respond to other calls in a much more prudent fashion. So we’re getting to calls, people are staying in their districts, getting out and meeting the community. I mean, it just seems like that there are a whole bunch of benefits and I want to go back and touch again one thing you said. So the drone as a first responder is using the drone to respond to a specific call for service. It is not the use of the drone out there patrolling in the same manner that patrol cars are, patrol officers are.

39:32
Mike Rogers
Yeah, it’s absolutely responding to a 911 call or sensor hit or whatever the activation is. But it’s something serious enough that we want to get a look at it quickly. The drone is out there. The drone is providing information to first and foremost assess the scene, send information back, protect the people responding, and give decision makers better data to make that decision. The side effect of that is it’s also potentially making the people unseen, safer, depending on the situation, what’s going on. It’s different from other types of drone programs. And I think when you look at those response times, this is the first step of this. To me, there’s a whole nother side of this coming that is going to be even more beneficial, and that is the next generation of drones.

40:11
Mike Rogers
We’ll be able to go out post and then be able to drop medicines to them. We’ll be able to drop an AED to them. You get a golf course call, right? All these heart attacks that happen on golf courses, it’s hard to get a responder there and out to the 15th hole quickly. I can push a drone in 90 seconds and drop an AED with instructions on the site to the other forsome. The other people in the forsome, I have an overdose, parents find their son overdosed in the bathroom. I can put narcan or insulin or something like that on the drone and I can drop that on the doorstep in 90 seconds or a minute and a half. That’s legitimate, life saving, without question, life saving kind of response.

40:46
Brent Hinson
Are there other first response agencies incorporating this technology into their everyday routines, like fire departments? They can send them out and see what is the level of intensity of the fire or how fast there’s a.

41:00
Mike Rogers
Lot of people considering this, even in private industry now, like, some of the pharmacies are considering this as a potential. But I think from our perspective, our company, half of our focus, my focus right now is on training, and the other half is on DFR. Specifically, what is the best setup for this? And I’ll get to my point here in the answer, but we’ve started a DFR center down in Huntsville, Alabama. So it’s a cooperative effort between us and the city of Huntsville and one of the universities there. The whole idea is we’re setting up essentially a DFR lab over a 2200 acre approved site. And we’re going to employ the best systems we can. We’re going to employ the software. We’re going to employ the different drones.

41:39
Mike Rogers
We’re going to employ the different radars day cameras, and we’re going to assess all these things. We’re going to assess what is the best system, what is the optimum software for these kinds of things, or what is the range of software, depending on how much you can spend and how much technology you really want. And this is the next cycle that naturally leads into testing, drops, testing deliveries, testing all these other things in semi urban environments, in rural environments, doing searches in rural environments. So this laboratory, we’re calling it Rise, but it’s basically it’s a DFR drones of first responder demo laboratory. We can not only do the research there, but we can also now do demos. So if you’re an agency that you want to see, we are really interested in this drone and this software.

42:18
Mike Rogers
Are they compatible and how would this work in a DFR environment? We can run scenarios to canned locations with setups. There are accident scenes and disturbance scenes and missing person scenes for you remotely. And you can see this. So to me, that’s kind of the next step is approaching this as not just a police department response, a DFR response, but as regional emergency response programs. So I want to be able to show fire departments this. I want to be able to show police departments. I want to show EMS companies. I want FEMA to be involved in this. We’re talking to FEMA about the potential for this immediately following a major event, whether it’s a tornado, hurricane, flooding event. Can we put drones from this drone first responder setup?

42:59
Mike Rogers
Can we push those drones now and have an immediate assessment of the site and be delivering things we need to deliver immediately while we’re still responding and getting know, staging our teams and that kind of thing? Right now, here by me, we got a really unusual wild gun fire here in the Shannon DOA, and we’ve got a bunch of teams staged here fighting the fire. Can I use drones in that respect as well? Can I go out and fire spot and find the edges of this thing, find hotspots at night when we really can’t see them normally and be able to start helping them attack the fire. So there’s a lot of uses for this. The answer is yes. There are other people looking at it. Police departments know, military really has been the first to do these kinds of things.

43:33
Mike Rogers
Police departments have kind of taken the step now in the public safety realm. And I think fire departments and EMS and those kinds of emergency responders or disaster responders will be next, followed by, or maybe in conjunction with private security things like Colonial Pipeline or Pacific Gas and Electric to be able to respond immediately to potential breaks in the pipes, potential wires down. They can put a drone out there in a minute, two minutes, whatever, and assess, yeah, we do have wires down, we have wires over the road and they’re starting a fire. It’s all basically responding to a prompt, to a legitimate prompt and it works in all those formats. But I believe truly that I think that this will be a standard capability that most large departments have.

44:17
Mike Rogers
I would like to see it regionally adopted for a region’s like a county’s police, fire and EMS together and have a shared nine one or shared fusion of that data.

44:27
Michael Warren
But Mikey, one of the things is when you look back like Katrina, for example, it would seem like that would be the ideal environment to have this regional type of deployment of it. Not every agency, in fact, most agencies can’t afford an aviation unit. The drone capability is something that most can could properly deployed if they had the right training and that type thing, it seems like it’s a force multiplier for public safety as a whole, not just for policing.

44:57
Mike Rogers
It’s really for a lot of agencies. Mike, a couple of things come to mind. One is the hurricane example. When you think about right now, if there was a hurricane and there’s a major event, we have to bring all these teams down with their drones and with their teams to start setting up an air boss and set up, what are we going to do here? Assuming everything survives the weather, right, but assuming your teams are already in place, you’re not bringing all these people, you’re just reactivating them. So the weather has cleared, the storm has passed, and now we’re immediately launching from our rooftop locations and from our boxes, our weatherproof boxes and things. And we’re pushing drones out to do immediate assessments of all our major infrastructure, our roadways, our waterways, our bridges, our power lines.

45:39
Mike Rogers
And then, like you said, delivering, we’re delivering needed supplies to needed people. Whether it’s dropping emergency medical supplies, whether it’s dropping some kind of heat source, or whether it’s dropping a satellite phone to communicate to an island that’s cut off, the roads cut off, or whatever, there’s a lot of things that we can quickly get there within minutes, which is really crazy, and do those assessments. And so I think what we’re really hoping is that if enough agencies adopt these kinds of programs, then they’ll all be in place. We won’t need to surge resources to these places to really start doing assessments and start doing deliveries. It’ll be in place. And that’s the key, is planning this up front and getting it ahead of those kinds of disasters.

46:16
Mike Rogers
But the more we use these systems, the more we practice this, the more we become comfortable as a society with them flying around us, the better we’ll be prepared for those kind of singular events.

46:26
Brent Hinson
It sounds like drones are a lot like I’ve got a video camera outside my house, a security camera, and it shows me my neighborhood and I can hit a button and I can talk through it. And it’s very similar to what drones can do, but it’s stationary. And I use it as peace of mind, a tool to make sure that my home is secure. And that’s really what this is. They’re tools to help us get the situation under.

46:50
Mike Rogers
Absolutely. We just we’ve done so many weird things this year. We’ve supported the military, we’ve trained the military in Czech Republic, in the US, here in the United States, and some guys over in Germany on just small drone situation awareness, force protection kind of thing, like what’s around us. I can now see 5 miles down range at night, which I never could do before from the ground. You think back to some of the big battles in history if they had a drone just to pop up and be able to look down range. And then we’ve done other things. We’ve done we’ve supported some private security on presidential level protection details where they’re giving an outdoor speech in a large public venue, and there’s 15 story buildings on all sides, which is a nightmare if you’re trying to protect an outdoor target.

47:30
Mike Rogers
To be able to just go across the rooftops and take a quick pass over any high points and say all the rooftops are clear. There’s nothing pointing out the extension of any balconies from ten stories and above. We’re good to roll. That kind of peace of mind. There’s a lot of uses for these things and like you said, really all it is it’s an extension of your vision. It’s putting it in places we typically in the past couldn’t really see unless you had a $13 million helicopter and you could run that system around. So it’s giving an aviation unit to every program in the United States to some level. Now you can’t do anything with it, but to some level but to your.

48:02
Michael Warren
Point about deploying these types of aviation assets to like a hurricane, you’re not just deploying a helicopter and a know there’s usually pilot and ailot and there’s also know some type of person on board that handles the logistics for lack of a better term. But you also have a support crew that for a helicopter. Is rather large. The people that are ensuring that it’s in flying, it’s a lot of resources that are used up for this one tool where if you’re talking about a drone, you still have to have logistic support. It reduces it. And if I reduce that, then maybe I can have more than one drone. So it just seems like it’s a sensible tool that makes it safer for everybody.

48:47
Mike Rogers
Yeah, exactly. And tying it up with the hurricane and helicopter example. You have a hurricane like Katrina, and now you’ve got seven Coast Guard helicopters and a couple sheriff’s helicopters trying to rescue thousands of people from rooftops and trying to fly around and find them and then lower the baskets and spend the fuel. And they’re limited trips. Whereas now you’ve got an army of drones that can basically do grid searches over you, define the area. Each one of these neighborhoods is your area. You grid map it, search it, and GPS plot every place that you see someone on a rooftop. And now these helicopters can come in untargeted. I need to hit here, and here and get out.

49:20
Mike Rogers
Now your fuel consumption is half of what it would have been if you’re driving around trying to find all these people waving flags, because these drones can come down at 50ft and just move right across the rooftops and even communicate or drop things. If we need to drop something like a life preserver, we can drop a life preserver to them. Boom. Or we can communicate them through a speaker or phone and say, hey, help is on the way. Stay here, stay protected. It’ll be 30 minutes and you’ll be lifted out of here. Or hey, we have no one to come get you right now because the weather all aircraft are down. You need to hunker down for 6 hours or whatever you can. Just endless possibilities of what this thing will be able to do.

49:52
Mike Rogers
Whether it’s an automated boat, autonomous small boats that can do this, or autonomous aircraft, doesn’t matter. It’s moving. Extending our voice and our senses, our eyes and our ears out to places we never could do that before is really what it’s about.

50:06
Michael Warren
The wrench in the plans, if you will. Back in August, there was an incident in New York City where there was a social media influencer had put out that he was going to be doing this giveaway in this park. And there was an overwhelming response by his followers. One of the tools that was deployed by NYPD was a drone. In fact, after that, there was all types of questions about privacy concerns with the use of the drone. But it was a dangerous situation. They had to go and grab the influencer and get him out of there for his own safety. As a drone trainer, as a drone expert, what do we do? How do we handle folks that have these privacy concerns for its use in those types of mass gathering, and we’ve talked about this before.

50:54
Michael Warren
I mean, there’s a difference between a mass gathering of people and a protest. Both involve a bunch of people, but the purpose and the danger is different, isn’t it?

51:04
Mike Rogers
Yeah. This has been a really strong point of contention for years now. We got wrapped up in this quite a bit in my former life. You got people that are protesting during a lot of the BLM protests and during a lot of things that were going on during COVID People are protesting against the government or angry at the government. They’re protesting. They’re exercising First Amendment rights. For us to go and film them doing that simply because we’re filming the crowd to see who’s participating or something like that would be a violation. That right. I think, I think there’s rules. This is not a law thing now. I mean, there’s a constitutional issue, of course, but this is a program policy thing.

51:34
Mike Rogers
I think that you need to address as an agency employing drones to go film people for the purpose of who’s here, probably a violation of that constitutional right. And I think most people would agree. Now there’s going to be a record of that filming. There’s going to be video of that filming. So you’re laying out your own case against you. But from a public safety perspective, to be able to measure crowd size and say, hey, this is what we have as a crowd, this is where they’re at, this is where the movement is. And hey, we have somebody who’s claiming they’re down medically in the middle of this crowd, let’s use the drone to get in there and find where they’re at. There’s absolutely legitimate public safety needs and value in using the drone in those circumstances.

52:10
Mike Rogers
So that’s really part of that public discussion. What is our policy as an agency about protests and gatherings and those kinds of things? I can tell you we have in multiple cases in the past, we had aircraft or drones that were staged over these things to support whatever they needed us to do. Their mere presence caused people to assume that we’re videotaping them for some other nefarious purpose or anything. In most cases, not the case. We were basically staged and the plan was if we have officers that have to go into this crowd and they’re enveloped and this thing turns ugly, we want the drone over them to start guiding people in and we want to find the path to get them out. Most effectively, if we have someone that goes down medically, we want the drone over it to pinpoint it.

52:48
Mike Rogers
Now, the medics who are trying to look laterally through a crowd of 15,000 people can look at the drone and march to the drone, which is already 100ft above them. And once they’re underneath the drone, they find their guy. So there’s other uses that you can use and public safety value in this that is, I think, of significant value. But you’re right. Absolutely. I think the idea of going and taking close up video because aircraft in the past really couldn’t do that. I’ve flown a lot of surveillance aircraft in helicopters. You’re not getting PII, you’re not getting someone’s face. You’re not getting that kind of information from 1000ft or 2000ft or whatever. But a drone at 50ft could do that. You could start getting facial recognition kind of concerns. So, I don’t know. I think that’s a policy thing.

53:28
Mike Rogers
There’s always the danger that could be happening. I think most agencies are mature enough to not do that. They’re handling these things right, and they’re using these things for safety more so than they are for that kind of gathering.

53:38
Brent Hinson
And I think probably what freaks people out the most is it’s something they can’t control. I might be able to outrun an officer. I’m probably not going to outrun a drone that’s flying over top of me.

53:48
Mike Rogers
Not unless you go underneath something. That is my argument. Everybody’s concerned. Number one concern always was I’m worried about people looking in my windows, like, pull the curtain shut, boom. You just defeated the best, most sophisticated technology in the planet, I assure you.

54:03
Brent Hinson
No one wants to see what’s going on inside.

54:06
Mike Rogers
No one wants to see it. You want to defeat the drone, go inside somewhere. You want to defeat the person looking in your window, close the curtains. They’re not perfect. They’re not foolproof. But I think the truth is most people still don’t really look at the vertical component of their space around them as the threat, right? They look at it. They look laterally at what can touch them and harm them. And so people don’t tend to look up unless they’re prompted to look up. So there still is sort of a tactical advantage, I guess, in the fact that we have this perspective, but over time, it seems we’ll probably change that.

54:40
Michael Warren
You know what, Mikey? I think one important things to point out is just because a tool is available doesn’t mean that it’s being used. An officer who comes into your house responding on a call is carrying a gun, is carrying pepper spray, is carrying a Taser, but it’s not being deployed. And just because you have some of these technologies available on a drone doesn’t mean that they’re being used. If you’ve got facial recognition, it may not be active because that’s not the mission for the day. Just because it’s an option doesn’t mean that it’s being used.

55:10
Mike Rogers
Yeah. And we’ve had philosophical discussions with a lot of people in the industry about arming these things, not so much with lethal force, but with some kind of less than lethal force. And there’s a lot of arguments for and against it. And for the most part, most agencies are prohibiting it right now, and it’s outside of the policy to do that. But that’ll be something in the future that we have to reckon with. And I think there is an argument to be made that if you look at the Avaldi school event, if they had a drone that could have flown into that room and just tased that guy from an 80 foot or 90 foot distance would that have been well worth having the taser on there and worrying about the fact that could be misused?

55:46
Mike Rogers
I would argue if you’re one of the parents of the children, that would be well worth it.

55:49
Brent Hinson
That’s tough. Once the genie is out of the bottle there, it’s hard to put it back in.

55:54
Mike Rogers
Yeah, that’s a whole nother discussion, but I don’t want to open that genie’s bottle here, but I think right now the question is, are the drones providing information and security that’s worth their cost and worth their imposition? My answer? Yeah, I think absolutely. I’m comfortable with the fact that they may fly a drone over my backyard and see me in the backyard, but at the same time may use it to stop somebody from who just assaulted me and my wife and is running out the backyard. I’d rather have the capability there and just basically keep an eye on the people using it and make sure we’re using it properly and have some kind of a process for that than to not have it because we’re afraid it might be used improperly in this one.

56:32
Michael Warren
I’m asking for a friend. You’ve indicated that some have the capability where you can speak to somebody through the drone asking for a friend. Can they also listen?

56:42
Mike Rogers
Yes.

56:43
Michael Warren
Okay.

56:45
Mike Rogers
Not every drone, I would say not even most drones, but some drones, enterprise drones and drones built specifically for some of the DoD and public safety users have the ability to listen and talk. The speaker is a two way speaker. Now, first of all, you’re going to hear a drone coming. It’s not going to sneak up on you and start listening on you, I guarantee you. And it can’t hear over the prop noise from a distance, right? So if it’s flying, it’s not going to hear anything. Where it’s a value is you have a negotiation, a hostage negotiation, and you have a guy locked inside a house that’s refusing to talk, has a weapon you can fly, break a window, fly this in, land it, and now have a two way communication with that person without them having to manipulate a phone or something.

57:22
Mike Rogers
So there’s one value. The other value is you have like the rooftop scenario. We have a flood, a major evacuation going on, and you can land this on the rooftop and tell people communicate. Do you have anybody injured? Yes. No. How many people are in the house? Six. Okay, stay here, stay put. We’ll be back in 30 minutes. So they basically have built basically a cell phone type communication device into some of these smaller drones specifically for those tactical purposes.

57:46
Michael Warren
Based on your answer, my neighbors will thank you because you’ve just changed my outdoor singing regimen. They can listen, but you would have.

57:55
Mike Rogers
To be singing pretty darn loud, Michael, because they’d have to hear you over the four motors right above it.

58:01
Michael Warren
Just saying, when you’ve got the headphones in, your volume is often mismeasured by the person singing. So, a couple of things as we’re wrapping up here. This facility that you’re talking about, is it in Huntsville?

58:12
Mike Rogers
Yeah, it’s in Huntsville. It’s adjacent to the Huntsville airport. It is an FAA designated test center, and we’re going to be managing the kind of the test and evaluation.

58:20
Michael Warren
When is that going to be up and operational and initially operational, like, ready.

58:25
Mike Rogers
To start flying there probably in January. So coming up here in the next eight weeks or so. And then we’re going to build in some scenarios and some infrastructure. So that will probably be in the weeks to follow. But I think certainly by end of first quarter 24, we should have a full program ready to go to start doing these things live and remotely.

58:43
Michael Warren
I think that the use of scenarios is going to be a game changer because for people being able to see and I would recommend putting more work on your guys’plate, that’s a perfect way to demonstrate to the public how it’s going to be used, what it looked like, so that the public can understand the limitations, the narrow scope in which that particular technology is going to be used.

59:06
Mike Rogers
Yeah, that’s actually a really great idea, because if you’re doing it virtually, then in some cases, you can do that anywhere in the country.

59:12
Michael Warren
It’s almost like a town.

59:14
Mike Rogers
We’re going to have a dispatch center in there built up. We’re going to have the scenarios where they can fly out and see things and even role players in certain circumstances. So we can go out and we can have this missing lost person and search, and we can use employ different technologies and see if we can really find them, but we can film those scenarios or remotely push them. And that would be a great way to say, this is exactly a DFR scenario. It’s on the roof. This is the aircraft. There’s an image of it. This is the software using. Let’s send it out on a car accident or a domestic or whatever scenario. So we’re looking forward to it.

59:43
Mike Rogers
We think it’s going to because right now, every one of these agencies is trying to do this is traveling around the country to an existing agency that does it. It’s trying to impose on them to do, can you give me a tour? They’re trying to talk to all these independent vendors. So what we’re trying to say is, listen, we’re going to distill this down to the four or five primary aircraft and the four or five primary software and the radars and all the air awareness part that work and say, come take a look. We’ll throw them into play and walk away from here with a pretty good idea of what you’re looking to do.

01:00:11
Brent Hinson
Based on the questions that I’ve asked over this past hour, I’m sure there’s many more that the public would have for you. And it sounds like one of the key issues here is community outreach, education and transparency. If you can nail those, I think that will come to an acceptance.

01:00:25
Mike Rogers
You got to nail those first before you even put the drone in the air, for sure. And most of these agencies have done a really good job of that. I’ve not testified, but I’ve been on video in front of city councils before because the police department wants the city council to have the ability to ask these questions and say, exactly what would your policy say about this? How would you handle these scenarios and stuff? So I’m impressed because coming from the federal side, where our program had a lot less community outreach, I’m actually really impressed at a lot of these agencies and how well they’re doing. That part of it. They’re really engaged in our case.

01:00:59
Mike Rogers
My CEO has actually reached out to the ACLU and we’ve done a joint paper on what is the civil rights implications of this and what are the privacy concerns and what are your concerns as the ACLU? And I think a lot of that’s been fleshed. I think it’s actually at a pretty good place.

01:01:15
Michael Warren
So, Mikey, if people wanted to know a little bit more about your company, where’s the best place for them to go for that?

01:01:20
Mike Rogers
Yeah, our website is@skyfireconsulting.com and you can go on the Internet to do that. You can reach out to me direct at Mike Rogers, At. You know, we’d be glad to talk to anybody. As we always say, we’re a consultancy first and then a training and an operator second. But we really don’t charge to have these kinds of conversations. We only charge if we come out and train or employ a system or something. So if you’re looking or interested in these kinds of programs, reach out. We’ve got some information on it. We can have these discussions and then we can send you. We don’t sell any systems. We are agnostic, and that’s on purpose.

01:01:53
Mike Rogers
So we can send you to where we think based on your situation, your weather, your size, all those things, what we think is the best systems to take a look at. So glad to talk to anybody anytime in the public safety space or the DoD space, and even industry and those areas as well.

01:02:07
Michael Warren
Very good. Well, we appreciate your willingness to come back on. I’m excited about the technology because I do think it increases safety for the communities we serve and for our first responders. I hope that people embrace it. Thank you to Director Rausch for bringing it back to the forefront of our minds. I think this is good technology, and I just think that we just have to be intentional about its use.

01:02:31
Brent Hinson
Well, I think it’s an education factor. Even though they’re not new, it’s relatively new to a lot of people. So as soon as we can educate the public and let them know the uses that it’s being employed for, I think a lot of minds would be at ease to see how beneficial that this technology is. And again, we talk about the Show Notes a lot on this podcast. We’ll put it in the Show Notes, and for those that aren’t familiar, just go to the episode page for this particular episode at between the Lines of Virtualacademy.com. And right there, you’ll see the website for Skyfire. Also, Mike’s LinkedIn page will have a link to that so you guys can get some more information. That’s what the Show Notes part of this whole podcast is.

01:03:14
Brent Hinson
And as we’re nearing the end of this particular episode, while you’re at our website, you can double back, hit episodes, go to episode 14, and you can revisit Mike’s first visit to the podcast. It’s all at between the lines at the virtualacademy.com. Mike, incredibly insightful. Thanks for being transparent and open about all this new technology that’s coming forward. It sounds like you guys are doing some fantastic work.

01:03:35
Mike Rogers
Guys, it’s always great talking to you. I’ve enjoyed it. And thank you for having us on. I do believe that getting the word out is probably the most important thing to get this technology up and running. So I appreciate to time.