# Pioneering Drone as First Responder (DFR) for Future-Ready Policing

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 44:17
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/E_PBp7jPc7k/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## Transcript

**[0:21]** hello and welcome to negen 2025 I am PR your host for this session and today we are talking about one of the most transformative and Innovation Innovative session in the public safety department drones as First Responders for decades law enforcement has relied on traditional First Response methods petrol cars helicopters and ground teams to react to incidents however response time officer safety and situational awareness remain critical challenges imagine a world where drones are the first eyes on the scene arriving within minutes providing live intelligence to officers and even help deescalate situations before ground units arrive that's exact ly what drones as First Responders is doing bringing the future of realtime policing AI driven Incident Management and safer Urban operations into reality but hold on before I start I have a few housekeeping rules to help us make this session even better success if you have any questions drop them in the Q&A Tab and we'll get to

**[1:21]** them after the end of the session the session is being recorded So if you have want to revisit and hear what the speaker has to say again you can do that engage with us let us know in the chat what's the biggest question about a DFO program how to deploy DFO programs at scale we we are all here for it all years for it and we are ready to answer last but not the least join the conversation on social or social media use NES gen on 2025 and on LinkedIn and Twitter to share your insights and tag our speakers I would also like to give a huge uh shout out to our sponsors for this year's nesg your support has been instrumental throughout this session and yes finally as I was saying Jones say First Responders are the future of smarter faster policing and who better to Walkers through this then Miriam Fox the captain at the Chulavista Police Department the organization that paved the way for dfr programs which have now been successfully deployed all over the world Miriam I'm truly honored to welcome you to the

**[2:23]** stage thank you pre I will go ahead and get started um share let's begin all righty okay so hopefully can you guys see my screen yes all right so again uh thank you pre uh my name is Mariam Fox I'm a captain with the CH Vista Police Department I've been with ch Vista approximately 20 almost 27 years prior to that I was in United States Navy um so uh life of service service is what I love and I get to do it with drones so again um here to just highlight and go over what CHD crazy idea that we started with and how it's kind of grown into a worldwide um thing that is going to turn policing into a future taking policing to the Future so where is chil Vista we always get asked this question we are located in San Diego County it's a suburb um

**[3:24]** where the second largest city in the Sano County where the third largest agency police agency in the county um we have about 280,000 plus so in our eastern part of our city we actually have a lot of new development New Growth or new Communities going up so the city is 52 square miles now and potentially is going to grow we have sworn 297 sworn we've got got about 113 professional staff or civilians um the reason why the Drone program is so important in our city is that we don't have the helicopter unit we can't afford one we would love to have one but it's very costly um even though we have great relationships with the San Diego Sheriff's department and San Diego Police Department that have helicopters it's also um not always available to our agency and the other agencies in the area um also we are seven miles from the US Mexico border so we do get a lot of cross border crimes that do happen because you have to go through the city of chista to get to the border so how this all started a neighboring agency had a

**[4:29]** incident where subject was this acting erratic um officer was in the air responded to the call and the subject pointed what was something shiny the officer thought it was a weapon unfortunately based on his training and skills and he shot the individual who ended up not surviving the injury so this is just footage actual footage of the protest after that officer involved shooting um the officer happened to be white the male had happened to be African-American it ended up being a shiny Vape device but it looked like a weapon and so at that time my chief wanted to know what could we do differently to avoid this situation so Chief Kennedy tasked all us lieutenants when I was Lieutenant at time saying what can we do differently so what we started to do is we came up with a concept called uh the Sarah program the Sarah model which is a cops model and basically what that is is that we

**[5:30]** put officers in plain clothes in unmarked vehicles and they would have a radio and their mobile data computer and they would go ahead on a call for service and they would call out what they saw before the marked uniformed officers got there that program was so successful we did it for about six mon six months and then another Lieutenant said hey why don't we try that same concept but using drones so that was the beginning of drones as first responder with children LPD and so from there at the same time now we have President Trump now but then president Trump was tasked um he had tasked the FAA to integrate drones into the national airspace um obviously as you know FedEx UPS a lot of these companies Amazon are looking to use drones to to uh improve their business model so the FAA started a program called the integration pilot program the integration P program IP it enlisted 10 uas testing sites

**[6:30]** nationally the city of San Diego was one of the testing sites and the chilisa police department we happened to be the only police agency that jump in any of the testing sites and we jumped in with city of San Diego so that's basically how we got head of the line um approvals and privileges with the FAA because we started with the testing sites and from there our program grew um we in 2017 after that happened we started to test and implement the use of drugs and uh responding to our calls and we also uh we did public forums we did City ma uh city meetings uh we did we had the news media come in to look at what we were doing we wanted to give input and give the the community a chance to see what we were looking at doing and what we were testing and also get input from the community so prior to studying our program officially in 2018 um we actually did a lot of Outreach so again again May of 2018 uh we we were

**[7:32]** selected as one of the 10 testing sites and and then we officially launched our program October of 2018 so in conjunction with our Dron is first responder program we also utilize live 911 live 911 is a software web-based program that when the 911 call comes into dispatch it splits off dispatchers get it and then our officers can get it and our officers get to hear in real time what the callers are saying and it additionally it uses um technology from Rapid SOS rapid deploy where it shows the Coller within a couple of feet of where they're at this is important because it's just like the same technology of uber and lft but this is important because when we're responding to calls we can see where they're calling from through live 911 in addition to our in addition to knowing exactly where the incident is happening and occurring and this gives the officer the chance to be able to respond appropriately and

**[8:35]** specifically know where exactly to go officers don't have to wait for the call taker to take the call interpret the call and then go to the dispatcher the dispatcher now the officers are hearing the information they're hearing the voice inflection and this kind of just helps having another set of ears to help our dispatchers who are already doing a fantastic job in addition within live 911 there's a system called campus alert and what that allows us to do is to geofence all of our schools in our city and other areas such as our city hall so if we ever get a 911 call from those areas anyone that's logged in and all of our officers get logged in when they start their day and it just then they just mute the system it'll unmute all of the the users that are logged in if there's a 911 call from any of our schools and obviously this is for us to protect and hopefully be ready got for bid of is the event of an active shooter a serious situation going on one of our schools so we use dfr in

**[9:37]** conjunction with live 911 again being able to hear that call come in immediately just a really quick success story we had an officer that was logged into live 911 heard a 911 call coming in of a mother that was frantic because her child had fell in the pool and was she was really upset as to what was going on obviously it was at the Children's party not her own own home so she wasn't sure exactly where she was at as our dispatchers were trying to get the information the officer was nearby in fact right by the address when the 911 call came in so the officer was able to respond to the call start CPR for the child and save the child's life now that may not seem like a big deal with the officer being there but normally you have to wait for the call taker to get the information try to get the information from the mom and then dispatch and hopefully officer in the area so this this saves lives getting there quickly having the information and knowing exactly what to do saves lives so how it works again we utilize it with live 911 this is my teller operator I happens

**[10:42]** to be one of my uas sergeants this is our dfr room so the teller operator is a sworn police officer they are listening to live 911 they hear the call they radio up to our rooftop this an example of our PD location they tell they and we have a piloting command on the rooftop part of the FAA certificate of authorization that we have require us to have a pick on the rooftop now the dfr 2.0 that is the iteration where the Drone the boxs and automating with the radar detection that would be our next step as well um but right now we still have our pilots in command on the rooftop that person make sure the Drone is flight worthy they check the airspace and the Drone launches and then directly starts live streaming footage to our desktop computers our officers mobile data computers and even on our mobile devices so the coverage in our city so like I explained we're we're within the Sano

**[11:46]** County um we have four launch locations actually getting ready to have a fifth launch location so this first circle is our the police station this shows the radius the lower circle is bayew hospital this shows the radius then we have Sharp Hospital in the center here and then we have Spring Hill Suites we also have a fifth location um that will be going up in June it's a new library that's being built in the eastern part of our city this gives us about 95% coverage for the city which is pretty great because we want to make sure we can get to those emergencies quickly and live stream that pledge to our officers so showing our progress when we first started in 2018 we only had one launch location we take a craww walk run um stance when it comes to type to doing these type of uh operations so we always tell agencies don't rush don't put up four location start off with one perfect that and then expand your location so initially we had limited availability we had our pilot and command Staffing the rooftops we only have one mile line of sight and we live

**[12:50]** the stream live stream the footage through cape and we had to enter our flight data man manually in now we use air data so Citywide we have four with one coming on another one coming online we fly seven days a week during the week we fly up until sunset weekends Friday night Saturday night Sunday night we fly until midnight the reason why is that weekend nights is where we have a lot more calls for service uh we will be expanding seven days a week up until midnight but right now it's uh only on the weekends up until midnight and then during the week up until sunset our we call our T operators which are the sworn officers they tell tell operate um we contract with a company called flying lion they provide our pilots in command um they are backgrounded to be able to access the police U facility and also use police equipment the drones are all owned by the city of chil Vista Police Department and so the company is just managing and using our our our equipment helping us with the airspace and making sure everything's ready we have our Beyond visual line of sight

**[13:54]** waiver we also have a two to one waiver obviously meaning that each location we can fly two drones from every location we're authorized so we can launch one drone get overhead with the scene live stream the data if as that drone if the battery is getting low we can launch a second drone from the same location get overhead adjacent and then bring the first one back so that will allow us to have the continuous View and situational awareness for our officers again we live stream our our Drone footage to our officers via Cape M roller Cape but there are numerous companies now that have t operating service that also live stream um so it's we consider a proactive tool we're prepared to respond immediately we can launch within 90 seconds and get overhead within 90 seconds for most of our calls um it's operated remotely Again by a teller operator we always harp about the experienc sworn officer because the officer that's launching the Drone and flying overhead basically becomes The Incident Commander and can direct the ground units in their approach and how

**[14:59]** they can deal with the incident they're dealing with um we have Geo fencing that helps uh ensure our uh safety and we also uh have visual observers in the field all of our sworn officers are get trained every six months on how to be visual observers to call out obstacles to uh our Pilots our Pilots so we have a lot of construction it could be a new new crane that goes up or you just never know if there's some sort of helicopter that's um not checking their nms and uh so we they're trained on how to call out obstacles and other and such to our tele operator uh again our taer operator will choose which launch site is nearest to the incident of course this is going to be a future automated uh iteration in the future but because they experience they know the city they know which launch site would be better and best to to respond based on the call or service and the response time um again they assist with coordination via radio they'll set up ground units because

**[16:02]** they have the best Birds I view and you see on the right it's distributed to all mobile devices and our mobile data computers and our desktop so our chief of police she could see what's going on with our Drone footage so transparency is a big in law enforcement as we know letting our community know what we're doing and why is an important part of of doing it right and so for us we had heard this early on about the community wan to know exactly why we're using the Drone program so on our web page you can see the date time the type the case number or instant number the location and why we responded to the call it even shows the flight Telemetry of the of the Drone which is important so we want our community to know that we're not just randomly patrolling now some agencies may be doing that now but for chil Vista it's important our community knows that we're not just going to fly our drone we're going to go for a call for service for a call for help uh this is also a part of our website there's a link on the bottom it shows if

**[17:02]** you could just Google chist the PD drone program you'll come up on our page and this is important this is a dashboard that it's power it's through uh powerbi uh and it just pulls from our Cad and our report management system and it basically feeds this information so right now this was as of the other day the 15th we had over 21,000 calls for service um 3,00 over 3,000 of those calls were assisted arrests um um and what's important about this the next slide is that you'll see for the um deployment avoided dispatch a patrol call so over 4,000 of these calls we actually with our drone program were able to kill clear the call for service without having to send an officer when we're deploying our drones we're deploying them for calls that are of a higher respon higher priority so priority ones priority twos and those calls will require two officers so if it's over 4,000 calls that we did not have to send an

**[18:04]** officer that's over 8 8,000 officers that could be redirected those resources can be redirected for something more important uh it takes us about 90 seconds to get overhead and over overhead on the call so that's that response time is huge with traffic and the size of our city sometimes it takes a half an hour to get from our our main headquarters station to the eastern part of the city another part from our website is uh when we started our drone program prior to that we weren't making our Priority One and priority two calls Priority One calls or crimes in progress right now prior two they car crimes that just happened that just occurred so now we are actually meeting our response times for priority 1 and priority two calls which is important because we can get overhead so quickly with the Drone and with the ground you it would take um it will take almost triple the time to get to the call so what we're doing is we're providing real time valuable Intel to responding officers uh we deescalate the situation we consider a deescalation tool when we are

**[19:09]** able for to get this information to our officers they're able to see what they're doing and I'll show you some examples of how we feel at the deescalation tool we can confirm we can dispel or expand on the information that we're receiving um we also are able to re reallocate valuable resources like I said earlier if our drone um our dfr can get overhead on a call of an active fight and we have multiple units responding code lights and siren but we could see the fight's gone and everyone's dispersed and we can cancel those units and they can be redirected to where they need to go uh provides a birdside view supervisor and Command Staff it makes our First Responders and Community safer so what we don't do and this is something that we hear from our community we don't conduct surveillance on the community um we don't implement uh license plate readers we do have license plate readers in our city we have 150 spread out throughout the city um but they're not a part of the Drone program um but there

**[20:09]** could be a later iteration but right now our community that's a huge concern for them we we're not sharing information with foreign entities we do get this question all the time um because of the mol Rola Cape software it actually bypasses the native DJI application and so that's an important thing now our Drone footage we don't it's obviously not a matter of National Security um so we're not going to say that it's not an issue with some other entities but for us it's it's not going to be an issue we don't weaponize it California we're not using facial recognition it doesn't put the community at risk and it doesn't cost too much money so I'm going show you a couple of videos with some success stories so this was one of our earlier videos in the

**[21:20]** program you involv you wiing this okay what what exactly happening um a male and female and one of the motorcycle just I don't know just each other with a car I don't know you said trying to hit each other with a car yeah police so this so that's our TAA operator giving updates giving updates to officers that in in that're in route they're not in the area this is actually right by the station and this is during our swing watch hours which is really

**[22:22]** busy so issing motorcycle break since we don't have any officers available the dfr is just going to stay overhead keep monitoring the incident 31 for the diesel is going to be lra looks like a Hispanic driver so again there's a confrontation their offic is not available and the dfr pilot has all the

**[23:26]** information away from the bike so this story was some one of the earlier videos that we our chief was like wow this is pretty impactful we wouldn't have had this information or this footage had we not had the dfr overhead so just to to give a little a context so obviously the female and male or in some sort of a disturbance domestic violence uh confrontation we the female that's driving the white vehicle we arrest her we actually also arrest the male because the motorcycle was stolen uh here's another video of subjects with a gun at our Marina uh this Marina is just close to the police department um it was a well we got lucky is the car was a subjects in red car waving around a handgun we got lucky there was only the red car only one RI car of the marina so we got lucky to see this um so our officers were actually in the area off the view of the Drone

**[24:31]** you can't see them but our drone pilot said hey hold off let me see if I can get further information see if this what we have and if this is accurate so you'll see you can see the subject the individual um she has what appears to be a handgun in in her hand so now our officers who are monitoring this the supervisor The Watch Commander um they know exactly what she's wearing um she's going to get into the Jeep and they know exactly where she's sitting so when we come in to do our hot stop now there's no guessing there's no question um at least from the last person that we saw holding the weapon so now our officers have a a coord they have a plan they come in with a coordinated approach they know exactly where the vehicle is uh so this just kind of saves us the guessing aim again officers

**[25:32]** don't have a crystal ball so they don't know what they're going into so at least kind of gives us an idea so then we do our we start our hot stop and then of course because the last person we saw with the handgun um that's the person we're going to pull out first and we know exactly where she was sitting because we saw her VI the Drone footage so we got everyone out safely uh what's important about this call is that that that that weapon that looks like a real gun had officers just come up without knowing where the car was and the person shoot uh points the weapon we don't know what what's going to happen that end up being a gun and you can't put a price tag on

**[26:32]** how valuable it is for not using Force we just don't know but this saved lives not having this information ahead of time we have another call of another example so again it's not just for uh creating preventing use of forces we also can have this information to help save lives the the emergency um apparently on Highway five at Jade Street I just heard a be crashing a smoke over here by the okay is it is it on the freeway is it on the on the street it's on the side I can see the smoke it looks like they ran off uh I heard a loud uh bang fire fire house and now I see fire so I know I'm going to

**[27:33]** probably fast forward but see if you look in the center it's basically a vehicle that had a collision and went off the side of the road what the callers are going to do is they're not certain they're driving by so they're not exactly sure where the vehicle is and we have different uh freeway onramp and offramp so what our dfr pilot is doing he's switching to Thermal to kind of zero down where it is and as he gets closer you'll see him looking to confirm if there's someone actually in the vehicle so normally it's a CHP call so California high Patrol normally handles freeway but we'll help them because it's going through our

**[28:44]** city fire I see so our pilot is searching the area to see if someone walked away from the vehicle um he doesn't see anyone based on thermal with the heat Source we would easily be able to see someone so now it's kind of more of an emergent type situation because we don't see anyone there could be someone inside okay so it's a it's a pretty extensive video I'm just going to chop it down so basically um again the officers are able to get there they know exactly which way to go the initial call that we were getting in actually gave us the wrong wrong location so our dfr pilot was able to direct uh the officers and they were actually able to pull the subject out of the vehicle I know I'm getting low on my time pre um so I don't know we have time for any

**[29:46]** questions uh no worries ma'am it's it's it has been an actually an eye opening discussion and um yeah the the the details that you've shared have been really amazing and I'm sure all of the session attendees and the people who sat throughout the session are walking away through like with some key takeaways and yeah we don't have a lot of time for some questions but we can take one question so uh we have this question is asked by Alexander have you had to handle any cyber adversaries when remote piloting such as remote hijack no we haven't um the Microsoft Cape Motorola Cape does Microsoft off is your uh Amazon web service so it's secure okay uh let's take one more and uh uh yeah so really proud of the stuff Chula Vista Police Department is doing in our neighborhood uh would love to know if there are any vehicle number plate uh uh detection or AI capabilities you all have implemented

**[30:50]** uh not yet but we are starting to look at uh how we can do that we are looking at going to dfr 2.0 which is the Drone the box automated type system but we are again we do the crawl walk run we each agency you have to find what's good for you and there's a lot of great companies out there so um no not yet but we are definitely looking okay uh yeah I think uh thank you a huge thank you to you for sharing real world impact of deploying drones as First Responders and helping us understand how the Chulavista police department has transformed future policing from reducing RIS response times to enhancing officer safety and improving situational a awareness uh yeah it was a truly it was an honor to have you at the session and I think that's it from our side stay safe keep keep flying and soore higher thank you everybody bye thank you thank you m thank

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