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Faster Response, Safer Campus: How DFR is Changing University Policing
Posted Oct 06, 2026 | Views 16
# Campus DFR
# Campus Safety
# DFR
# X10
# Skydio Dock
# Drone as First Responder
# Webinar
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Speakers
Noreen Charlton
Public Safety Strategy @ Skydio
Noreen Charlton leads public safety strategy at Skydio, helping law enforcement agencies build and scale Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs that fundamentally change how they respond to emergencies.
She brings over a decade of experience with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Crime Scene Investigations Section, responding to nearly 4,000 incidents, including the Route 91 Harvest Festival mass casualty event. Working at the intersection of tragedy and accountability reinforced her belief that faster access to reliable information helps agencies make better decisions and protect lives.
At Skydio, Noreen translates operational experience into practical strategy. She develops guidance and resources that help agencies understand the value of DFR, navigate implementation, build internal and community support, and create programs that can grow responsibly over time.
She also serves on the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Standards Board for Crime Scene Investigations, where she contributes to the development of national standards for forensic documentation and analysis.
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Chris Colby
Sergeant @ University of Tennessee Police Department
Sergeant Chris Colby has served as a law enforcement officer for ten years. His career began in 2016 with the Kershaw County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina before he transitioned to the South Carolina Highway Patrol in 2018. In 2020, he and his wife relocated to Knoxville to be closer to family, and he joined the University of Tennessee Police Department. Sergeant Colby spent three years as a nightshift patrol officer before being promoted to nightshift Patrol Sergeant in 2023. He now serves as a Sergeant in the Special Events Unit and has been since March of 2026.
Throughout his career, Sergeant Colby has gained specialized experience in SWAT operations, bloodhound tracking, mobile field force response, community relations, emergency vehicle operations, and unmanned aerial systems. He currently commands both the department’s Mobile Response Team and the Aerial Operations Unit, in addition to his daily supervisory responsibilities. Sergeant Colby earned his Part 107 certification in July 2024 and has three years of hands-on UAS experience. He specializes in both small and large event management and drone deployments with a focus on campus events specifically. In 2025, Sergeant Colby was selected to the Steering Committee for the Tennessee state chapter of the Law Enforcement Drone Association.
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SUMMARY
The University of Tennessee Police Department (UTPD) covers 920 acres and 40,000+ students, and game days bring in 100,000+ more. Skydio's Noreen Charlton talks with UTPD's Sgt. Chris Colby, UAS Program Coordinator, about how UTPD grew from one hand-flown drone to a program with two Skydio Docks placed on rooftops around campus. Real flight footage shows how live aerial views helped with traffic flow, crowd safety, rooftop searches, and other common campus-related calls for service. The session closes with a live audience Q&A.
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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
Hey, everyone. Thanks for hanging out with us today.
My name is Noreen Charlton, and I lead public safety strategy here at Skydio.
Today, we're talking about what drone as first responder looks like on a university campus. So we're gonna spend most of our time hearing from the University of Tennessee Police Department and looking at footage from their actual operations. We'll talk about how they get started with their program, where they're using the drones the most, and how the information helps the people that are responding on the ground.
I am joined today by Sergeant Chris Colby, The UAS program coordinator for the University of Tennessee Police Department. Chris, do you wanna give everyone a quick introduction and a little background on your role?
Sure. My name is Chris Colby. I am a special event Sergeant at the University of Tennessee Police Department. And over the past about two years, going on three now, I've been building this foundation of our drone program into what it is today. So we've got two Docks, Skydio X10s, and one standalone drone that we deploy for various events around campus as well as for patrol response.
So before we get into it, a little bit of housekeeping. You can drop any questions or comments that you have right there in the chat. We have somebody monitoring those behind the scenes and dropping those for me, so we will address those at the end. I know this is a webinar format, and it's a little bit difficult, but trying to keep this as conversational as possible. So as things pop up, if you have questions, for either of us, please go ahead and drop them in the chat.
Alright. So let's get into it. A lot of the conversation around DFR specifically has really focused on municipal police departments, but campus agencies are responding to calls too, and these are often in environments where getting to the scene and understanding what's happening can be a little bit complicated.
So before we get into UT's program, I wanna show you a quick video from Vanderbilt to put this conversation into a campus setting.
There are 12,000 students here at Vanderbilt. We have approximately 300 acres of campus, whether it be for move in day or commencement, their last day and last week on campus. Using drone as first responder allows us to make sure we're keeping them safe their entire time here.
The average response time for our drones is about eighty seconds.
Even the fastest officer could take several minutes longer than that to respond. Having the ability to have real time eyes on the scene as officers respond is not only invaluable to the officers responding, but the communication that we're able to send to the community to help protect themselves.
Drone's first responder will allow us to get that situational awareness from a factual standpoint much much quicker and be reliable and educate our officers as they respond to assist the community.
Chris, that gives us the perspective from one campus PD. Sergeant Colby, when you started looking at DFR for UT, what was happening on campus that made you think that this could be a useful program?
There was a lot. It was around the time that all of us across the nation were experiencing some significant protests on college campuses, And it didn't take much for us to be sitting in our emergency operations center looking at the camera feeds that we have around campus and realizing that we can't see everything.
And that those cameras, although they're great to have, really don't provide us as much information as we believe that it could. So it started with just me flying a DJI Mini through the halls while we're have some town time in between responses and the chief going, hey. I think we need to look into that.
And from there, it just... The possibilities really skyrocketed. The football games, stadium events, move in, same things like Vanderbilt was talking about. There's so many events that happen on campus, and there's so many various reasons that we could use that drone for.
Of the things we're gonna be working on is even using our drones to provide escorts. So if a student calls in instead of having to tie up an officer, we can actually use the drone. And if they wanted to, we could send them a ready link to where they could watch themselves as they walk home.
It's an idea we're working on, but, really, there's just... There's so many things that you can see from the sky that we couldn't see before. So it's it's definitely already, shown us great results.
Yeah. We're gonna take a look at quite a few of the videos and the use cases that you have provided today for our audience, but this is basically just the campus piece. Right? You've got a lot happening in what's usually a pretty concentrated area, but getting across, it isn't always really straightforward.
So you have these buildings. You have pedestrian areas. You have a lot of event traffic, and they all, affect how a response unfolds. And so this is kind of the vision that we had for universities.
And, you know, UT is kind of one of the first universities that has really embraced this as a program and really rolled it out in a way that it is super impactful for a lot of different use cases, which we'll cover today.
So anyone here working in campus policing is going to recognize some of this. Right? A major event doesn't pause the rest of the campus. When you have a football game going on, you still have things happening elsewhere. It's just like any other city.
You still have these calls coming in while your officers are tied up and committed to managing these larger events. And then when something does happen, the first information may come from someone who can only see part of it. Right? The callers aren't always super accurate with their information, and that's what your officers are working for as they head into that way. So from your perspective, where does that create the biggest challenge for your teams on the ground?
I think every officer that responds goes in with that mindset of the... Playing the what if game. What if this happens? You really never know what you're walking into.
So with that challenge in mind, once you know that you have eyes in the sky, and they're there almost instantly, that that adds another layer of, I think, officer safety. And then, also, most agencies have really good, relationships with their dispatchers. Our dispatchers and our officers get along very well, and they definitely care about each other. So having a dispatcher being able to have that added layer of safety as well to keep an extra eye on the officer at all times really is just... Is bar none. It's invaluable. And like I said, we've, as you'll see in a few moments, seen the direct impacts of that.
So let's take DFR out of the equation. Let's talk about, you know, campus policing without drones and without that added layer of visibility. How, is your department kind of balancing the event demands with something like a football game, and everything else that they're responsible for that are happening at the same time?
Definitely, tapped out on resources. We lean into our outside agencies, the surrounding counties and surrounding agencies around Knoxville to provide resources. And you can never have enough. Right? With our stadium holding a 102,000 people on a game day plus another 30 on an SEC game, probably 40,000 around the exterior of it. There's just never enough officers to respond to calls, to provide security for the event, and that doesn't even take into account regular patrol.
So we actually have to borrow from other patrol shifts just to cover on a game day because we're pulling so many people for either specialized units or assignments or just based off the game, we need more officers. So those are the challenges we face seven, eight times a year, if not more.
So Yeah. And I think, like, you know, that's not unique to campus police. Right? That's... You know, most police departments across the country right now are pulling from other shifts, or there are big overtime budgets to make sure that you're staffing all of the things that you need to do on top of these large events.
But this is kind of where having that live aerial view becomes really useful. So with the GFR, you can start understanding what's happening while that is still all coming together. And so that information can help the officers figure out where they need to go or how they're going to approach a specific scene. But somebody has to take what they're seeing from the livestream of the drone and then get it to the people who can act on it.
How does that work, with your university? How does this information reach kind of the drone operator, and then how does it get back to the officers on the ground?
Yeah. So we... Actually, I create the ready links ahead of time for our major events and send those out to key individuals across campus, and that could be athletics, that could be chancellors, heads of department, and Overwatch officers on the ground. We really share it with key people who we think are going to need it so that they can make effective decisions in the field.
And that's a simple email out. If they... Skydio makes it super easy for you to create that link. And then if it's outside of an event like that, it's as simple as, hey. Here's a screenshot of that ready link.
Or you can... We've created a command link that never expires. So everyone, at least within our department, at their level, anytime a drone goes up, they get a notification. They can click the link and have that live feed instantaneously, and they can distribute that how they see fit. So it's a lot simpler than I expected it to be.
Really, it's just basic communication.
So when we think about, making a case for a DFR program, we really have to explain, the need that people outside the apartment have. They might be thinking about the drone very differently than an officer who's responding to these calls for service. So how did you explain, what you wanted to do with DFR at the university, and then what did their leadership want to understand about the program in general before you were given the green light to move ahead?
We were really blessed. We have a a great, chancellor and vice chancellor at our university who saw a need. They heard us from the beginning. We explained to them basically what we're talking about now. It's gonna make campus safer. It's gonna make our officers safer. It's gonna provide everyone at every level with information that we never had before so that we can make better informed decisions based on protests or any open air event that we believe could have, a negative response, on campus or, you know, with the Charlie Kirk incident.
Now we own the rooftops, and it's easier for us to do that than ever before.
And we didn't get too much pushback, but they just wanted to come along with the process. So from the get go, we had our vice chancellor involved in every step of the process. Here's the company we're looking at.
Scottio sent a team, I think, for the Knoxville police department for their test, and we were able to get our vice chancellor in the same room with all of the other police chiefs in our area in Skydio. So he was able to see, the benefits from other agencies, and their drone programs. So definitely involving your command staff, involving your vice chancellors or chancellors in the process from the get go helps on the back end because there are some answers that... Or some questions that I could not answer. And having someone at Scottie O that I could just say, hey.
This question came up. Can you talk to this person? Was... It just made our process so easy. And I know that's not every campus, but including those people and your partners definitely, definitely helps.
Yeah. That's great. So let's level set for everyone here, and give a sense of the campus at University of Tennessee. So the stadium alone really tells a part of the story.
You have the campus that your department is responsible for every other day, and then game day brings in a lot of people to that environment. So you can just give us a little bit of an idea about the campus size and how many people you're dealing with on a daily basis and what your operations look like from a police department perspective.
Yeah. Absolutely. So as you can see, we have 920 acres, over 40,000 students, 257 buildings, 2,000 plus faculty and staff. And, realistically, on any given day, you're looking at closer to 50,000 people on campus just moving around, whether that's, students, faculty, and staff, or visitors.
Of those buildings, 17 residence halls, we're getting a new entertainment district that is going to be attached to the Southwest corner of the stadium or to the Southeast corner, and that's gonna be a 24 story building plus a garage and various businesses that'll go into that. So that'll be something added, within the next four or five years.
Right now, we have about 75 police officers, and those are sworn. We have roughly 18 communications officers. Of those, 12 of them are certified to fly, part one zero seven. And then we've got some administrative staff, one of which is also certified to fly.
And we respond just like any other police department. We're considered a state agency, and we just have a smaller jurisdiction. So out of that 920 acres, it's roughly three square miles that we respond to plus some off-site property.
And we have, on any given time, probably six to eight officers on a shift, working. And, of course, we work closely with our partners in the city to respond to calls in certain areas. So we use our drones for patrol response, large events, things like that, and we utilize a combination of the DFR and the hand flown drone just to to have that extra security.
Yeah. And I think that's a pretty common part of everyone's program. You know, a lot of agencies start with... Like you said, you started started with one, small drone, and it has grown into the program that you have today. Think I a lot of people are starting with that, you know, one drone on a shelf or maybe put it in the back of a patrol car, and you start getting some wins from it. You realize that it could be helpful in other areas of what you're doing, and it grows from there.
What I really think is helpful for people to understand about how you've built out your program is this timeline. So there's a lot of work between kind of deciding and having those initial conversations that you want to DFR and then actually being able to use it.
Can you just walk us through a little bit of the timeline here? Like, where did you spend the most time, and who did you really need to involve to keep things moving forward?
Yeah. So, initially, we were at, I can't remember where we're at exactly, but chief and I were talking about the different demos that we had, we had gone through, and we landed with Skydio. And the main reason we landed with Skydio was just the customer service aspect.
And that...
I can get to that later in the timeline here, but that was a big selling point for us. But from the moment we got the quote to installation, the toughest part we dealt with, which is, I think, one of the unknowns when it comes to university is just procurement. Trying to get something through contracts and procurement just takes a long time. There's so many hands that the contract moves through, so many questions that they have because they're not in our, in our chair.
Right? They don't understand why a public safety agency needs a drone. And one, maybe you're not a public safety agency who's post certified in your state. Maybe you're just a security division within the the university.
And of those questions, again, I could answer a lot of them based off of my knowledge from Skydio, but having someone, which at the time for us was Chris Perez, who I could bounce those questions off of. Or if I said, hey. If...
Can I give this individual your phone number?
Was just... It made it so easy.
Procurement still took a long time, but we got those questions answered. And as you can see, I say it's a long time, but we were able to get our docs installed, by April in twenty twenty six. So it definitely felt like forever, but it really was a short time in the grand scheme of things because we had two stadium events in the same month in May that it... Had we not had those docks installed, we would have been way behind the ball. And we actually had drones and pilots that we had to visit during those events. So it was helpful to have those drones during those events for sure. And now to this day, we're still training, new pilots as we get them, and we actually have a training tomorrow to get all of our dispatchers trained up on the docks.
So Yeah.
That's awesome. I think, actually, it might have felt like a long time for you, but I feel like this is actually a pretty quick timeline, for most public safety agencies. So you guys have done a phenomenal job with the program thus far. To everybody who's on the webinar with us, if you have any specific questions about the facilities, management, or IT, or choosing locations, or anything like that, please feel free to throw those in the chat so we can address those individually.
So you get through the program. You get everything installed. You start training your operators, and then you start flying, and you learn what that program looks like in practice. And these numbers kind of capture what you are currently doing to date. So can we talk a little bit about how you are flying and what these numbers mean to your GFR program?
Absolutely. So a lot of our...
I would say more so than just patrol.
A lot of our flights happen during special events. And for other various campus operations, which is why we put those on this slide, because from my standpoint in building this program, I knew that we were gonna have the patrol responses and the patrol wins organically. That was gonna happen. My goal with our program was to figure out how else we could utilize this.
Kind of on that, drone is infrastructure mindset. How can I help our partners? How can I bring them on board? And and what are other ways that we can utilize the drone to help out campus overall?
Because if we help our partners, that's only gonna increase campus safety from a different aspect. And it proves so during the Savannah Banana events, which we'll we'll talk about here in the future. But it's really...
We do fly for patrol response. But with our eight home games, we fly for rooftop searches to coincide with our building searches pre event. We utilize them to assist our overwatch if they see an anomaly somewhere in a building or on top of a crane. We use them to provide our EOC with an overhead view of traffic so that they can make the decisions on maybe we need to make a change at this intersection or maybe we need to make a change overall to the traffic pattern for the next game.
It's really...
I always tell our pilots, I would never restrict them on what they can fly for as long as it falls within the parameters of public safety, because I don't want them to feel like they're making a mistake whenever they fly. So they can fly if they want to to go provide overwatch officers on a traffic stop where we've got... For some reason, they ask for more officers.
The other day, we flew for an individual who had fled from us. Unfortunately, the drone did not capture them, but they were in the right spot. So our pilot did a great job, providing the officers on the ground with that visual of, hey. We think we see something here.
Like I said, didn't get the guy on camera, but they were looking in the right spot.
So, really, the sky's the limit, no pun intended, with with these and our response in using them.
We love a good pun around here. You can add those in. I think you bring up a really good point when you mentioned kind of the infrastructure piece. And we're seeing this play out in all police departments now in all cities and even counties across the country.
Jonas First Responder was very intentionally a police program, and we are seeing more people and more agencies and leadership at these police departments lean into this being more than just a police tool. This is really, you know, whether you're calling it Drone as a City Resource or a Smart Cities thing, or as you said, it's really part of drones' infrastructure. You know, how else can we provide a service to the people that we serve, the community, the campus, the county, whatever it might be, by using these drones for multiple different use cases. And so you really hit the nail on the head there.
Like, this is more about just patrol use. There's so many things that you can be doing, because so many jobs are affected by having that better information faster, and you can get a lot of that with the drone footage. So speaking of drone footage, we'll go ahead and kind of segue here into a lot of the stories that you've provided us. So, we'll start here with Savannah Bananas.
We'll start with this event. If you kind of just set it up for us, what was happening, and then we'll get into the video.
Yeah. So for those of you who have been so lucky to host a Savannah Bananas event, you know, it's typically a sold out event.
And we used the Luke Combs concert and the Savannah Bananas, event to test out our proposed, traffic flow for football. So what you're gonna see in the video is something that we worked on for quite some time, setting up basically this four and in some point, some points of the road, five lane road to get as much traffic moving as possible. And as you can see, out of these three lanes that we've created for egress, the one on the far right is our emergency lane. People are still going back to their normal human behavior and only using one lane because that's what they've known for the past twenty or thirty years.
So this flight allowed our EOC to look at at this flow and say, hey. These other two lanes aren't working. How can we fix it? So we were able to utilize, a few officers further up the road. We'll say north here on the the northwest corner of this video to force lanes into those... Or force traffic into those other lanes, and that made a world of difference. We stopped having a backup immediately, and we're able to push vehicles into those other lanes to clear it up.
Yeah. And this is a great use case lesson learned, for basically any agency. As someone who went to a playoff baseball game last night and left sad because we lost, we were stuck in traffic for, like, forty five minutes, couldn't get out of a parking lot. And I had this, you know, this conversation of, sure would be nice if there was somebody who could monitor this from above and realize we can change the traffic flow.
We can open up lanes. We can close some. We can have, you know, a certain number of vehicles go at a given time. This is a really great use case that's beyond just the patrol response, that you mentioned earlier.
So I think our next one is also Savannah bananas. This is a crash risk one. You wanna set this up, and then we'll play the video?
Yeah. So that day, it was great. My lieutenant actually was not there.
She had a family matter she had to attend to, so I was kind of thrown into the the fire, proverbial fire there for figuring out how to run-in a large event like this, because I had just moved to the to the unit, like, a month prior to this. So it was stressful of a day, but I'd already built relationships with our partners with athletics and and some... And facilities, things like that. So I already knew that there were gonna be some problems, but that we could solve them pretty quickly. I didn't expect them to be solved as quick as we did with this. I was approached by one of the associate athletic directors, and he basically said, hey. Can you come with me?
We have a ton of heat casualties right now. They're dropping like flies. And I think that our main gate is... You know, there's gonna be a crush risk, people are gonna get hurt. I need someone to come down and explain to Savannah Bananas that we need to open gates early.
So as you can see, there's a ton of people, just in one general area. And what's happening with this is at this time, we are approximately twenty to twenty five minutes to gates. So the athletes are stepped out to sign autographs. So it created a major crowd issue where every athlete was.
So we immediately met. My chief responded to the same area. We met with the Savannah Bananas. They refused to open the gates early, which at some point, my chief politely said, you know, either you may have done things differently elsewhere, but not in our city, so we need to figure out a solution.
At that point, he requested that we fly the drone over just to see what the crowd looked like, and that was all we needed to show everyone, to get the gates open earlier. So we didn't quite get it as early as we wanted to, but having this overall view to see, what the crowd looked like at these gates, We were able to get the gates open at least ten minutes earlier than they wanted to. So for us, it was a huge win. It reduced the number of, heat casualties, reduced any risk of crush injury at any of these gates. So we would not have been able to make that decision had we not had that overall view.
Yeah. And I think, you mentioned kind of fixed TV or closed circuit TV cameras, fixed camera locations earlier. And so maybe you're sitting in a nice office somewhere, and you're watching this from, you know, one fixed perspective, and it doesn't look that bad. Or you're on the ground from one specific perspective, and you don't also think that this looks that bad. So the the drone footage in this case was really kind of able to give this, like, very quickly overall view of just how many people were there, which was able to kind of change the situation for you. So this is a great example of kind of other things you can do, just to kind of assess the crowd, and help with people management moving so that everybody stays safe.
So now we're gonna talk about a sinkhole.
This one's a little bit different kind of a campus concern. How did your team get involved with this?
Well, we we heard that there was a sinkhole opening, and this actually occurred two days before we had that Savannah bananas event.
And sinkholes around our campus are really not that big of a deal to us. They happen because we're we're built on top of rivers and creeks and things like that. So to some extent, you expect one to pop up every now and then. This one was directly in front of our main gate at Neyland Stadium.
So where that...
In the last video where that drone was sitting overhead, it was basically right there. So I was able to hear that come out on the radio that there was a possible sinkhole. And immediately, without question, I threw the drone up and went and got a thermal image. What what I did there with that thermal image was provide that to our facilities services, and they were able to determine that the heat and the ground along with all the other data that they had in this picture, was about 600 degrees under the surface.
So when I say that ground was squishy, I walked it. It was it was definitely squishy. It was it was very, unsettling. So, of course, in our minds, we're gonna have a sold out event in two days that we need to fix this.
Thankfully, they were able to trace back the source, kinda figure out with the video and the pictures we sent them, the area they needed to address that. It ended up being a steam leak. So they shut the steam off and basically gave it a day, since it was on a Thursday. They gave it overnight and all day Friday to kinda cool down.
And once it cooled down, the surface was able to harden up. And on the day, we didn't really have to draw too much attention to it. We just put some security in the area and directed people around it just so that we could be extra safe. So with...
Again, without this, they would have probably been able to make a decision, but not as effective of a decision seeing how hot it really was versus using a hand thermometer.
Yeah. And this is another perfect example of sharing that information. What does that information sharing flow look like for you from your drone, your data, to getting it over to the people that need it?
Yeah. It was super simple. Of course, following all policies, within our department. But one of, facilities reached out to me, said, hey.
Do you have anything on this? And luckily, was like, I'm already here. I'm flying it. I'll get you some images.
I'll get you some video. So immediately after docking, that image and video were uploaded to my evidence.com account, and it was as simple as sending an email requesting approval to download this and distribute it. Once that was approved, in under five minutes, facilities had this in their hands.
So Yeah.
That's incredible. That's that's great teamwork there.
The next one we have, suspicious item. You wanna talk about what was reported here, and then we'll get into the video?
Yeah. I think this was during the Journey concert we had at Thompson Bowling Arena, another one of our venues. And there was a new dorm that is is done construction now, but still under construction during that time. And all of us, at least from an operation standpoint, had major concerns because they they always left doors open.
There were always items out on the roof that probably shouldn't have been there. And it's it's just construction crews. Right? They...
Sometimes they clean up, sometimes they don't. It's been a long day. We don't blame them for that. But when I saw this, I'm not in the construction world.
Some people may have looked at that and immediately known what that was.
I did not. So, we were able to use this footage, get it to our team on the ground, and they were, able to get up there and check it out and clear that. It ended up being, I think, some, insulation, if I remember correctly. But if that had been something else and we didn't have drones, we would have never known about it.
And we we find this all the time, especially on construction sites.
Tools are left up there.
Flammable items are left up there. And if we didn't have a drone, who knows what could happen? We would never know it was there. The worst of the worst could happen, then things explode. They cause fires, or worse, someone gets access to a rooftop and is able to carry out a mass attack. So, again, this is just another another point that no matter how small the thing it might be, these drones can provide you with some information that without them, you wouldn't have had.
Yeah. And I think our next, story here is actually the roof access issue. So help everyone understand where this was located and what the team was trying to check out.
So during the event, we conducted numerous rooftop searches with the drone while we're doing traffic overview just to to try and own those rooftops.
And in the video, because we've had issues with open doors, this was on another portion of that same hall where we found the suspicious item. And out of this door, you can walk straight south and get a view of that door, which leads to another penthouse that overlooks the crowd as they're crossing the street. And at our events at that arena, you could have anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 people. That night, I believe we had a sold out event of 18,000, and it was just...
If someone could have gotten in there, it could have been extremely, extremely bad, and they could have carried out whatever they really desired, mass casualty or god knows what. So we were able to get officers up there and close those doors and secure them. And then I was able to provide all of this data and the suspicious item data to our facilities basically as a, hey. Can we work together and prevent this from happening in the future?
Because there are serious safety concerns if someone gets access to a rooftop. It doesn't matter what time of day, but especially around our events.
Yeah. And I think, obviously, we can see that the doors are open in this video. From regular livestream, you would have also had thermal imaging, which would have been able to see, you know, somewhat into the room there. So, obviously, we can see what's going on on the outside. What did you still need kind of patrol officers to go up there and and check out, that... Because you couldn't access it with the drone?
Yeah. Those interior rooms there, personally, I've been able to fly the x 10 through doors like that on rooftops.
I'll deny that if anyone asks me to stop it in the future. But we do have a lot of nooks and crannies that, that larger drone just can't get inside. I've already pitched it for us to get some r tens just for that purpose.
So we have the interior option too. But in this building specifically, there are portals all around, the outside of the building and at that, rooftop level.
So sometimes you can see in there. Sometimes you can't see how deep it is. And for our Overwatch teams, that's one of their main concerns with this specific building is that the drone can get you all of that data from the outside and to a certain extent. But, obviously, I couldn't fly the drone to the right and see all the way into that hard corner.
So someone could, essentially hide from the drone as we're flying by, and that's a realistic possibility. Again, these drones are tools. They don't replace officers, but they enhance officers' ability to gather that information. So being able to clear as much as that, I can tell Overwatch, hey.
I've cleared about 80% of this, so check this hard corner. So they didn't have to do, you know, the the piggyback search on that.
Yep. And then I think we're back at the old Savannah bananas again. So what are we looking at in this video?
So perfect segue. These are the portals that I was just talking about. You can see before you start the video, that image on the right or that portal on the right has this hard door on it versus the one on the left that they just put some screen up. So, obviously, from an Overwatch perspective, when we have a crowd of a hundred and one hundred and two thousand people utilizing the main thoroughfare below that, that's a serious concern.
We don't know. I could turn thermal on, but there...
I couldn't tell how deep anything was. I know there was a person in there, because as I flew to this position, one of the construction workers walked into the penthouse. But this for us is like a shooter's dream. I could have a standoff distance from probably 15 to 20 feet once we walked that area and figured it out, and no one would ever know you were there until, shots were fired.
So having the ability to put this drone up and look directly into it, which you'll see in the video, allowed us to clear clear that area.
Yeah. Oh, there we go.
Might just be a still.
Yeah. I think it might just be... Yep. It's like that one's just a still.
So we've seen several different situations in which you have used drones and your DFR programs. Let's talk about how these views come together and how you are managing the response.
Having your drone feed is one part of it, but the people that are making the decisions for everybody on the ground also need access to it. So can you talk us through who is watching all of these live feeds during an event, and then how are you actively coordinating with teams on the ground?
Absolutely. So our operation has become much more robust since we first started back in April and May. With football, we've got, our drones as well as the Knoxville Police Department's drones that we have to have that airspace deconfliction with, as well as the college game day drones, the ESPN drones.
Sometimes our athletics flies a drone. So we have a system in place utilizing, signal chat to handle airspace deconfliction. But beyond that, we have a command post and emergency operations center, EOC. So what we've done is we have members of both departments in both the command post and the EOC, and they have both feeds from our drones for both agencies.
So they can see when either of us are flying, and we we have designated areas of operations. So the Knoxville Police Department will only fly north of campus. We cover all of campus down to the river. So we've kind of placed that area of operation into our airspace deconfliction just to avoid any of that.
But, really, once our command post shuts down, our EOC doesn't have to worry about getting a new, drone feed or anything like that because it's already there, and it's been there all day. So, realistically, everyone from the moment they sit in that chair can view our live feeds, as they please.
Yeah. That's great. And I think we can look at, a specific example of the information that's reaching those people that are making the decisions. Walk us through what happened during this game day and what you were seeing specifically from the drone feed.
Yeah. So this was during, the game versus Texas when we had college game day here. And with ESPN, they typically only request us to provide security for the talent, and then they utilize a company called Axis for security for various items up there, the buses, the equipment.
Unfortunately, we were not staffed well enough up here to prevent the security breach, which is what you're seeing here. As a result of that, we had to throw pretty much all of our resources at this to clear that portion out there. I know one student got injured, and an officer was put in a pretty sticky situation where he was overrun by the crowd. Thankfully, he didn't get, badly hurt. But I was at roll call when this happened, and I was standing right next to our chief of police and was able to pull this image up, this video, look at it with him, and he made the decision instantly to just send everyone that worked for the University of Tennessee Police Department up to this area and, mitigate this issue. So we were able to clear that all the way out and allow them to enter in a much more orderly fashion, after they were screened.
Yeah. And on average, how quickly are you getting to incidents like this from your doc drones?
Doc drones, ninety seconds or less. Nighttime is a little longer, but it's... It it just depends on where they're going on campus. For this specific incident, we were able to be... We're in the middle of a rooftop search, so we were able to be back on scene in under thirty seconds.
Great. Yeah. That's awesome.
And so this is kind of why we spend time talking about how DFR connects to the systems that you're already using. So being able to share this information, bring it into a command center, having the shared operational view, the report is coming from somewhere, and the information from the drone needs to get back into the response. So everything you see here represents integrations that are active across agencies today. For campus, the questions which connections matter kind of the most to the way that you work.
And so right now, for campus security, these are a couple of the integrations that we've completed. But, at UT, what does kind of this connected response look like for you guys, and how important are these integrations to get information in and then to get it out... Back out to the people that need to see it?
Yeah. So we are, an Axon agency, so we use dash cameras and body cameras in the taser. And we have a a local, CAD company that we worked with. And for the longest time, it was very hard to get the integration done on their end just because they didn't have everything set up as much larger companies do.
But I was just told a couple days ago that somehow they figured it out. So they were able to give Skydio the necessary information they needed. So now we're we're fully operational with that integration as well. So they can now click on a call and immediately send the drone and the calls populate.
So that's been huge for us.
And just the ability to pull up DFR command for our pilots and then actively see where body cameras are, I don't... I didn't really understand that integration until I saw it.
I didn't even know that was a thing until I saw it in DFR command myself. So being able to see where those cameras are so that we know where our resources are and then where we can send the drone by just a click of a button is absolutely invaluable.
If I know that an officer is in distress, I can click on their body camera and DFR command and send it there at 45 miles an hour.
So like I said, that's way way too invaluable of a feature. And then also, the evidence.com is huge for us so that everyone can get all this footage uploaded to the cloud. They can, label it, follow our policies as far as, retention goes, and things like that. So it's it's really... The integrations have been great for us.
Yeah. So for everyone watching, we do have an open system. We are happy to integrate with any of the systems that you currently use. You know, DFR as it stands alone is not useful to you if you can't figure out where you need the drone and you can't get the information, that's needed to help with your response. So, if there was something that you use that you don't see on this list, please reach out to us, and we can help you through that process.
So we've seen a lot of your flights, but a lot of the work to make those flights possible happens before you ever launch. You absolutely need the right people involved. You need to understand what it takes to run the program with the staff that you actually have to do it.
Serge, if another campus agency called you tomorrow and they said that they wanted to start DFR, where would you tell them to begin?
Start with, obviously, command command staff. But by that time, they were probably the ones told you to look into it. So, I would start with campus partners. They're so vital to the success of your program, and I don't think we talk about it enough.
Our program wouldn't even be installed if it wasn't for our partnership with facilities. They, funded all of the infrastructure for our two docks to be installed.
And then the dean of the agricultural campus, I think he might be the dean of the vet school as well. He's got a lot of hats.
He was able to... Our chief walked up to him and said, hey. We wanna put two docks on top of your building, and he was, okay. Let me know what you need. Let me know where you wanna put them. There were no questions asked because of the relationships that we already had there. But also understand that, you know, these...
You you have to take care of them on the back end.
Partners, if you say you're going to provide them with that drone as infrastructure, do it. I actually did a flight yesterday for them, for our parking in transit to, provide them with some aerial images of some road construction that we're doing on campus. So definitely start with your partners. I can't say that enough. I can't hammer it home enough because they will absolutely help your program be successful.
Yeah. And part of getting started is really kind of answering these questions that people have about drones. You know, I think that can be kind of a scary word for some people out in communities, but they wanna know what it's being used for, you know, when is it recording, who can see the footage, what exactly are you capturing. The dashboard that I linked here is from Dearborn Police Department in Michigan, but it's an example of giving people a way to understand when, where, and why you are flying.
And on the left hand side of the screen, you're seeing, how we can display those flights publicly for you, and you can kind of make all of the...
You can choose what to publish. Right? But we do really encourage transparency about what you are doing with your program. I know we talked a little bit yesterday about some of the students, and them having questions about the program.
So how did you answer those for them, and what was the impact that it had?
Yeah. So when we had our demo, Scottio sent us a doc and a team to test it out during the UT Georgia game last year. So having that set up on top of a dorm, obviously, we were walking past a lot of students, a lot of front desk, workers that had a lot of questions about what we're doing, why we're doing it at their dorm, things like that. And, surprisingly, they were ecstatic about it. They thought it was the coolest thing. One of the techs there actually was able to show them the live feed as he was flying it from the computer, the kids thought that was just the coolest thing in the world.
So, answering those questions is easy for us. Again, we're blessed where our community is onboard. We haven't really promoted it that we have a program just because of other, other issues in our area politically.
But word-of-mouth, if anyone asks, we tell them, we don't wanna really tell them where they're at, for security reasons, but they can see it if they drive down the road if they know what they're looking for.
But, yeah, it's it's super simple for us to just tell them, yep. Here's what we have. Here's what we're using them for. And a lot of times, our... The response we receive is, well, we're thankful that we have another layer of safety.
Yeah. Absolutely. I think sometimes it's just kind of breaking down those barriers into what people believe the programs are doing versus what you're actually doing with them.
And measuring the impact of your program is so very important. You need to understand whether it's doing what you intended it would do. Right? When you go to your command staff, when you go to leadership and you say, hey.
We want a DFR program because it will do x, y, and z. You wanna be able to come back some months later and prove that it's doing all the things you hoped it would. So a flight count tells you how much you're using it. That's fine.
But all of these examples that you just showed us today with the footage help explain why all of those flights mattered, and we have tools built into the system to help you track a lot of this to understand the impact that your program is having.
And I kind of wanna end it with this before we get into, a lot of q and a. Dfr is no longer experimental. There are agencies who are operating DFR every single day, and campus departments now have people like sergeant Colby that they can learn from. What's the biggest thing that you'd want another campus agency to get right from the start if they were to choose a DFR program today?
Prepare to scale. We we scaled very quickly, and I'm kind of playing catch up right now. If I could have...
Personally, I want docs everywhere I can, but, I'm already thinking about adding more docs. Now don't get it twisted. You absolutely, depending on the size of your campus, can operate with a hand flown drone or a dock.
My main thing that I want people to know, especially on campus, is if is if you're not thinking about drones, you're way behind. This is how you get it right is you just go for it. You get a drone and figure out what exactly you want that drone to do for you. Because it could just be that you're getting that drone for public safety, or it could be that you're getting that drone as critical infrastructure for your campus to provide that to your partners.
There there are so many things that are gonna be thrown at you as far as what platform to go with, what sensor you should have.
Skydio was perfect for us. It provided us with everything that we need, thermal, a sensor, flight time so that we can be effective and provide that information in a moment's notice.
So you have to figure out, what's important for you and your program. And, personally, Skydio is not paying me to say this, but they are the best American made drone company here in The United States bar none. And you throw on their customer service at that. I can make a phone call in an instant, and in two minutes, have someone working the problem. So you, you can't pay enough for that, in my opinion.
So Great.
We appreciate that.
So we'll get into some q and a. I will throw many of these over to you just so you can kind of give your insight from your program. As a part one zero seven license holder, I'm curious to hear how your program manages the FAA rule of no flying over people in vehicles.
Ah, very easily.
Skydio was essential in helping us obtain our part 91 beyond visual line of sight waiver, and we also purchased all of the attachments for all of our drones. So all of our drones have a parachute and can fly under that beyond visual line of sight waiver or part one zero seven because it's category compliant.
So I would highly recommend, purchasing the parachute and the attachments if you buy these drones. It will only help your operations. And then also if you're operating DFR or if you're not. Right? If you wanna operate a hand flown drone, you wanna do it beyond visual line of sight up to 200 feet or 400 feet if you can get detect and avoid technology. Definitely go for that beyond visual line of sight waiver.
Yeah. And if you need any assistance with that, we have a phenomenal regulatory team at Skydio that can help you with that. We have a ton of resources on our website that we can also send over to you so you can kind of self serve and walk yourself through the process if you want as well. But, lots of information out there. We can absolutely help you along the way.
So this question, you've mentioned it many times before. I'll kind of give a brief overview on Skagio ReadyLink. So this is our way of sharing drone footage with whomever you deem necessary to see it. So when you have different drones in one of your organizations within Skydio DFR command, you are able to create ready links that you can send out to people so they can view the live streams when those drones are in the air.
They're customizable. You can set them up for a couple hours. You can set them for a week. It's totally up to you.
And you can, you know, pin password protect them.
We're doing a lot of work on ReadyLink. We're trying to make it better and more secure and, you know, easier to share and all of those things. So more to come there, but that is just our way of helping you quickly share out the links to the drone feed so anybody that needs to see it can.
Did you seek any outside resources such as grants to assist with funding?
We did not. I would highly recommend if you have a grant writer or someone that handles that to do that. And that's another thing that Scottie offered us help with on the front end. We just my chief decided he had a number. He had a budget, and we fit the... Our program into that budget.
Grants are a little hard for us on our campus. It may be different in different states, So we decided to opt out of the grant side and just add it to our budget.
Sweet.
I'll ask you how you share your link. So when sending links, are you able to text links directly? How do you get those to officers in the field? I'll have you answer that on how you guys do it on your end.
Yeah. So for officers in the field, that's easy. Just text the link to them.
For game days, I will create that link on a Friday, and all of our links are PIN protected unless it's that text from a dispatch to an officer. Obviously, in the heat of the moment, we're not gonna PIN protect that because we need that officer to have that information immediately.
But for the most part, I create that link for football games the Friday before, and I have a list of people I send that link to and the pin to, which is basic instructions of please don't share this with anybody anybody else but yourself.
And then I set the date usually for about twelve hours. So from the time I know my guys are gonna be flying for rooftop searches until I believe traffic will be fully cleared and they're they're heading home. So it makes it super simple because it's... It takes me five... Not even five minutes to set up an email out, and then I don't have to worry about it on a game day.
So Yeah.
And that's a great practice. The next part of this was how do we ensure links to video feeds are secure and avoid an SFPD like incident. So we kind of addressed it here. You can set up the length of time.
You can set up a PIN. You can do all kinds of things. We are creating more robust system to make it easier and also more secure, so that it defaults to things like protecting the links versus kind of defaulting to these things off. Our CEO wrote an entire blog post about the SFPD incident, kind of our take on that.
So that is up on our website if that's something that you would like to read to understand, how we take responsibility for these types of things. We're very transparent about them and, what happened in that particular case and what we can do going forward.
Okay.
Let's see.
Within your waiver, do you also need a parachute for ops over people? And if so, what is your average flight time?
Yeah. So regardless of whether you have the waiver or not, you have to have, the parachute and then also our waiver and our con ops that go along with your waiver application state that once that parachute deploys, the props are, are turned off. So the props stop, and that has a controlled descent.
Scottia will tell you that that is effective at a 100 feet and above. So it will deploy, below that, but that's what it's rated for at a 100 feet. So we do not fly under a 100 feet, since we have that waiver. Now if you're in airspace, that's something you have to to think about, especially when applying for the waiver. You may need to get a tailored airspace authorization with that. But, definitely, with that waiver beyond visual line of sight, the operations over people need that parachute, and your waiver will say that.
And I apologize if you already said this, but are you operating under a part 91 or just part one zero seven for your pilots?
So right now, we do both.
Our DFR operates under part 91, and right now, we could fly our hand flown both waiver and part one zero seven. So for game days, when we fly our hand flown, we we have three positions. One of them is remote pilot in command. The other is a VO or visual observer, and another person is responsible for airspace deconfliction, communications, monitoring the weather, things like that. And our pilots rotate through those positions every three hours on a game day. So with that being said, it's because we wanna fly higher, it's easier for us to fly part one zero seven on a game day, because we can get Lance approval above the UAS FM grid. So it's an easier process for us, but we are going through the process to get a CAPS portal account so that we can get tailored airspace around campus.
I think this is actually a really great question. There's a lot of stuff in here about flight time, but, obviously, you're flying something like a football game that's lasting hours. So how are you handling flights that last longer than a thirty five minute battery life?
Right. So, with the attachments, you have to take that into account and also your environment.
On any given game day, because we're close to the river, there's always some type of wind blowing, and it's really up to my guys on whether they want to fly with the attachments on or not. We always leave the parachute, but whether we want to add a spotlight or a speaker is up to them.
So they were flying with at least a spotlight on even during the day in the parachute and night sense, and we were seeing about twenty five to thirty minutes with our environment per battery independent on are they doing a rooftop search, are they perching somewhere, or or hovering somewhere over a building to kinda give that that pan and tilt view. It just varies for us, but one thing we noticed is bring as many batteries as you can. Keep them charging, because for us, the flight time doesn't really affect our operations. Because if our hand flown has to go down, then I can just launch a docked drone, and it can be on scene in seconds and vice versa. If our docked drone battery needs to be recharged, then we just throw the handphone drone up. So we constantly... That's what I'm saying. It's it's really nice to have multiple, drones, but you can certainly do it with one drone and multiple batteries.
Yeah. That's a great point. We definitely encourage multiple drones for redundancy, but also if you have a drone that's flying over a football game, again, like we've talked about, the rest of the campus doesn't just stop. So you wanna be able to still be able to respond to calls for service that may pop up.
And, also, if you haven't heard, we recently announced Skydio as F10 LightRunner, which has a one hundred and twenty minute max endurance. We see this being used for this type of use case quite a bit here in the future because of the battery life of F10.
With that said, we are at the top of the hour. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to spend... You know, to learn more about campus DFR.
Sarge, I really appreciate you for taking the time to share what your team is doing and letting us see it through the different flights that you've had so far. For anyone who didn't have any questions answered, we'll make sure the team reaches out to you. But, hopefully, this gives you a better sense of where DFR could fit on your campus and what it takes to get there. So really appreciate you all. Thanks for hanging out with us, and stay safe.
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