Inside LVMPD's Multi-drone DFR Operations

Hey, everyone. Welcome. Thanks for hanging out with us today for a bit. Today, we are talking about what multidrome DFR actually looks like in the field. There's been a lot of interest in this topic because agencies are starting to move beyond single drone DFR and think about seriously doing DFR at scale. There's still a lot of questions about what that actually means operationally. And when people hear multi drone, they imagine one pilot manually flying multiple aircraft on multiple calls at the same time.

But that's not really the model that we're talking about today. Today's reality is much more practical, using multiple drones to maintain coverage, to reduce your gaps, and then to support all of your operations without adding unnecessary workload.

My name is Noreen Charlton, and I lead public safety strategy here at Skydio. I actually spent more than a decade with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. So I'm really excited about being joined today by Officer Russie.

A little bit of housekeeping before we jump in. Please go ahead and drop any comments or questions that you have right in this chat.

Obviously this is on a webinar platform but we are trying to be as interactive as possible. So we'd love to hear from you throughout the session and we will answer any and all questions throughout the way or at the end.

So Joseph, can you start by giving everyone a quick intro? Talk about your role? How long you've been with LVMPD and what your day to day looks like as a lead DFR pilot?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Of course. First off, Noreen, thank you for having me here today. So my experience, I've been on with Metro for about ten years now, about six, seven years in patrol as boots on the ground handling calls for service. For the last three years, I've been in the tech ops bureau.

I started with drone enforcement, then we created our drone as first responder team. So we started that from a mobile approach.

We did that for a year successfully, then we transitioned over to our remote operations. So that's what I do day to day. So currently, we're operating thirty eight remote docks across the Las Vegas Valley handling calls for service. I'm a lead pilot for my team. I have three other civilian pilots with me.

So we're hammering calls nonstop supporting patrol.

Anything that comes up where a drone can be needed, we'll send a drone out there. We don't do any random surveillance or anything like that. It's only for assisting calls for service.

With how busy Las Vegas is, it's mostly just dynamic calls all day nonstop.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think that's actually the perfect segue into the next slide. So to really understand LVMPD's DFR program, I want everyone just to understand the environment that they operate in. Think when most people hear Las Vegas, they kind of just think of the strip. Maybe, you know, some of the surrounding residential areas, but most people don't realize the vast land of coverage that that you have at LVMPD. So can you talk a little bit about Vegas and specifically Metro's jurisdiction?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So Metro's kinda unique. So back in the seventies, we merged our city jurisdiction with our county jurisdiction. So we do both. So we kinda run the the whole valley in a sense.

It's a very, very large valley. It's growing tremendously. We can't even really keep up with how much it's growing from a police department level, but over two million people are here. There is, I believe, maybe two to three million calls for service, every year.

We try to cover as much as the Valley as we can with drones. I believe it's over a hundred square miles now. Might be a little more. For our police department, I believe we're, like, the sixth largest agency in the country.

I think our number is getting close to four thousand commissioned officers with even more civilians now. So it's a very big city and it's a busy city. There's a very tight knit community, but it is, calls all over the valley.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think what's even more unique about it is obviously the number of visitors. I think we estimated over forty million annual visitors here. I was with the agency in twenty seventeen and working the night of the one October Route ninety one Harvest Festival mass shooting.

We started using drones the day after for scene documentation. While it has obviously taken LVMPD some years to get to the program that they are today, I kind of like to remind people that's just because the technology didn't exist the way that you needed it to operate at this type of scale. Can you help everyone understand kind of what makes the metro jurisdiction uniquely challenging, specifically from a drone standpoint?

Speaker 2 So for it to be, yeah, uniquely challenging for us from for drones, it's just getting to those areas quick enough with the drone to assist on calls for service. My experience with flying drones for the last two years, you wanna be first on scene with the remote docs that's helped us tremendously. My drones are first on scene, I would say, almost a hundred percent of the time.

We are there giving critical information to patrol officers, setting the scene for them so they know what they're arriving into.

It's just being there for our patrol to support everyone. Vegas is so unique. And like you talked about for October one, I was a trainee at that time. I was hired on back then. I was still in field training, and it was one of the most chaotic nights of my career.

And seeing that we did a drone mapping mission, and that was like the spark of LVMPD starting to use drones and then just doing building blocks from there.

We had a lot of trial and error in the beginning with with drones and figuring out, you know, who can use them, how we can effectively map out things and help calls for service. And we kind of decentralized our drone unit and everyone got one. And that led to a lot of crashes and a lot of airspace violations and then kind of brought the drones back in house and slowly refined it from there. And now as you can see what it is today, with the sixteen mobile drones and the thirty eight docks, it's been highly successful getting there.

Like I said, first on scene, providing that information, getting people in custody, helping officers on foot pursuit so they're not, you know, injuring themselves, jumping walls. We can do more containment instead of going after and and, you know, chasing someone to capture versus chasing someone to contain now. So it's definitely has been a huge game changer. It's a massive force multiplier on what we do as operationally.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's super helpful. I think I also wanna call out some more, like, information about call volume. These these numbers are from the twenty twenty four annual report, but they give us a good baseline for the operating environment that you work in. You receive roughly two and a half million calls a year. More than four hundred and twenty five thousand of those calls are dispatched.

In 2024, about a seven point seven minute average response time. I think that seven plus minutes matters because DFR, obviously, as you mentioned, fundamentally is about time and information. So you're also operating across twelve, almost thirteen area commands, which matters because DFR coverage has to map to real operational geography and not just kind of this citywide average drop a drone and draw a circle.

Can you just talk about the current DFR response in Vegas? Like, how are you getting dispatched to these calls? What does that information and communication look like for you in your day to day operations?

Speaker 2 So for my setup, we have, four monitors that I have multiple ways of looking at calls for service. So I have three different entities I have that the calls for service will pop up on. And I only do that because sometimes one system's a little faster than the other, but we're proactively monitoring calls. So when we see a call pop up, even before the dispatcher would broadcast it, I'm already launching my drone to the scene.

Within our radius of coverage for the drones, the longest response time a drone's gonna take to reach the edge of our operational limit is about three minutes.

For the most part, if calls are within that bubble, we're within thirty seconds we're on scene. I think my record for being on scene is within like fifteen seconds of a shooting call because they did it right by the dock.

It's just so important, and we'll probably talk about that later with that successful call. But it's just being proactive, being on top of it. There's different ways of being first on scene. That's kind of the biggest thing is how do you jump the gun?

How do you get to the call first? What do I have to do? Do I need to monitor, you know, prepared nine eleven and listen to dispatchers on the phone? Do we have the capabilities?

We looked at that and because we have so many calls for service, it's kind of a sensory overload listening to every nine eleven call. But as the call taker puts that initial details of the call in our queue, we can see it even before there's a major update on what's going on. If we see the type of call that's coming out, we'll just send a drone immediately there and it's been highly, highly successful. Being on scene within fifteen seconds to three minutes to give officers real time updates on what's going on, seeing people fleeing from houses, you know, throwing casings, throwing guns.

We've been getting more people in custody and making this city a whole lot safer with our Hold Your Own Program.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's awesome. I think I wanna touch a little bit on, how the radio system is set up there. So we spoke about having all of these different area commands. I think this is going to be important when we talk about multidrone and launching from different areas. But can you just talk a little bit about how each area command has its own specific radio channel plus other various channels and how you monitor and keep control of all of that?

Speaker 2 So with being such a large agency, yeah, we have the twelve area command channels. And then within those area command channels, there's a secondary channel and a third channel if needed, if if it gets overloaded with dynamic calls, plus we have our specialized unit channels that utilize us for certain things. So for the most part, we monitor Valley wide calls for service queues, and then we usually sit on one channel and our dispatchers know what channel we're on. So if a dynamic call comes out that we're not tracking or if it's something is more static or an update happened that we didn't see, dispatch will reach out to us directly and ask us to switch over to that channel.

For the most part, though, my team, we're on top of it.

The only time they'll notify us really is if we're all four of us are working a call and we don't have time to monitor other calls. And that's kinda where multidrone comes in, where as I'm wrapping up one call, I hear another one coming out. I can send one back and send one immediately to the next call. So then by the time I finish one, I can just seamlessly transition to a new channel and start working that call. Saves time. DFR is all about saving time and getting there first.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's awesome. I just think it's super important for people to understand, especially if you're joining us from a smaller agency where you kind of have, dispatch center and one main radio channel for all of your traffic. Vegas is obviously very complex with the size of it and how many the area that they serve. So just something to keep in mind as we get through more of this, and we're going to talk through a specific case study here soon.

In September of twenty twenty five, LVMPD secured a major regulatory milestone, which was BVLOS in Zero Grid and the multidrone approval.

From the operator side, what did this approval make possible that was difficult or even impossible before that you had it?

Speaker 2 Well, if we don't have our BVLOS and zero grid, it completely restricts us on what we can do operationally. And then if we didn't get that waiver, we would need a officer on scene first to observe our drone flying to the scene. So getting that BVLOS waiver in the zero grid, huge, huge, huge success for us to go and not gum down our operations.

Speaker 1 Can you just speak a little bit about the, all the airspace there? You have multiple airports. You have Nellis. You have all can you just talk a little bit about your airspace that you've Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we have, an air force base called Nellis Air Force Base, which is a large presence. We have Harry Reid, which is one of the most popular airports, and then we even have, private airports in North Las Vegas that where it's where a lot of people do training and get their pilot's license. So there's flights nonstop and all over. So with our certificate of authorization, we worked it out.

We have our areas where I I actually brag. Arco is the best in the country because it's how tight we can get to the airport. I can almost fly up to the fence line of the airport. It's just a arrival and departure where we can't touch.

And even if we needed to, we can call, you know, SGIs in and get in those air spaces. But having that BVLOS and having the COA the way we have it allows us for more coverage, faster response, less phone calls to the FAA, less phone calls to the tower to get us there on scene first. And that's honestly the thing I'm gonna hammer in today is you wanna be on scene first to give all the updates. That's the whole purpose of having a drone in a dock ready to go is to get there immediately to give updates because things change dynamically in all these calls for service.

Anybody who's been in law enforcement, you know, you get details. Two minutes later, it can be completely different.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think now we've kind of established what the jurisdiction looks like. So let's talk a little bit about coverage. You've mentioned some of these numbers already, but here we've highlighted kind of the actual footprint of the DFR program today in Las Vegas.

You have twelve different dock locations. You have thirty eight dock drones. You have slash had sixteen mobile DFR drones. And in total, have about one hundred and thirty square miles of your jurisdiction covered.

So this is the point where kind of the operational questions start to change. When an agency obviously has one drone, the question is, can we get this drone to a call? But when you have multiple, docs in different areas, the question is, well, how do we use the right drone from the right place at the right time without overwhelming the operator? And this is where multi drone becomes extremely relevant.

So before the docks were installed, LVMPD built a mobile DFR capability. So can you talk a little bit about why that mattered and what did mobile DFR prove for the agency?

And how did patrol respond once they started seeing drones arrive on their calls?

Speaker 2 So when I started mobile DFR, we did that canine model. So it was us paired with another pilot, a civilian pilot, and we were valley wide responding to every call for service. So it was kinda difficult because you're essentially the dock on wheels. Right? And you need to understand your valley and kinda put yourself in a position where you're kind of guessing where the next dynamic call is gonna come out at. So you would look at your crime maps and stay in those hotspot areas, which we were very successful.

In my experience, if we weren't within, you know, five to ten minutes of driving distance to a call, we weren't gonna be successful. So you really had to position yourself in the right areas. And then you take an account for rush hour traffic and trying to maneuver around the valley. The way Las Vegas is split, it's kinda split, east and west, with the highway. So if you're picking a side, you're kinda stuck on that side for the night in mobile DFR. The difference having, you know, the docks now is you don't worry about traffic.

But patrol, when we first started mobile DFR, they weren't really too sure on how it was gonna work. They still requested the helicopter over us.

It wasn't until we just proactively started jumping these calls, getting first on scene, providing those information, and really relieving the officers during those foot pursuits. They started loving us a lot more. And now we're requested on every single call all the time.

They they almost demand us to be there because we're such a good eye in the sky, and we relieve them with so much responsibility. We become the radio traffic. We become their perimeter. We become everything for them so they can focus just on their officer safety and their tactics. And when I was in patrol, that's one thing that I loved about, you know, the helicopter coming to my calls is they relieved me of all that. And now having a drone, you know, you have multiple little mini helicopters doing that same stuff for patrol on multiple different calls.

So it is still a huge, huge game changer, and, it's nothing but love from patrol now. They they they can't live without us.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's awesome. I think we didn't even set that up in the beginning, that that you guys have an air unit, a very robust air unit that's out almost, you know, twenty four seven responding to calls for service. It's kind of a muscle memory thing that you just request air, and you don't think about drones.

But this slide in particular, is speaking to the metrics thus far in twenty twenty six. You've completed more than ninety seven hundred DFR flights, and you're averaging more than two thousand a month at this point, supported more than six thousand calls for service and assisted in four forty two arrests. I think these stats were pulled from a week or two ago. The important thing here is to note that DFR is just not an occasional use tool.

Right? It's becoming a part of the operations for all of your patrol.

And that level of flight volume creates a very different set of questions around staffing and your prioritization and your workload and how you keep drones available for the next call that comes in. So when you look at these numbers, what do they say to you about how DFR has changed day to day operations, not only for your team in DFR, but also for patrol? And you kinda touched on this a little bit in the last slide, talk a little bit more about just how you're seeing these changes and the growth as you continue to move into the DFR space.

Speaker 2 Yeah. With with the way Las Vegas is and how inundated with calls we are, this number would easily be doubled if we had doubled the staffing. There's so many calls that we just can't get to, so we're prioritizing the most dynamic ones first.

But, yeah, it's like I said before, it's a complete game changer on us getting the calls and being first on scene and assisting patrol.

There's times where patrol would have to go, you know, far onto the desert or on top of rooftops to check for people. Now you get the drone to do it for article searches, for locating subjects. It's just so much easier and faster for the drone unit to do it. Missing kids is almost a thing of the past now when parent calls in. We're getting the drone over there. We're finding the kid almost immediately.

It it's just such a I'm gonna keep saying this. It's a game changer or force multiplier. It's so important now for our city to have drones and to expand our drone unit. As big as we are, you know, we wanna triple it.

We want, you know, I want to have a hundred and fifty pilots and I want, you know, a hundred docs because we're just so successful and it's so helpful. And the public perception has been very positive because we're very transparent as an agency. So we post all of our flights publicly to our LVMPD page. We have very strict policies that we follow.

We make sure that everyone is not randomly surveilling. We're not checking backyards unless it's for a purpose, for a crime, for a call for service.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's great. And I think you've mentioned some of these numbers first on scene. You've only mentioned a thousand times already, so let's talk about it.

I think this is the slide's just showing more of the operational impact. Right? You were reporting seventy percent first on scene. I put a little asterisk here because I wanna start there.

There's a little bit of nuance behind that number. Can you explain how LVMPD defines first on scene and what that metric does or does not capture here in seventy percent?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So when we do our, like, post flight reporting, we check a box if we were first on scene. That means beating patrol to the scene. The issue is we're also requested on, you know, missing person calls.

We're requested on all different types of calls. Well, we're not first on scene. We're doing article searches. We're helping out in various ways.

So it's kind of inaccurate on how we're first on scene. We need to change our reporting system to be, you know, if the call was generated and you got assigned to it at the same time as patrol, who's first on scene? It would be us a hundred percent of the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I I think that's just important for everyone to know here because you mentioned, like, you're, you know, first on scene is obviously of utmost importance. This is how it's reported out, but that's the perfect explanation. Right? There are other calls for service that you go to that aren't like the priority zero call that you're getting there before everyone else, but they're in assistance of the officers that need some additional coverage.

So we've also called out kind of here that you have more than four hundred and ninety calls cleared without patrol response, nineteen hundred persons located in more than five thirty five vehicles.

Obviously, first on scene is one of the most important TFR metrics. But this really speaks to the value of getting that aerial awareness for officers just in general.

The cleared without patrol number is also important because it shows that your DFR is not just accelerating response. It can also help agencies avoid unnecessary response when the drone can fly over and the pilot can verify that the call doesn't actually require patrol to continue. So when DFR clears a call without patrol, what kind of calls are you guys typically seeing that those are for?

Speaker 2 So it's mostly like those, lower priority trespassing calls, people causing disturbances.

It's a lot of unhoused people that are in areas where people call in like businesses. We're calling it shopping centers. So we'll also look at calls that have been holding for a while if we have downtime, which is very rare.

But we'll send the drone over there, and we'll check to see, like, a seven eleven if that person is still outside, you know, causing a disturbance, yelling at people. We'll let the patrol supervisor know, hey. That person's gone. Looked around the area. We don't see anyone.

We'll have dispatch recall the person reporting and be like, hey. Our drone just checked. It's neither not there. Do you wanna cancel the call?

And they'll cancel it, or the patrol supervisor will just cancel it. Just two weeks ago, we had a very dynamic call. It was a shooting that turned into a barricade in our downtown area, which our downtown area command encompasses, like, all the Fremont Street experience, part of The Strat, and large area. And they had, I believe it was over, like, forty calls for service pending where they just didn't have the resources.

And they're pulling officers from other area commands to help out. And our watch commander sits with us at our stations, and I hear him asking for more resources. So I had my team, you know, hey. Still handle the value on calls for service.

I'm gonna jump over and start clearing out these calls for downtown. So I checked on all those longer holding calls.

Some of them were property pickups. Some of them were trespassing ones. Everyone was gone, and we just cleared them out to help clear out calls, call back the person reporting, and let them know, like, hey. We're a little busy.

I see you're not in the area anymore. Do you still want our assistance? They usually say no. We'll call back later.

And that's just how we free up more patrol units. So as such a large agency, we're able to do that. If there's smaller agencies out there, you know, you'll be first on scene for everything. And even those disturbance calls, when you're first on scene, they may turn into nothing.

They may just walk away and you clear it out, or they pick up a rock or a stick and they start changing a misdemeanor to a felony. You know? And we've seen that many times.

Speaker 1 So Yeah. I think this is kind of one of the most unexpected parts of DFR was being able to do this. And I think all of the examples you provided are are super helpful to anyone who has joined us to understand how they could be clearing calls for service with the pilot and the drone.

So we pulled this from a presentation that you guys had recently. This daily flight volume chart explains why LVMPD's model cannot be built around occasional use. You can very clearly see days with a very high flight volume, often in the kind of seventy to one hundred flight range and sometimes even higher. But this also explains why multi drone matters. When flight volume is this high, your drone availability, the battery cycles, the prioritization of your calls for service, your operator's workload, these all become really operational issues. So what does a high volume day feel like from your seat as a DFR pilot?

Speaker 2 It's it is the same as when I was in patrol. It's just call to call nonstop.

The only difference is, you know, I'm not in a hundred and twenty degrees in a full uniform, but it it is taxing on the pilots. And I see some of our guys that are civilian pilots getting a little stressed out and worn down because we're short staffed. You know? I say we're short staffed, but we have a large staff. It's just we have so much calls, and we can do so many flights. We need to have more bodies. But those busy days, it's nonstop back to back calls, and sometimes you gotta catch up on your post flight reports at the end of the day.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then this this graph is for hourly flight distribution, and it's showing when demand is occurring throughout the day. And so you can see that flight activity kind of ramps up significantly in the morning and then pretty much remains high through your swim shift hours.

I think this pattern matters because it really helps inform staffing for a program like this. And this is also why the staffing conversation should not be separate from DFR or from a multidrome conversation.

From your perspective, how does the hourly demand affect how you guys staff the DFR unit and then prioritize that coverage?

Speaker 2 Well, so these stats actually show when we're logged on. So we log on at seven in the morning, and then our swing shift logs off around, you know, eleven. So you could see the second we logged on, we're hit with calls and it's carries throughout the entire day.

It it it's a lot to go off of. For the midnight to six in the morning, there is calls holding, you know, and we can't get to them because nobody's there. We're on call, but it's not for patrol calls for service. It's for, like, mapping missions or assisting on barricades.

So if we did have our twenty four seven coverage, those bars would just be as high as the other ones. We're a twenty four hour city. We're nonstop. Everything's open late.

You know? You you've you've been with us back in twenty seventeen. You know how Las Vegas is. It's a twenty four hour city.

Everyone comes here to have a good time, and it is nonstop.

We are transitioning to a twenty four hour coverage model here in the next couple months. We're hiring eight more people and that'll kind of help us stagger our hours. So the next time you see this graph though, it's gonna be just straight across the board nonstop flights.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's helpful for people to understand. Also interesting, and I think there's some questions in the chat about this. You guys use a mixed staffing model, which is super unique to your agency.

A few others are doing the same, but I wanted to highlight this because it's one of the topics that I hear most about from agencies across this country. You have commissioned supervisors and sergeants. You have commissioned police officers, and then you have civilian remote pilots. One thing that obviously stands out is the civilian remote pilot role.

Can you just talk briefly about who those pilots are and how they're hired or selected for the unit?

Speaker 2 So we started off opening civilian applications to everyone, and we were looking at the best candidates, which we found were retired military air force guys that were flying the the m q nines and the predator drones.

Those hires were phenomenal. They were great. We have other hires that came in that didn't really have the police experience, didn't really know, but they were great drone operators.

That's a bigger hurdle for us training wise because we're training them on police operations, patrol tactics, helping coordinate perimeters, and calling pursuits. So operating that more dynamic area, it was a little bit a struggle, but we have a nineteen week training program we put our pilots through. So we we don't just send them, you know, out to the wolves. They're with us.

We do our daily observation reports. They're with me as my little trainee for nineteen weeks until, you know, we get them up to speed. But it's definitely an interesting model on how we're doing it. We do at least one commissioned officer on shift for every civilian.

So it's usually one police officer and then three civilians. And the lead officer is going to be the ones that are filtering the calls, looking what's dynamic, kinda teaching and educating the civilian pilots like, hey. This is a priority call because it says this, this, and this. You know?

Just based off because we go off four hundred codes, like just based off the four hundred code doesn't necessarily means that call is more important than this other one. So teaching them that was a big hurdle.

It would have been, you know, a thousand times easier to do all commissioned officers. And if you have the ability to do that, it's just a seamless transition. But it's difficult to pull, you know, patrol officers from the streets to do it. And also, some of our civilian pilots, like the retired air force guys, I learned more about the airspace and drone flying from them than I've learned anywhere else. So having the right hires and the right civilians that you pick just expand your unit, and it it's all positive.

So those two sets the point. You just gotta be, you know, kinda choosy on who you're hiring.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that rolls clearly into what we're seeing is the core challenge for agencies across the country.

The number one barrier to starting or even just scaling your DFR program is finding the right people to staff it. And once agencies understand the value of DFR, the next question immediately becomes, Okay, how do we support more coverage without needing one dedicated operator for every single drone and every single dock? So that's the problem that multi drone operations is trying to solve, but it has to be solved in a way that's safe and realistic for operators. The technology obviously can help with this, but only if your operating model is realistic for the people that are actually doing the work.

And so when we work with an agency to understand the deployment, we take a data driven approach with historical call for service data for basically all of the reasons Joseph just covered. So the locations of your drones and docks should be directly related to your call volume. At the end of the day, one drone can only respond to one call for service at a time, no matter how fast it flies or for how long it can stay in the air. So in this particular simulation, we looked at about five hundred thousand calls for service across Clark Kearney.

And we just asked a simple question.

If DFR coverage expands, how much of that call volume could drones theoretically reach and how quickly? And so the key point is that coverage will improve as you add more docs, but then that creates a second issue. How do you staff all of those docs and that coverage? So just to kind of briefly show what that looks like, with fifteen docs, the simulation shows a very limited reach.

It's like one point two nine percent of calls reached under one hundred and twenty seconds, and that's eighteen percent of the total of the five hundred thousand calls for service. This is obviously valuable, but it shows a huge constraint. Right? A small number of docs can support important areas, but it does not create this broad coverage across a large jurisdiction like Las Vegas.

But as the number of docs grow, the coverage changes quickly. So here's that forty four docs, eleven point two percent under one twenty, and almost forty percent in total.

Hundred and sixty eight docs, we're getting to sixty four percent in under one hundred and twenty seconds.

But now let's talk about the staffing commitment. At fifteen docs, one to one staffing is a huge commitment. Right? That's fifteen docs with fifteen operators.

At forty four docs, a one to one staffing model is basically impossible. And at a hundred and sixty eight docs, it just totally breaks. No agency is going to staff DFR by simply adding one operator for every single dock forever until they've fully grown their program.

So that becomes the question of why multidrone. The goal here is to create a model where a smaller number of trained operators can manage distributed drones when those assets are solving a real operational problem. So that's what you're seeing here. So when we say multi drone, we don't mean one pilot manually flying several aircraft on multiple different unrelated calls for service.

We mean a trained operator using more than one aircraft when it solves a specific problem. So that could be continuity of a call, right, on station relief. That could be coverage. That could be containment or just transitioning from one call to the next.

And a lot of this is about automation. Right? It's about remote operations and having really disciplined procedures to keep your drones available, maintain visibility, and really reduce the gaps that you have in your coverage. So, Joseph, when agencies hear multidrone, I think we've talked about this a bit. What do you think they misunderstand about what it actually looks like in the field?

Speaker 2 Well, I think the big misunderstanding is, yeah, like you said, you can't fly multiple drones to multiple calls. You can't have your eyes on four different screens of drone flying and give four different updates, especially like for us when I have somebody running on this call or I'm setting up containment. I have to watch this house. So if someone runs out the back, you can't break that focus.

The best use for multidrone is, like, continuing a call is on scene relief. So I'll have one drone on a call. It's getting low on battery. I'll send a second one, get it on scene, get it set up, and then send the other one back.

That's kinda the majority of what we're doing. There's another aspect to it when you're controlling multiple drones over multiple different areas where we have different radio channels is when I'm going to a call and let's say it's, you know, a a higher priority call, but it's not the most dynamic call, and then something pops off that's extremely dynamic. I don't have to wait to send that drone back and land it and send a second one. I'm immediately sending that new drone to that more priority call, and I'm letting my dispatcher know, hey.

I have to send this one back. I have a better call I have to go to. So that's where multidrone saves us to get us first on scene even quicker. And with the autonomy flight too is I monitor the drone coming back, and it lands in the dock on its own.

It flies back on its own. It uses, you know, Pathfinder to avoid buildings and everything that we, you know, don't wanna crash into. So it is a huge, like, stress reliever for us, and it lets us get to those priority calls faster.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think that's a perfect segue into our next section here. We've obviously talked about your jurisdiction. We've talked about why multidrug matters from a staffing perspective, and from scale. So now we'll talk about how you are actually operationalizing it. And I really wanna kind of move from this concept of multidrone into what your team is actually doing in response to call for service.

So first, we'll talk about DocHives. This is one way to create operational depth in your high volume areas. This is something we believe very strongly in. The idea is that incident volume is not evenly distributed.

Right? You obviously have hotspots, but your incident volume could be over a large area like the jurisdiction that Metro serves. Some areas just generate more calls. There are higher priority incidents, and they just need more continuous aerial availability.

A hive gives you more than one drone in the places where that demand exists. And that means one drone can be on a call for service and another one can be ready and charged available to relieve, and another could potentially be dispatched to another nearby priority call. And this is where multidrone becomes extremely practical. It's not just having more drones, but it's having more available operate more available options for the DFR pilot, the operator.

Vegas obviously has several hives. We mentioned at the beginning, twelve dock locations, but thirty eight docks. How do the hives change what you can do compared to having only one available kind of drone in one location?

Speaker 2 For me, the hives are are mandatory. You can't really have a DFR operation without them.

For all of our sites, we were paired in three at all of our sites except for our headquarter location. We have five. I would honestly recommend if you're a high volume city to have five drones per hive because it's just so amazing to go to a call, do that on scene relief. But also when that call's finished and those drones are charging, like if you used one or two and another call pops off in that area, you have that third drone ready to go.

You're not limited on waiting for drones to charge. So that's where it's a huge game changer. We've had calls for service, like, for our headquarters that it's very busy in this area, and we've used all five drones on one call before. Or we'll use one drone for a full call, land it, and immediately another one.

Or we have three pilots flying three drones out of that hive at once for three different calls. It's it's nonstop. You can never have enough drones, but for the hives, the minimum of having three is good. I would recommend five per just on my experience.

As many as you can fit on a rooftop.

Speaker 1 It's Yeah. You heard you heard it here first. You can never have enough drones.

You can

Speaker 2 never you we need more drones.

We need more.

So

Speaker 1 let's talk a little bit about on station relief.

This is absolutely the most common and most straightforward multidrone use case.

So what you're seeing kind of in this image is, like, we'll say DFR one. That's our first drone. It's on a call. The battery is getting low. But rather than lose eyes on the scene, you are going to send DFR two to that exact same call. So now you one pilot has two drones in the air. Like Joe mentioned, because of the autonomy, it is going to go to that point that you needed to go to on its own.

Once DFR two has eyes on scene, then your low battery DFR one can return home. So one pilot has two up in the air at one time. This might sound simple, but, like, operationally, this is a huge deal. If the scene is still active, a battery swap is going to create a huge visibility gap.

The suspect can move, the vehicle can leave, you know, officers are going to lose the information that they need. So on station relief is about continuity of the call. You mentioned that this is the majority of your multidrone usage. Can you just walk us through how this looks from your seats?

And how do you decide whether a call is important enough to send relief from another drone?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So when we're going to a call and let's say that it's turning into a barricade or somebody just ran and we know that they're under this certain area, but we can't get to it for whatever reason because there's heavy tree coverage or there's a patio cover, and we're not gonna drop the drone, you know, right on top of them. We're gonna cover that area and keep eyes on it. So anybody that moves from that bubble, we're gonna see it, and it's highly important we can't lose the eye on it, especially if it's going to be like a barricaded subject that they're gonna run out the back to for officer safety, we're gonna push our officers a little bit away from rear containment and have the drone with eyes on so they can count on the drone.

So when our battery is getting low, operationally, you need to do your own battery management.

Skydio does a great job of giving you a a wheel of your battery with green, yellow, and red so you kinda know, like, hey. The drone's this far out. Once it hits yellow, it's gonna send it home. So I need to send my new one out, you know, now. You know, don't wait for the drone to come back. So once we do send that second one, we'll pick a spot so they don't, you know, overlap each other or go near each other.

Once we move into a position and we get that second drone eyes on the same way we did for the first drone, then we'll send the first drone back. Now the nice thing is with that autonomous return is now I can focus on that second drone on my containment and don't have to worry about navigating around buildings or making sure the drone's gonna land home. You keep a loose eye on it, and it's on the same, screen. So you keep a loose eye on it, make sure it gets home, and boom, you keep going. And sometimes for our coverage, we have overlapping docs where sometimes we have access to nine drones at once. And just from, like, an operational standpoint, I'll send one drone from one hive. And to save the other two drones from that hive, I'll send a second drone from a completely different hive just in case other calls for service come out so I don't burn all three at one location.

So it's very, very useful. It's very important. It's something we hammer home a lot in our training because it's what you're gonna be doing. It's what patrol and supervisors rely on for you to maintain that eye. It's very important for us.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And before we play this video, I kinda just wanna set this up really quick. So this is a real screen recording from your DFR command map, and it's showing on station relief in action. Everyone's gonna see kind of one drone already on a call and then the second one moving in. Quick note. I absolutely sped this up in the interest of time so that you can see kind of the full relief process in a short amount of time.

But in real operations, you know, you're managing this with actual flight time and battery status and radio traffic and all of the other things in mind.

What I personally love about this example is how ordinary it is for the LBNPD team. When we had kind of a dry run of this session last week, I just asked, you know, do you have an example of this? And you were able to send this over to me from a call for service that happened within, like, I don't know, thirty, forty five minutes of us having that chat. So this is something that you do all the time. It's very much routine part of your DFR operations, and a huge piece of why multi drone. So we're gonna go ahead and play that now. And then, Joe, can you kind of just walk us through what we're seeing here in this video?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So you could see the drone that's flying towards our, target location. The static drone is gonna position themselves just a little bit out of the way, but still keep the eye. And then our new drone will take over their spot, get the new eye.

And then once everything is set up, the pilot will send a return to home protocol on that drone and send it back. And this one is actually two different hives, like I mentioned earlier. We're not gonna burn all the drones at at one hive. And then boom. Back on scene, continuing operation. No problem.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's that's super helpful for everybody to see that in action on how that works.

Deploying to a second call for service is also another practical multidrone use case, but you've already touched on it. Like, the operator really needs to have visibility on one scene in case things change dynamically. They need to get that information back to the ground. There's no point in having a drone overhead if you can't let your officers on the ground know what you're seeing and prepare them with the information that you have.

But this is more about like kind of transitioning to a second call for service. So this is this one we see. DFR one is currently on a call, but it could be wrapping up and ready to return home. But a second call comes in and requires DFR.

So DFR two can begin moving toward the new incident so that you're not losing time waiting for the first drone to kind of fully reset.

And in some cases, both drones may absolutely be airborne during that transition with the operator managing a handoff rather than actively working two unrelated calls. In a high volume environment like LVMPD, obviously, this very much matters. Multi drone helps the unit maintain this kind of tempo across calls. So what has to be true for you from your perspective before you are comfortable sending, let's say, DFR two to a new call while DFR one is, you know, still returning or wrapping up on its original call?

Speaker 2 Well, just trust in your technology and your equipment and your software, that Pathfinder. You can see the that pink line for DFR one, it's automatically changing its path around the building. That's something we rely on a ton. With all the buildings we have around here, especially downtown, I've trusted the drone to go around like the circa, and it does it flawlessly.

For this kind of situation for departments so they know, if I'm wrapping up a call with DFR one and the second one comes out and that call is completely done, what I'll do sometimes is I will send that DFR one drone to that second call with its little bit of battery life left as I'm sending the second one there. So I can maybe get an eye a little faster, call it out, and then swap them out there. So the multidrone, it just helps us, you know, get resources there quicker, keep eyes on longer, and you have to use it tactfully and correct or else it's not gonna be successful. So when you're picking and choosing your operators for your drone program, I recommend strong patrol backgrounds, cops that have been boots on the ground that know what they wanna see because they've done patrol long enough to know exactly where they need to go and how to filter out the calls.

And then you just apply the drone knowledge to them, and you'll have a very successful program.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's a great call out. The other thing that we spoke about was setting perimeters, and this is where multidrone can be especially useful around really complex scenes that cover a large area. So single drone obviously gives you one perspective, but for these larger outdoor spaces or perimeter containment or moving incidents, let's say maybe a vehicle pursuit, multiple drones can hold different angles or kind of likely exit points while patrol units move into position.

And so what we're thinking about now when we look at this image, we've kind of set up the concept of like a vehicle pursuit. Right? We have one drone following the vehicle, and we've set two others up on intersections of a potential route this vehicle may go. You talked about kind of using drones in this sense as kind of like an aerial PTZ camera. Can you talk a little bit more about this use case?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So if we get a vehicle pursuit, let's just say they're going westbound up a street, we'll send the first drone to the direction where they're going and try to cut them off so we can get a whole long eye down that street. The next two drones that I wanna send are gonna be if that car takes a left or a right hand turn, we can still stay with it. A lot of the times, officers are losing eyes on the vehicle for pursuits. Sometimes the danger outweighs the pursuit, and they're gonna discontinue, but we still wanna stay with that car.

The biggest win for us is when that car does take those quick turns and they go off these side streets, and the drone is right there. You know, they might lose patrol because they took six or seven turns immediately, and they're tucked away in this neighborhood, and then they bail, but the drone's on top of it. We didn't lose them. We have a good eye in the sky. And when they start running through alleys or hopping walls and backyards, now we're setting up containment. And then we can transition those three drones and push them over and have that containment set up.

For the most part, when we're doing this, if we do get a vehicle that does zigzag through neighborhoods and and bail, I'll start pulling other pilots and be like, hey. I'm gonna control this one. You control this one for me. There is the capabilities for me to control all three at once, but it does gum down your operations a little bit because you're taking your eyes away from your target. But setting it up, you can do, if you're quick enough, a few clicks, send your drones autonomously to your points, position them where you wanna position them, and you're operating all of them on your own.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think the biggest piece about multidrone, this is obviously going to change operations here as we keep building out our AI and our autonomy is that this is only going to get easier. Right? The more that the drone can do on its own, easier it's gonna be for your operators. But I think this is an excellent use case for getting multiple drones up, on one individual call for service. But this is obviously, like, a dynamic one where, you know, it's a vehicle pursuit. We're actually gonna jump into moving kind of again from concept into a real incident, so recovered stolen vehicle.

I think this is important because it lets us see multidrone, not just as like this planning diagram, but more as this operational decision making process.

And this particular example is helpful because it shows kind of the same operational principles, even though in this case, it did involve more than one available pilot. Can you talk about briefly, we're gonna play this, and I'm gonna have you walk through it and kind of narrate it. But can you just set up real quickly how this started and how the coverage evolved?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So as, you know, LVMPD, we try to be the most technologically advanced agency in the country. So we have a lot of different things out there. One of the things is license plate readers. So this stolen car passed through one of our license plate readers. Our fusion center, our real time crime center called it out, but also our drone pilots, we get notifications for, stolen vehicle hits. So our pilots immediately launch, and they get on top of it and start giving, radio traffic on when they locate the vehicle and then its direction of travel.

Speaker 1 Great. We'll go ahead and play it, and I'll just kind of have you narrate what's happening here, as a play serve.

Speaker 2 Yep. So one of our pilots is assigned to it. They're gonna go and do their best guess on where the vehicle is. So they locate it. We're given updates on how many times it's occupied, which direction they're going. You could see that we already cut it to where patrol was already on top of them.

So a lot of the times, they'll either give up, run, or they're gonna punch it and go. So then it's game on. So for our officers, I don't believe they pursued this vehicle because it was too dangerous of a pursuit, so we used drones. So that first pilot ended up launching a second drone, but there was another pilot available, so they took over for them. So we had two pilots flying two drones. They locate one of the subjects bailing out of the car in our downtown area.

So they're just giving radio traffic. They're setting up containment. They're giving officers real time updates. You could see the two drones were next to each other at one point. So now we have one guy running and one car that's driving through the parking lot. So having those two drones up was helpful because one's sticking with the passenger and then one's sticking with the driver.

They eventually link up, and they think they're scot free. They think they're just, you know, pedestrians walking down the street. Little do they know that we're setting up an entire team of officers to go out and get them.

And then we have our plainclothes guys come up and and ****** them up and, keeping the city safe. And one more stolen car recovered back to the owner, thanks to, multidrone.

Speaker 1 And I I always love a view of the drone on drone.

I always think that

Speaker 2 looks good.

Speaker 1 It's a good shot.

Speaker 2 Definitely a good shot.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Absolutely. So this may not be obvious to every anyone who doesn't know the LBNPD jurisdiction, but these drones came from two different area commands. One was from Bolton and one was from downtown. And so I took those flight paths and we overlaid it onto a map so you can see what that looks like. So you see the two dock locations.

You can see some overlap in the flight paths as well. So obviously some deconfliction happening there momentarily.

But I just thought it was interesting to see when you have drones set up in different locations and you have hives of different drones, how you can send them from different locations. They don't have to be right next to each other. This the pilot obviously is in some different area and not in either of these locations. So super beneficial for your GFR operations.

Before we jump into the Q and A, we have about nine minutes left to get into some of that.

I just kind of wanted to call out that GFR is obviously no longer experimental. The broader industry context is really important. We currently have more than thirteen hundred public safety agencies flying Skydio drones. And our latest assessment was twenty one million Americans now live within two miles of a Skydio DFR dock, and another DFR drone is taking off every thirty seconds. So what LVMPD is really showing is that multi drone is not just a waiver or a hardware or software capability. It's an operating model.

It takes staffing, takes specific procedures, the autonomy, understanding your radio discipline, deconfliction between drones, and kind of a clear understanding of when that second drone actually solves a mission problem and when you should be sending it.

Before we jump into the Q and A, any advice that you have for anyone attending today that already has a DFR program and is starting to think about getting into multi drone operations?

Speaker 2 Just look at your operational picture and see how it can be successful.

The way we use multidrone is we shave time down to get first on scene and to get eyes up and to keep that continual eye. If that's your operational picture and that's what you wanna do, start looking at how you're gonna put those procedures in place and get your guys trained up. Training is huge. Never stop training. So that's really the best piece of advice is just keep looking early and improve.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And I think like the other key here is that there are people like you and agencies like LVMPD that are figuring this out and are doing this operationally. And they more than welcome you to visit their operations and check out what they're doing and work together. This is a tight knit community where networking is so important.

And learning from one another is really important as well. So Vegas is there. We have other agencies who are doing multidrone. Please just let me know if you ever want to be connected with anyone as well. We do have a few minutes. If you don't mind, we'll jump into some of the questions here.

I'll handle this first one. What did the FAA require for the BVLOS waiver? We have tons of resources on our website. My team can drop you some links there in the chat that will help you understand how to apply for these waivers. If you need any assistance, we have a phenomenal regulatory team that can help you out as well. So more to come there, but we can absolutely get get you what you need there.

Okay. So have you used your mobile drones within the DFR operations? Like, you launched mobile and then have your HQ pilots operate? If so, how is your experience functioning with the transition?

Speaker 2 So it's a seamless transition. So right now, we don't put cars in the streets anymore. We're solely remote operations. The only time I go mobile is for when there's gonna be a longer dynamic call where I can just take over that and keep the docs free or if it's out of our coverage zone. For what you're talking about, I actually did have a call where you might have seen it on the the news if you're tracking Las Vegas.

It was at Atomic Golf. Somebody shot somebody inside. It was a security guard, and I had two remote drones on top of it. I actually landed well, I didn't land.

I floated the drone probably sixty feet off the ground into the driving range to get a view on the second floor. And I went mobilely, so we use remote drones with the mobile drone and our helicopter. All of us working together to get a better picture and a clearer picture because, you know, it's weird how those those Atomic Golfs and Topgolf places are are open, and there's many doors and rooms, and it's hard for officers to get through. So just giving that sight picture with remote and mobile, it was easy, and it's just deconfliction.

It's just working with each other long enough to know, hey. You know, I'm gonna separate myself, you know, thirty feet from you. I'll be thirty feet here and we all know the spots.

And having Skydio, you know, all Skydio drums talk to each other. So if you get close to a Skydio drone, it's gonna tell you, hey, you're too close to this one. So all the trust in your technology and then deconfliction and communication is key. That's how we're successful.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's perfect. Do you have fire and or EMS integrated into your DFR?

Speaker 2 So, we do have, County Fire has tethered drones that they use, but for the most part, we're doing, the drone calls for fires right now.

So if there's a fire, we'll launch one of our drones and we'll throw on one of the thermal pallets, and we actually have a distribution list. We didn't really touch on it too much to send a link to our live feed to all of the firefighter chain of command. So that's kind of what we do and they look at the different thermal pallets and they know what they're looking at because they're firefighters about structural integrity and whatnot and all the different colors. I just fly the drone and let them see it.

So they handle business. So yes, the fire department has tethered drones that do get in the way sometimes, and we'll tell them, hey. We don't need your help because we're kind of a bigger operation. And then we'll just launch our drones and help them out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think, like, in general, for the agencies who the PD is flying for fire, like, that's the general consensus. Like, I know how to get you the images, but, like, I don't know what I'm looking at in thermal, so that's on you. But the easy link sharing through, ReadyLink is is kind of what everyone's doing so they can get a quick view on it, if the PD does not or the I'm sorry. If the FD does not have pilots of their own. Are all of the LVMPD docs on government property, or are there is there a mix with any kind of private partners?

Speaker 2 They are all on our area commands, plus we have them on two fire stations.

Speaker 1 So Yeah. Fire is huge. A lot of people put them on their fire stations.

Speaker 2 Yep. It's just secured areas.

So no. There could be talks about, you know, maybe our resort casinos might wanna get some docks on some of their lower buildings, but we haven't done it yet. There's probably talks about it, but nothing yet.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There are definitely agencies who have some private partnerships. I know QuickTrip has installed hives on some of their buildings in some cities.

We have malls who have paid for docks and put them on top of the mall because they have a lot of theft or retail crime. So there's definitely a lot of agencies out there that are doing the private side as well. Happy to help you along the way if that's something you're looking to do.

Couple minutes left. What is your maintenance schedule like since your drones are being so heavily used?

Speaker 2 That is a great question. We do maintenance minimum once a week. We'll go and physically touch every dock and every drone. The good thing about Skydio is everything's connected.

So I can see my system health. It tells me when there's errors on the drones or if props are being worn down or batteries need to be swapped. So trust in your technology again. But, yeah, we physically go and touch the drones at least once a week.

And then if we do so many flight hours, we'll go and do certain level of maintenance on them. But, no, it's a good question. You definitely need to maintenance your drones, especially on the wear and tear with props and then the battery cycles.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's helpful. So this we have a trooper out of Florida Highway saying that their agency requires a report for each DFR deployment. Do you have the same requirement? And if so, how do you manage the officers' downtime while completing the report? Is it primarily for evidentiary purposes?

Speaker 2 So for every single flight we do, we have to do a post flight report. We also have to do a flight management log, which we use a different system for. And then for Evidence, we are an Axon agency. So we use Evidence dot com, which we have to manually download our flights. So there is a little bit of of downtime. And sometimes when you have those days where it's just nonstop back to back flights, you know, that might be a tomorrow Joey problem, or I might be staying late and and getting all my stuff caught up on admin.

But, yeah, every flight is logged and then post flight report on what we did. You know, that's why you saw the stats earlier. We were first on scene if we cleared without patrol, what type of call we went on, what we were successful on. And then on top of all that, we do an internal success stories because our public information office likes to post our videos on Facebook.

So we do logs for that too. So as Metro, we're we're heavy on reporting. So everything is logged, everything is tracked, every number is there. We like to have it all.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Heavy on reporting, but also, like, super heavy on transparency. And so it's worth it to make sure, you know, if there's any questions that everybody knows what happened and why the drone was out and for all the reasons that everybody wants to track. So, yeah, that's great. We are at time. For those of you who had questions that I did not get to, I apologize.

Our team will absolutely follow-up with you via email to make sure you get the answers to anything that you had questions for.

Joseph, I appreciate you so much today for doing this webinar with us. I think it's super helpful for everyone to understand how an agency like LVMPD, is very busy is actually managing multi drone operations and what that means for you in your day to day DFR program. Forever grateful. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. If you need some more contact information, you can go ahead and scan that QR code. As I said, the team will be, following up with you soon. Joseph, any last words for the group here?

Speaker 2 No. Thank you for having me. And if, anybody wants to reach out to me, just get in contact with, Noreen. She'll send you my info, we can talk, and I can help you with whatever you need.

Speaker 1 Amazing. Love it. Thank you so much, everyone. Take care, and stay safe.

Speaker 2 Have a good one. Bye.