# Police drones can extend coverage and verify calls faster

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/police-drones-can-extend-coverage-and-verify-calls-faster/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Garrett Langley](https://realalpha.app/builders/garrett-langley/) · Founder & CEO, Flock Safety · Founded Flock, whose cameras, drones and software help thousands of communities detect crime and investigate cases.
- Host: [John Coogan](https://realalpha.app/people/john-coogan/) · Co-host, TBPN · Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.
- Host: [Jordi Hays](https://realalpha.app/people/jordi-hays/) · Co-host, TBPN · Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.
- Show: TBPN
- Episode: [Thursday, September 25th](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/), Sep 26, 2025
- Moment: 2:10:14 to 2:18:47 of the episode (9 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/police-drones-can-extend-coverage-and-verify-calls-faster/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7814

## Quote

> “we just treat drones like **a camera that can fly**. So we're pretty good at building cameras”
> — [Garrett Langley](https://realalpha.app/builders/garrett-langley/) at [2:10:47](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7847) · TBPN

## Takeaways

1. A drone can cover about 30 square miles.
2. Drones can verify calls before officers are dispatched.
3. A leading deployment costs about $22 per resident yearly.

## About this segment

Garrett Langley describes drones that can track vehicles, verify incidents and escort students. He says they can reduce wasted service calls, with a leading city paying about $22 per resident annually.

From “Thursday, September 25th”, Sep 26, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/)

## Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

[2:10:27](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7827) They drive it to a Home Depot, to Target. We know that car is stolen. Today, we just notify 911. And, you know, depending on what city you're in, a couple minutes or twenty, thirty minutes later, 911 shows up. Now with our drone, that drone can get automatically dispatched off a rooftop out of a box, completely remotely, kinda teleoperated. You've now got live video streaming to local law enforcement inside their vehicle. This is the vehicle. This is the person. They're going into the store. They're leaving the store, whatever it may be.

[2:10:57](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7857) And so it's kind of the way to think about it is we just treat drones like a camera that can fly. So we're pretty good at building cameras, and now these cameras can fly and chase bad guys.

[2:11:06](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7866) Can you give me some, timelines on when, you know, the average American would be seeing just drones flying around, what scale we're gonna see that? Are you bullish or excited about humanoid robots or wheeled robots? We've seen what Starship Technologies has done. There's a whole bunch of companies that are putting, you know, more, like, simpler robots on the on the ground. Like, what what's the actual path, and and what kind of timelines are you kind of operating against?

[2:11:36](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7896) So, I mean, the the good news is that these drones fly high. So we fly 400 feet up in the air. Okay. So if you're not looking up, you're not gonna hear it. You're not gonna see it. Wow. The other thing is our drones can cover up to, like, thirty thirty square miles effectively. Yeah. And so the sheer number of drones you need actually isn't that many. Sure. So if I think about a county near me, it's the largest county in Georgia. I think it's just over 500 square miles. They're gonna get 20 drones to cover the entire county.

[2:12:09](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7929) Wow. And that's a a couple million people. Like, you're never gonna see these things.

[2:12:13](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7933) So you would probably wind up either partnering or building yourself, like, something that looks kinda like a cell phone tower, has charging infrastructure. Maybe there's a human that goes out there and fixes parts of his Does

[2:12:24](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7944) it even need to look like that, or can you just put it on a roof of, a Walmart? Put it a roof.

[2:12:29](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7949) Even better. Fire department. Fire departments are legally required to be ECA deployed in us. There's a federal regulation of the density of fire departments, which makes them a perfect place to also put drones. For sure. So you put them on top of a fire department. Mhmm. They're fully autonomous. They live up there. It's got HVAC. It's pretty cozy place to live. It's a drone. Yep. And then someone clicks a button from a computer just like you guys are on Yep.

[2:12:51](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7971) Drone flies. And then it can track the car, locks in, tracks the car, the human is locked in. You can do multiple drones to one operator. So even in a county like the one I'm describing with 20 drones, you know, if I need three or four operators at all times Mhmm. But, like, they're covering 500 square miles, like, insane coverage.

[2:13:10](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7990) Yeah. Talk to me about some of the other robots. Like Yeah. Robotic dogs, wheeled four wheeled robots, humanoid robots. Like, when does this

[2:13:18](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=7998) And and before that, like, talk about autonomy timelines. Because if you're flying 400 feet in the air Yeah. At what point like, there's not a lot else going on up there. I imagine you could build these to be pretty fully autonomous pretty fast.

[2:13:35](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8015) Yeah. I mean, the the autonomy is already there. The issue is the FAA regulation. It's like right now Yeah. We are legally required to have a human click a button that says launch drone. Yeah. And then they need to have a part one zero seven license that says they can fly, and they're Like an actual video game. That's a pilot slice. It's a it's a easier version. It's maybe twenty or thirty hours of, you know, studying.

[2:14:00](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8040) Okay. Specifically for commercial drones. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's good, but the autonomy is there. And the FAA has done a great job over the last few years of kinda trying to catch up. They were a little slow for a while. They're catching up now. I mean, they're making better decisions. Like, they're now allowing us to fly multiple drones with one operator. It used to be it had to be one to one. It used to be able to you had to be able to see the drone. Now you don't have to be able see the drone.

[2:14:23](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8063) So in the case of that big county, that person sitting downtown, they're flying a drone 50 miles away. Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense. So the autonomy is there. It can autonomously track the car, stick to it, so you can avoid a high speed pursuit. But the FAA is gonna make sure that it's safe, and I agree. Like, safety is the most important feature we sell. Yeah. How much of a It's a big thing.

[2:14:46](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8086) It feels like high speed chases are, like, definitely a bug, not not a feature. Right? Because it creates an entirely new danger. Right? Of of, hey. Let's get we've got one guy that stole a car. Let's get six cops driving out of mile. Yeah. Super fast.

[2:15:03](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8103) What can go wrong? Yeah. It's probably thrilling, though. Yeah. I think it's, like, probably one of the highlights of the job if you're, like, an adrenaline junkie because, you're driving 90 miles an hour trying to, like, chase someone. Yeah. No. It's definitely a bug, and I think most elected officials would agree Yeah. As they've started to ban it, which creates all types of new conflicts. Mhmm. So I think high speed pursuits are a really good one. I think the other thing that we've been surprised by is the reduction in service calls, and let me try to expand on that. Please.

[2:15:30](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8130) When you call 911, the average response time might be thirty minutes. Mhmm. And a part of the problem is it's just slower to drive. So we'll get there faster because of that because we don't have to wait in traffic. The other issue is that a lot of times, you'll call 911 and say, hey. These two guys are in a street fight. And then twenty minutes later, those guys are gone. We still had to send an officer. They still had to look around. Maybe they go into the gas station and grab a Gatorade because they're thirsty. Mhmm. And all of sudden, like, we've wasted hours of this officer's day.

[2:15:58](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8158) So one of the beautiful parts of the drone is actually it gets there faster and it can also remove that call for service from the backlog so that for actual critical incidents, we get humans there faster as well. I think the other one that I'm pretty excited about is we have a number of colleges that we work with that are using drones to help escort females at night back home. Mhmm. So you can call 911 and be like, hey. I don't feel safe.

[2:16:21](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8181) Like, it's really dark. I just left this party. And you don't feel great, I think, as, a 19 year old maybe doing that because, you know, now I'm gonna get in back patrol car. Yeah. Now in a couple of colleges we work with, they're pushing this out. Like, hey, you can always call 911 and then a police drone will escort you home. Woah. And we'll have a video we'll have eyes on you so that anything social looks suspicious, like, we're on top of it. And I think there's just a ton of use cases that we're just undercovering now, to make drones just a more bigger part of our daily life.

[2:16:48](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8208) If you run the the, like, economic calculation on the 30 square miles for one drone and there's cost to service that and batteries versus do some sort of deal where every stoplight has a camera on it and you have sort of coverage, three sixty cameras on every single corner. Is there an economic calculation here that makes sense where the drone's more efficient, or is it just more flexible? Like, what are all the trade offs that a city or you think of?

[2:17:17](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8237) Yeah. So the the way we think about it is, there's a certain cost per citizen Mhmm. That a city is comfortable paying to eliminate crime. Mhmm. And we do think you can eliminate it. Like, you can't eliminate emotional crime, like crimes of hate, crimes of passion, but a capitalistic crime. Like, there was a really funny No Jumper podcast a couple couple weeks ago Yeah. Where the guy was like, those effing flockers, they're making it too hard to commit crime in San Francisco. And I'm like, that that that's the goal. Because, like, that guy knows On a podcast. On a podcast.

[2:17:49](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8269) Wow. He called you flockers. That's hilarious. That's That's so freaking It's just about, like, it's it's about making it so that You know you've probably got somebody could still do it, but it's not economically viable. Random podcast. That's amazing. Yes. That's product market fit. Getting called out on no jumper for for stopping crime.

[2:18:06](https://realalpha.app/v/QL_GSxeXG5I/?t=8286) For stopping crime. So when we look at that though and, like, you know, the the the probably the most deployed city we have is spending about $22 a citizen per year with Flock. I think that's pretty reasonable. That's not actually it's not that much money. It's a lot for that that city, but, I mean, as an individual, I believe that city is gonna solve every single crime that happens. I don't think that's too much of a burden. But I do think it's about you know, you think about building a cake. You gotta have different layers. You don't want just all cake, all icing. You want cameras.