My name is Blake Resnick.
I'm the founder and CEO of Brinc Drones.
We basically build public safety technology.
Brinc Drones recently signed a deal to send several
drones to the New York City Police Department.
Drones aren't anything new to the New York City Police
Department, but their use has only increased as the
technology has become more ubiquitous.
We want to utilize this technology to complement our
crisis management team, complement our police
personnel and respond appropriately and be able to
respond in record time.
A drone could get to a location and 30 40s where
we're going to have crowded streets where police are not
going to be able to get there as fast.
This is Lemur two.
This is sort of our main in-market drone right now.
It's designed to get first responders eyes and ears in
dangerous places. First drone in the world to have a
glass breaking capability.
It can literally fly up to a window, shatter it out,
enter a structure that's really unique.
First, drone the world to have a two way audio system
so you can actually put on crisis negotiators use this
sort of like a flying cell phone de-escalate a
situation. I mean, the reason I got interested in
this space at all was the October 1st shooting
happening in my hometown.
In the late hours of October 1st, 2017, a gunman opened
fire on a crowd in Las Vegas from a hotel window.
This became the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
The gunman was found dead before midnight, but the
response to the aftermath of the shooting carried on
into the early hours of October 2nd.
I got a phone call from my best friend when October 1st
started who was on the strip and started hearing
gunshots. And he asked me where I was.
I luckily wasn't there, but I knew other people that
were. It got me initially thinking that first
responders need better tools.
It took officers an hour and five minutes to make
entry into the room where the gunman was firing from
during October 1st.
The reason why that happened is all over the
strip, plain clothed police and security took out their
service weapons and then they were misidentified as
additional active shooters.
So what first responders are thinking when this is
happening is this is a coordinated terror attack at
these 6 or 7 different sites.
They're sending resources to all of these places
incorrectly. They don't understand the true nature
of the event. And it just took a lot of time to
actually understand what was going on.
I think the right drone system, something that could
take off from a fire station half a mile away
from the Mandalay Bay. And there is one right there
that could have arrived in 45 seconds.
And just given that aerial perspective, to tell them
that this is a lone gunman halfway up the Mandalay Bay
shooting into the Route 91 Harvest Festival, that is
information that would have saved lives.
That's what we want to build to missions that we've
done that I'm really proud of.
First, in Surfside, Florida, we got a call.
So the situation there is there was a 14 storey
building. Half of it initially collapsed.
There were around 100 missing people.
We got on scene less than 24 hours later, took off our
drone, and we were able to search that underground
section of the building, basically with a structural
engineer in a virtual reality headset, watching
the video output of one of these things.
We dealt with some similar situations in Turkey.
And what we found was there were also families outside
of these things that maybe lost a family member
somewhere inside you can enter for.
They're under the motor and they were waiting for first
responders to come and either to find a surviving
family member or to tell them that they they didn't
make it. We were able to launch our drone and in some
cases actually use the glass breaker attachment on
our bird to bust out a window, make entry, fly
around clear rooms and try to find folks.
Ukraine is our largest drone operator.
They have around 60 of our systems, almost all of which
are in the hands of Ukrainian emergency
services. So that's sort of their fema equivalent.
They're using our drones to search partially collapsed
buildings, structures that might have been hit by
cruise missiles or artillery. That's sort of
the niche we fall into.
Some groups are concerned with the privacy problems
when it comes to drone use.
We have to push back on the sci fi aspects of drones of
no one is going to be up monitoring.
You know what you're talking about your
conversation.
Recently, New York City announced that they would
use drones to monitor parties on Labor Day,
drawing a backlash among some observers, There are.
A number of calls of loud music, disruptive behavior.
Instead of the police having to respond and look
at those, they're going to utilize drones from a safe
distance up, not down, flying in someone's backyard
to see what they have on the grill.
They're going to utilize the drones to determine
should they send crisis management teams there right
away to help mitigate the problem.
We don't want police to be the same.
The only response, I.
Think, for our current products, indoor Swat
drones. There aren't huge privacy concerns just
because these are critical incidents.
Every officer is already wearing a body camera.
In the past, they would actually put up police
helicopters to get an aerial perspective.
These are really intensely surveilled situations, but
they're surveilled because they're incredibly
dangerous. Right. There's usually someone armed with a
rifle inside of one of these houses.
And if they poke their head out of a window, police kind
of have to know that. So we're just one more camera
on top of dozens that are already deployed.
I don't I don't think there are huge privacy concerns
around that use case.
I think where these questions start becoming a
lot more interesting is when we're installing these
big citywide networks of nine one response drones.
You just have to be really thoughtful when you're
designing these systems.
One really good strategy in general is to not have
cameras on or to have cameras pointed just at a
horizon when a drone is taking off from a fire
station and in route to 911 call, for example.
I think another similar example is really only using
drones to respond to active emergencies.
And when someone calls for help, you know, sending a
drone to respond to a 911 call as opposed to just
launching and accomplishing surveillance.