Call In Live: Drone As First Responder (DFR) Guest Panel

Our Take

This Week In Drones gathered a guest panel — hosted with Roxana — to talk up Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs, the increasingly popular police practice of launching a drone to a 911 call before officers even arrive. It's an industry show talking to an industry audience, so don't expect hard questions about who's watching the footage, how long it's kept, or whether the public ever consented to a department flying cameras over their backyards on a routine basis.

We cover DFR because it's the natural extension of what Flock and other ALPR vendors are already doing on the ground: normalize constant automated observation of everyday movement, then let the tech quietly expand its footprint call by call, contract by contract. Flock itself has been pushing into drones and aerial partnerships, so panels like this one matter to our beat even when license plates aren't the headline — the underlying pitch is the same 'force multiplier' language used to sell camera networks, just airborne.

If your department already has Flock cameras, ask what's next on the shopping list, because DFR is often the next line item. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action guide if you want to push back before drones become the next 'it was always coming' rollout.