Chief Roxana Kennedy
Appearances
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We are seven miles from the Mexico border and we are the second largest city in San Diego County. We have about 290 officers and we serve a community of about 300,000. But because of the close proximity to the border, we have a lot of people that travel back and forth. We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of. We are responding proactively to calls for service in our community.
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And so we have drones stationed from four different locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop. And then we have a operations center where we have sworn officers that are part 107 pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service.
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On average, an officer on scene, a drone pilot on scene that's sharing information with our officers, live streaming that information on our cell phones or in our computers, they're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Chula Vista and for our community,
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is we are providing information rapidly, real-time information to officers so that they can make better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say the community's safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're awfully proud of what we're doing.
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Another thing that I always talk about, because I think it's critical, is the concept of why we're using drones, what the benefit is to the community with the use of our drones. And I truly believe that when my officers can pick up their cell phone before they even respond to the call and they can look and see the scene,
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what's happening, where the individual is, if the person's pacing in the middle of the park, there are no children around him, there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harming, you might not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can deescalate, make better decisions. And I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement.
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And right now, we were the first agency to be involved in the Integrated Pilot Program with the FAA. We're very proud of that, that they trusted us enough for us to be the organization that brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement.
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I don't know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones. And there are all different types of drones that are available. I call them reactive drones or ones that are like the tactical drones that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath.
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beds, go inside attics, all types of different drones. And many organizations have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000
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missions it puts a lot of wear and tear on them so but that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding so we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for for drum programs and so we had to be very very creative in our police department and we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drum program and continue it going forward so funding is always going to be a challenge
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And dependent upon the drone that you use, there are some drones that you can't use for asset seizure funding, nor can you get grants for, because sometimes when it comes to foreign-made drones, there are many challenges as well. So you have to think of that. And then we deal with legislation right now. That's the new challenge that we all have. We had to fight some battles.
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Like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's the best drone out there and protect the information. And we do that with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should be using right now.
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My officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS 1 available? Is UAS 1 available? Because it's giving them more information. Think about the fact that you can look at your cell phone. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at it. It lets me know whenever there's a drone flight and I can watch.
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I can have visual awareness, aerial overlay of what's happening in my community, no matter where I am.
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And I'll tell you one thing, even some of the activists, they were very concerned about drones in the sense of privacy. What are you doing with these drones as you're responding? You're trying to gather data and information to spy on us, right? And we have to go to a lot of detail in explaining that. As our drone lifts off, it is immediately...
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It is recording because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds, the camera is already going almost three miles down the road to where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, well, on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard?
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And I say, if you're in California, does it really matter? But we'll let that one go, right? But we said, okay. We get your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we work with, and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon, so we're not recording anything.
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If another call came out, we can immediately, we'll go back in, it'll map it for us, and it'll share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well.
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Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement, because there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's out there. And Whenever you're a part of what's deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology.
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And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it was about in 2015 when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones. And I laughed and chanted and said, George Jensen, because that's my story that I used to, and I love it, because I made fun of Mike.
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Guys, when they said that we wanted to fly drones, I said, oh, come on now. What are we going to be, George Jetson flying around with cars? And then I saw today they talked about a flying car. So it happens. It happens, all right? And so with the community, we started having these conversations. We created a working group. We started doing community forums.
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We started asking the community about what would you think if we were able to do something like this? We even went to some of the organizations that may not always be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew a drone, we call it the crawl, walk,
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run phase we're still in the very end of crawl we're not into walk yet and we've been doing it again also for five years so um you have to make certain that you're transparent and we've provided all types of information that are available if you go to uh children all you put in is to visit these drones and it'll come up with us and you can look at all the things that we do all the information that we share the flight maps that we share
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I mean, it's just super important to have those community forums. Every year, we do a community forum twice a year where we ask for input from our community.
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And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement, other people will tell it for you and it might not be the right story. So we've gotten really good at sharing on our social media. and through YouTube channels and everything, success stories of what we're doing.
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Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards 24-hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset. We go until close to 10 o'clock at night, which goes a little bit beyond that.
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And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting like a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops, we have what's called a pilot in command. And that pilot in command is contracted through a company. And they just have visual awareness of the sky.
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And they work in coordination with our drone pilot that's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay. I believe for each site right now with the operations that we have, we're paying about $100,000 per year. So that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other costs associated. So it can get expensive.
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My hope is that, and we keep hearing about it, we've seen some of the testing, and we've been testing it as well in our area, are what's called drone in the box. Or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are autonomous. So we're getting there, but we're not quite there.
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Because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drone was to drop out of the sky and harm people in our community, that could create tremendous challenges for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, the crawl phase.
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We have what's called 59111. And that allows my officers to hear incoming 911 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear what's going on there. And that is tremendously invaluable to them. We have so many different layers of technology. that have really showcased the value.
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These drones, they're revolutionizing the world. I mean, people who are not taking drones seriously right now will be left behind. We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage, you can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community. We have nothing to hide.
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We are in the business of saving lives, and I believe drones are one of the best de-escalation tools.
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That's going to be a little bit difficult for me to answer because the court case is still moving forward. It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't lose the case. It was recommended to go to a lower court to go back for some clarification under three categories.
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I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved and the ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important. And so...
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we don't use our drones for if there was a protest we would not use our drones if there was if it turned into a riot 100 so if people were out there and they have the ability to to speak freely, to share their concerns if it's in opposition. Our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do.
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And hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I, believe me, I'm dying to give you more that I can't, okay?