Episode 199: Innovating Policing: How Humble PD Utilizes Drone Technology with Officer Kent Guidry

Published 2024-02-15

Episode notes

What are the keys to successful drone implementation?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

Discover how drone technology can further evolve to meet the unique challenges faced by law enforcement agencies in different environments

Learn about the journey to drone integration, including training, community engagement, and real-world success stories

Understand what measures can be taken to balance the use of drones in policing with concerns about privacy and civil liberties

Hear from Officer Kent Guidry of the Humble (Texas) Police Department.

The department currently has 10 drones, including DJI and Autel models, which are used for various purposes such as crime scene investigation, accident reconstruction, and search and rescue operations. The drones have significantly improved officer safety by providing real-time situational awareness and reducing the need for officers to enter potentially dangerous situations.

The department has also prioritized community engagement and communication to address any privacy concerns and showcase the value of their drone program.

So click play now to find out what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

0:00 Intro
1:02 Meet Officer Kent Guidry of the Humble Police Department
1:44 The city of Humble and its police department
5:02 How Kent got into drones
9:11 Getting the FAA Part 107 license
11:19 Airspace rules near Bush Intercontinental
12:58 Starting small with policy and training
15:29 Choosing and buying the first drones
20:58 Keeping up as the technology changes
25:41 Finding a suspect with the thermal camera
30:03 Officer safety and overwatch
32:44 DroneSense as a central hub
35:52 Growing the drone fleet
37:35 SOPs, policy and training new pilots
40:53 Drone as first responder
44:19 Community engagement and privacy
49:12 How another agency can start tomorrow
53:04 Don't be afraid to ask
55:16 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is an FAA Part 107 license and why is it required for police drone operations?

Kent Guidry explains that Part 107 is an unmanned aircraft rating that separates recreational flyers from commercial pilots. Commercial means anything done for a benefit or employer use, like police work. The license requires studying FAA regulations, weather, airspace, and crew resource management, then passing a test.

Hear it at 9:38

How did drones reduce the time spent on crash scene investigations in Humble?

Kent Guidry says that using drones with photogrammetry programs like Pix4D cut crash scene documentation time from four to eight hours down to as little as 10 to 30 minutes, freeing up four to six officers who can return to other calls.

Hear it at 20:58

How do drones improve officer safety during pursuits and searches?

Kent Guidry describes two incidents where thermal drones located hiding suspects without officers entering dangerous areas blind. In one, a Matrice 30 thermal found an escaped prisoner in the woods. In another, it guided officers to armed carjacking suspects without them having to jump a fence into an ambush.

Hear it at 25:41

What is DroneSense and how does Humble PD use it?

Kent Guidry says DroneSense is third party software that acts as a central hub. It live streams camera feeds from up to five drones at once to dispatchers, command staff, and officers on scene in real time, and allows multi agency mission sharing.

Hear it at 33:06

What advice does Kent Guidry give departments starting a drone program?

Make friends, do research, and find out what other agencies are doing. Ask questions, reach out on social media and through contacts, and have distributors bring equipment out for hands on demos so you know what you actually need before you buy.

Hear it at 49:12

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 199 transcript

Innovating Policing: How Humble PD Utilizes Drone Technology with Officer Kent Guidry

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Kent Guidry

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast, where we cover public safety technology trends and change management. Today, we are joined by Officer Kent Guidry from the Humble Police Department to discuss the implementation and benefits of their drone program. The Humble Police Department is a mid-sized agency located in Harris County, Texas. The department currently has around 10 drones, including DJI and Autel models, which are used for various purposes, such as crime scene investigation, accident reconstruction, and search and rescue operations. The drones have significantly improved officer safety by providing real-time situation awareness and reducing the need for officers to potentially enter dangerous situations. Kent will cover how they started, what they're looking at in the future with drone tech, and how others can follow to implement drones effectively into their public safety operations. Thanks and enjoy the show. Kent Guidry from the Humble Police Department. How you doing today?

[1:02] Kent Guidry: Hey, good morning, Kevin. Doing perfect. How are you?

[1:05] Kevin Sofen: I'm doing well, thanks. Where are you located today in the world?

[1:08] Kent Guidry: This is northeast Houston. The city of Humble is actually just north of the Beltway. We are located at 1960 and Highway 59 north. The city of Humble is just between Houston, Harris County, it's in Harris County, Texas.

[1:31] Kevin Sofen: But tell me a little bit more about Humble, the Humble Police Department and the population that they serve and the geography and the demographics. What is the city and the department like?

[1:44] Kent Guidry: Well, even though the city of Humble is relatively small, it actually is only roughly a little less than 10 square miles for the entire city. And the size of the population is approximately around 15,700. So the population on a day-to-day basis is relatively small. However, we do have more than 200,000 people that are traveling through our city on any given day.

[2:10] Kevin Sofen: And then as far as the police department, I mean, how many officers and how many members of the police department do you have?

[2:19] Kent Guidry: Right now, we currently have, I believe, 65 sworn officers the Humble Police Department, and that consists of everything from the chief of police, assistant chief, captains. We have our lieutenants, sergeants, and that's going to be covering for each shift, whether it be for patrol, our detective division, and then our traffic division. And then you have patrol officers, you have crime scene officers, we have our accident investigators in the traffic and then we have our one K-9 unit.

[2:52] Kevin Sofen: Would you classify Humble Police Department as medium, midsize, or kind of small or large? Where would you put Humble Police Department in regards to size?

[3:02] Kent Guidry: As far as compared to other agencies, we are probably midsize, maybe a little bit smaller than other agencies because again, many other agencies, I mean, compared to Houston, we're small when you have thousands of officers, let alone less than 100. So we are considered basically mid-sized small agency.

[3:23] Kevin Sofen: Most cities in comparison are small compared to Houston. I know Houston has some crazy stat. I don't know exactly whether the growth rate of Houston is. And in really Texas, I know Dallas as well. I mean, Texas has been growing like crazy.

[3:38] Kent Guidry: I mean, for sure, the population of Houston, I mean, let alone Harris County, is growing every year. And like I said, even though our population is small, we have the influx of Houston traffic every day. So everyone's coming into our major mall that we have for Deer Brook, and the traffic coming in and out of the city because we have Bush Intercontinental Airport.

[4:02] Kevin Sofen: And I feel like that, in a lot of ways, is just one of the impacts that drives how you need to operate. And a lot of times when we talk with first responders, there's this constant theme of needing to do more with less and needing to continue to adapt to the threats that are happening within society. And again, thinking about just a major metropolitan area like Houston and a lot of the traffic coming, like what does that bring? I mean, it could be something new every day, you don't know. But I know one thing that we've talked about in the past and we've worked together in some capacity is with the drone program that you have and drones in general from the hardware and the software and equipment. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your drone history and Humble's drone story. I mean, what sort of led to Humble Police Department getting a drone? Like, where was the day you woke up, and your department woke up and was like, you know what, we need to start getting a drone. And like, talk me through that kind of like start process to even a little bit to where you are today.

[5:02] Kent Guidry: Well, a little bit about my history, as far as I went and put myself through the Basic Police Academy at Lone Star College. That was in 2011, and shortly afterwards, when I graduated from the academy, I was offered a job after applying with the Humble Police Department. Honestly, Humble was so small at the time, I never even heard of it until I went to the police academy and had one of the guest instructors come from the Humble Police Department. From there, that was in 2011, I started out on patrol like any other officer would, went through the FTO training program, and that way I started my career on night shifts. there. That's everything from conducting regular calls for service. You were dealing with assaults, burglaries, thefts, intoxicated individuals, crashes. And this was on a totally different level of policing because it's all at night as a new element of safety concerns, but also a new ability to explore different options about what you have in policing. And it's actually grow with your training. And I got into the, basically the field of intoxication investigation. So I was actually really early on in my career, very good with driving while intoxicated cases. And that's where I really built my career on getting certified with the Intoxalizer, being a breath test operator. And then shortly after that, I became the department's only drug recognition expert, which is that way able to not only detect the signs, but to properly evaluate and prosecute cases that are impaired by other means besides alcohol. With that being said, every officer has to go through continual training every year. That's per our requirements for being a licensed TECOL officer. And getting further into my career, getting off a night shift, coming onto evening shift, I eventually got the pleasure of getting moved into the traffic division as an accident investigator. From there, I was focusing more on the aspect of crash reconstruction, investigating accidents and how they happened, not just because somebody crashed. From there, we went through different online courses, different training aspects in the department of the departments. And in 2019, while in the Traffic Division, I realized one day that one of our officers came out to one of our crash scenes and had a drone with them. I had no idea that we even had the drones, which was fantastic because I am all about that kind of stuff growing up. Loved to play with model aircrafts, mostly like RC cars, just anything outside playing with styrofoam airplanes, helicopters. So when I found out that we had drones, I immediately wanted to talk to my sergeant and say that I wanted to do anything and everything dealing with drones. So we discussed what we had to choose from and what we had as far as options with the drones. And he said, the first thing that you need to do is you're going to need to get licensed. So I had no idea what an FAA Part 107 license was until that time when he said, okay, you're going to class. It's going to be a week-long class, make sure you take this home and learn everything you can about this drone, and good luck.

[8:30] Kevin Sofen: I'm like, outstanding. You can do that. Here's a book. Go read it.

[8:35] Kent Guidry: So, yeah, I mean, I did. I jumped headfirst into it. We went to a class that was put on by a retired Ayers County sheriff's deputy that was in their aviation division. And from there, we spent a week-long class going over FAA regulations, everything from weather, crew resource management, the drone itself and because I've never actually flown a legit drone before and the department had two drones that I was unaware of so we got to take both the drones to the training program and actually learn how to use it which was fantastic.

[9:11] Kevin Sofen: What was that FAA Part 107 license process for you and I have a couple friends and colleagues that have gone through it but from your perspective I mean for someone that is wanting to do this drone program the right way, it seems like this 107 license is one of the most important things to start with. In your experience, I mean, it was some studying, it was some classes, and then you just take a test, or what else kind of was your experience with it?

[9:38] Kent Guidry: Exactly, like you said, now when I say or hear Part 107, I immediately know it's associated with drones, but for anybody else just getting into this, they don't even know that a license is required to fly it, and when or if it is necessary because in aviation, there are different classifications or what's called ratings, so, if you're a manned pilot for aviation, whether you like to do single engine, multi-engine, rotary, you have to have like part 61 type of license to fly. But as far as the rating, which is classified under part 107, is for unmanned aircrafts. So that's basically what you're applying for whenever you take the part 107 test. It is just simply a unmanned aircraft rating. With that, individuals need to know why they're flying and why it's important to get it, because there's two different ways, by definition, the FAA recognizes unmanned aircraft flyers, and that is recreational flyers who just like to do it for fun. And then there are commercial pilots, which commercial you think airliners, but really just commercial pilots mean that anything is being done where you stand to benefit from a commercial gain, whether it be for you're being paid as your employer, or you're being paid by a company like a real estate company to take pictures, or you're making like a YouTube page.

[11:01] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, big difference between I'm just a hobbyist taking photos of my lake versus I'm a police officer using this for a traffic scene. And there's legal ramifications, too, if you're flying these drones without the proper licensing, to my understanding, correct?

[11:19] Kent Guidry: Correct. I mean, everything we are taught with the class because, like I said, besides just regulations, a lot of that regulations talks about airspace because most individuals, like I was unaware, I knew that we were in an airport, but until I took the Part 107 class, which is strictly a preparation class. There's nothing like truly defined as a one and only part 107 class and everyone must do these specific courses or topics in the part 107 class. It's to really get the individual refreshed and up to speed on regulations and rules and requirements that a drone operator must operate within in controlled air spaces or uncontrolled air spaces. that quickly discovered that, yes, the city of Humble lies within a Class B airspace, which is the Bush Continental Airport.

[12:13] Kevin Sofen: I mean, a lot of these things that it seems like you could maybe brush under the rug, but they're very important to make sure that you're doing it the right way. And so it seems like obviously this Part 107 license was important. What else did you and your department need to do from an SOP or kind of a whole, just like a framework of operations, you know, before we maybe get into some of the fun stuff and how you're using it, some of this foundation of, hey, we want to get droned, hey, we get licensed, hey, we need to make sure we're doing this right. What else besides the FAA Part 107 license did you in the department need to really think about to make sure that you had your, you know, everything in place before you really started to use drones in a larger scale?

[12:58] Kent Guidry: Well, to be honest, most departments or individuals getting into this will usually apply the run-crawl-walk method. Most people will get ahead of themselves with just buying a drone and then starting to fly and actually not really understanding the ramifications of if something does happen, what civil and criminal liabilities you could face. With our department, we, first of all, had to make sure, first and foremost, the drones were purchased and they were insured. From there, we had to make sure that the pilots, whoever was flying, which at the time was only just one of our traffic officers and our sergeant, we had to make sure that you kept your FAA Part 107 license with you at all times. Like any certification or license, you need to actually have continuing education. Every two years, once you get your license, you actually have to recertify. That is done online with the FAA. Not only do we have systems in place to make sure one pilot is certified and licensed, two, are they doing their recurring training to make sure they are in good standing with the FAA, and then three is when we basically developed our first standard operating procedures for the City of Humble until later I was able to help create the actual policy for the Humble Police Department.

[14:16] Kevin Sofen: Good to hear and good to know, because you need to have all these different pillars in place before you can start running. Like you said, I sometimes like to put the cart before the horse, but realize in this kind of situation, that's maybe not the best idea. And it's important to make sure that you're doing it all correctly before you just kind of unfortunately maybe have something go wrong. So kind of further into that, I mean, you talked about some of the frameworks and the licensing that you needed before we maybe even to get into this might come in together with the drones that you selected and why, and then maybe for the use cases that you're using it for. But I know there's a lot of big drone manufacturers out there's some of the common players, then there's the blue SUSCS classifications. I mean, some of the usual suspects from DJ, Altair, Parrot, a lot of those companies of drones as well as many others. How did you go about selecting the drone and ultimately purchasing these drones. You know, you'd purchase these through Darley, but you had kind of mentioned that there's a couple different drones, like talk me through your drone purchasing, you know, which model and ultimately how you went about purchasing those drones.

[15:29] Kent Guidry: Well, the good news, I didn't have to actually do that in the beginning, because thankfully they were already purchased for us, as far as my sergeant already purchased it with the department. And we started off with two DJI drones. The first one was the DJI Phantom 4 Pro, which is a second model version from the original one, and it was a smaller drone. It was actually easily accessible. It was easy to put together and quickly in rapid deployment. So that way we could actually take pictures of crime scenes and that way we didn't have to contact the fire department to get their ladder out there, climb a long, tall ladder, good aerial shot using our handheld Canon DSLR cameras. So that was primarily just for taking crime scene photos and getting an aerial perspective of what was going on at our crime scenes or accident scenes. And then the second drone that we already had purchased was the DJI Matrice 210 version 2. And this drone is a beast. It's a workhorse because it's meant primarily for search and rescue. It has a very beefy camera, actually has two cameras. One is for digital zoom, and one is for an actual FLIR infrared camera. So that way we can actually search during the daytime or nighttime. From there, those two drones carried us for probably the first, I want to say first maybe one to two years. But like I said, as soon as I got involved with it, I started actually going through any and all training opportunities and drone expos. So that's where I met a lot of the distributors from personally meeting them at these conferences but also too, word of mouth. So I met a lot of friends really quick, a lot of other agencies who already had the drones implemented, finding out what was working best for them. And of course, everyone's going to ask the question is what kind of drone I need to buy? What's the best out there? And the answer that I always was given and actually what I use today is what do you need it for? Strictly, what are you doing and what are you actually hoping to get out of it? Because every drone is going to do something different application for a different mission. We primarily wanted to have rapid deployment. We were needed something small, we need something that was actually able to easily access, get up in the air quickly. So that way, whenever we have a suspect running on the ground, or whenever we have a missing child or person, we can actually locate them quickly because we know we needed to have a good camera, something that was actually able to work with our city, being in our airspace, and something that was able to have the same things that the Matrice 210 had with the different thermal capabilities, but not as much weight, cost, and accessibility to be able to actually use it. So we used that one drone, and that Matrice 210 takes about a good 10 to 15 minutes to put together before we even get in the air. So we knew we needed something more rapid deployment, and that's why we were considering a different brand of drone by Autel called the Evo 2 Enterprise Series. That drone was probably a third of the weight. I mean, you're going from 10 to 15 pounds down to maybe four to six pounds, and it had the same capabilities of zoom and thermal infrared that we were actually needing. So figuring out what we were going to decide on what kind of drones to buy, like I said, we met with distributors and we were put into contact with different companies like Unmanned Vehicle Technologies, Darley, Linked All, and there's many other companies that are out there that are selling the same product. And that's when I actually had the pleasure of meeting Bruce Ireland.

[19:13] Kevin Sofen: Bruce, one of the greats, just a great human.

[19:17] Kent Guidry: He's the man, the myth, the legend.

[19:21] Kevin Sofen: Indeed true.

[19:22] Kent Guidry: So with that being said, after having conversations with Bruce and other distributors, my department said, okay, well, if we're gonna get some drones, we need to actually see what we're doing and why do we need these particular drones. So Bruce and other companies were actually kind enough to come out to our department and they brought every toy that they had. every tool in their toolbox they brought out to us. So that way they could actually put the product in our hands and show the department what it could do, why it was beneficial, and then it allowed us to make the decision that we ultimately went with, was adding an additional four drones by Autel, the Evo. two enterprise series from Darley.

[20:02] Kevin Sofen: Thanks for that context and spotlighting the dynamic of working with Bruce and your decision-making process and obviously it seems to be a lot of weight and capabilities and the flexibility of deployment. All these things go into what drone you're going to get and everything you've talked about has been extremely helpful so far. What I'm really keen to hear about more now is your question earlier is what do you need it for? Now, that's almost my question to you is, what do you need your drones for? And maybe give me some use cases and some examples of how have you used drones? How have you shown that having drones, part of the Humble Police Department, has helped Humble Police Department do this type of traffic operation or some type of search and rescue operation better because of the drone? I mean, it's a very open-ended question, but we'd love to hear you riff on that. Absolutely.

[20:58] Kent Guidry: With technology, it's growing every day. Like you buy a cell phone, the next day they have a new one coming out. Same thing with drones. So being able to have Bruce to help us along the way with that has really made things a lot easier in doing our jobs because originally what I talked to him about was saying, Bruce, that we need a lightweight drone that's quick to get in the air. We don't want to have to deal with a lot of restrictions. Before we were having problems with DJI and geofencing problems, we were in a Class B airspace. So that actually made us a really good argument to say that we need Autel drones because they don't have the geo-fencing like DJI does until later on I found out it wasn't really that hard to actually work with DJI and get those simple problems fixed. That's why we still incorporate and employ both DJI and Autel drones. So in the traffic department, with the At the Humble Police Department, we look at other agencies and what they're using, because I know that we want to stay up with the technology, because not only we have drones, we have other technology that we also implement with doing our jobs, which is simple things like using crash data recorders to pull the black box information on vehicles that actually been involved in the crash, and we didn't know how they crashed, what their speed was, and all the other information is for breaking information, but then we get into more other type of technology, which is like using a total station. It's kind of what you see on people on the side of the road with surveyors, they have a pole, they have a laser guide, and they are taking real GPS location coordinates to be able to do a two-scale drawing of an accident. And with that being said, that process was very lengthy, and we needed to actually something to improve that because we were out on crime scenes and crash scenes we're taking between four up to eight hours. With the innovation of the drones using photogrammetry, we were able to actually utilize this primarily for our accident division because any kind of crash scene that involves a fatality, anything involving one of our department vehicles or anything in that matter requiring to actual take a relative scale or two-scale drawing of that actual scene, we can do it with a drone and probably cutting down the time from four to eight hours down to around between 30, as little as 10 minutes. Wow. So that is primarily what we're using it for is we needed the drone to be able to, not only one, search for persons, but also two, be able to take quality pictures to be able to actually use photogrammetry programs such as like DJI Terra and then Pix4D, Mapper and PIX4D Matic, which we currently use today, but we're starting in getting into new technology, which is the Leica scanner, Leica scanner 360 RTC, and then also integrating that with the Leica GNSS total station using real-time kinematics with the drone to be able to actually not only fly a mission with the drone but actually get to scale accurate GPS coordinate locations on the real planet Earth's surface and integrate that into a two-scale drawing for insurance purposes, court purposes, and have that as documentation for our department. So that's what really helped accelerate our program and needing a good product to be able to actually help us get in and out of a crime scene or accident scene and release it back to the general population so that way we're not tying up the roadways anymore, causing more unsafe hazard conditions.

[24:36] Kevin Sofen: Well said, I mean, it's fascinating to hear about is inclusion of hardware, software, and being able to get a very accurate, detailed photo snapshot of a crime scene in a time that's 30 minutes or less to where you can get the roads open faster. You're able to get the exact information you need, you set for court. And it just seems purely, as I mentioned earlier, but first responders being asked to do more with less, something that you had officers on scene for four to eight hours, if you can reduce that to one, that just frees up bandwidth to do other tasks instead of being on that particular scene.

[25:17] Kent Guidry: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that four to eight hours is not just tying up one officer. That's usually tying up between four to six officers that could be answering other calls for service.

[25:26] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. Well, that's a great use case example. I'm hungry for more. Besides traffic cases, and you just mentioned, what are some other examples of how you have implemented the drone to enhance your operations?

[25:41] Kent Guidry: Well, glad you asked, because I've been sitting on this one. I've been waiting to actually share it with you. We've actually had two recent success stories, and they actually happen to both be in this, beginning early this year. We had two cases actually in February, where our drones were able to assist not only our department, but another department. We were actually contacted by the Harris County Constable's Office, Mark Herman's Precinct Four Constable Office. They had a prisoner that was brought to the hospital, which is located in the city of Humble. This was a felon who was brought in for medical reasons and medical treatment. But during that course, that time that he was there, he escaped and he actually went into the woods behind the hospital and there was an active manhunt going on for that individual. Our on-duty pilot, part of the Traffic Division, Officer Montague, was able to actually rapidly deploy his newly purchased drone that I'm happy to say was purchased from Darley. That is actually the latest technology with the Matrice series. We used our Matrice 30 thermal drone to be able to launch in less than two minutes. We were able to actually get a perimeter set and using the thermal capabilities of the drone, John was able to actually locate the suspect that was hiding in the woods, laying down to try to evade police detection. And then he was safely placed into custody without further incident.

[27:06] Kevin Sofen: You can hide from the human eye, but you can't hide from the infrared camera.

[27:10] Kent Guidry: No, you cannot. And that's just one of probably three stories that we have. Many departments have many other ones. But it wasn't, honestly, five days later that we were on regular duties at the Humble Police Department. And again, thankfully, John was in the right place at the right time because we had another call for service. And this time, it was a carjacking. Individuals were in the area for a report of two young males that were attempting to carjack individuals. And what basically turned out to be were, these were Lyft drivers, like Lyft, Uber drivers. They were being called and it was a setup to actually be able to try to steal their vehicles. So with that being said, we were in the area. We were trying to search for the individuals, find the victims involved, and be able to get the story to be able to actually begin our investigations. When we started hearing gunfire in the area, we had our resources dispersed pretty thin. So we had to actually utilize the drone in this incident. Again, John was able to deploy in probably less than two minutes. And he was actually able to relatively close to where the gunshots were heard. He was actually able to locate the suspects. They were hiding in a backyard of someone's residence. With that being said, Officer Montague was able to actually guide the officers safely towards the location of where the suspects were hiding, but give them commands not to be able to enter the backyard because they could not see where they were going, where the suspects were hiding. So they would have been at a disadvantage and actually placed themselves in more harm. So at the end of the incident, we were actually able to get both suspects to surrender. They were both placed into custody without any injuries to them or our officers. After that, we were able to actually use the K-9 to go into the backyard and locate the pistol that was not far from them as the individuals were hiding from police that were standing no more than probably 10 yards away from the fence line. That could have easily been put in a very bad situation.

[29:17] Kevin Sofen: Expand on that a bit more. I feel like I've seen a lot of departments and you see a different scope, whether it's in L.A. or New York when they're using some of these land robots to go in and do some sort of hazmat work. And that's a whole other scale. But with these drones, one of the things I love about them is that we can use these drones to get perspective on a situation where previously we had to send a human or a police officer in there to put themselves potentially in a very bad situation. But how are drones positively impacting officers' safety in these different scenarios? Is it like the ones you just portrayed or maybe some other? scenarios that you could depict with around officer safety?

[30:03] Kent Guidry: Well, first and foremost, like you said, it is officer safety, and I myself have been put in that situation many times because when we didn't have the drones, what was the first line response to an incident is the officer itself. So many times have I been actually on an alarm call or I've been on a theft call where individuals have run, and I've had to chase individuals into buildings or through different properties And the first thing that I am always thinking about is, whenever I jump this fence, is this person going to be waiting for me on the other side? So not having drones or any other type of technology to assist us, it's taking the safety element and taking the officer out of harm's way, period. There's no other way to say it's just that you are in a situation where you are putting yourself first to make sure that this person does no harm to anyone else. And we rather take any kind of harm than let it actually befall the public. So if we can actually provide a way to get eyes in the sky, get situation awareness, keep our officers safe, we don't have to run blind into a situation where we're going to hurt ourselves trying to chase somebody or be ambushed.

[31:17] Kevin Sofen: Just a great example of how we can use technology to improve first responder safety. And I think I think if there's, to me, that's one of the most exciting things about tech and how can we just continue to allow first responders to do their job safely and go home safely. So I just, it's exciting to hear about these different examples that you just portrayed there.

[31:38] Kent Guidry: And just one more little thing, I guess, to tag on to that with, like you said, technology improving our ability to do our jobs more efficiently, but also safer, is we're actually able to relay that information to other officers and command staff. because with the drone itself, that is a tool and you need to be able to have the software to be able to run it. We also use a software program called DroneSense. That DroneSense program software will actually give us the ability to live stream our camera views to our police department, our dispatchers and our other officers that are on the scene so that way, if they're on the ground on our location, they can actually log into their device and actually see the light feed of the drone knowing where they are in real time. And also too, if our dispatchers are talking to other officers en route to a call, they can look at our drone feed and say that the officer's not responding because he's actually involved in trying to detain a suspect. So it's just getting more eyes and getting that more situational awareness to be able to use that technology with the drones to help keep us safe.

[32:44] Kevin Sofen: And expand a little bit more on the DroneSense. I know you mentioned you have multiple drones now. I mean, how is a software like DroneSense helping you better streamline and understand and create some sort of central hub of kind of a dashboard that allows you to give the best insights into Commander during a scene?

[33:06] Kent Guidry: Basically, like you said it yourself, it's basically a central hub. So the DroneSense software is a third-party software. it has the ability to do everything that we need to from developing missions that we know of, that we are going into in advance, to create a mission on situation awareness, if we're gonna have obstacles, locations of where we're gonna be searching for, but also too, to be able to utilize multiple drones in this. And that way, every drone that we have logged in to the software will actually broadcast a live feed. With that being said, we can have up to five drones that are actually broadcasting live, and that will actually go back to our command staff, so that way they have real-time situation awareness of what is going on in the scene, as well as our dispatchers and other officers.

[33:58] Kevin Sofen: Really interesting to think about. Again, there's not just one drone, but you could have multiple drones, and then you don't need to necessarily be the one flying the drone, but if you have access to a web-based link, multiple people within the department can have eyes in the sky through a simple software link from a company like a DroneSense.

[34:19] Kent Guidry: Absolutely, and even beyond that is, it actually works with multi-agencies. So other agencies that have the same software and the same technology with the drones can actually link together and share missions, so that way if we're assisting our own department or actually conducting business in our own department is one thing, but if we have to get a call another agency and they have a mission that they have other drones and they are operating with the same software, we can get on their program and actually broadcast our feeds to their command staff. And we've done that with Splendora. We've done that with Houston. We've done that with Memorial Village, Paraland. We've even done it whenever we went, myself and Officer Montague, when we went down to U of Aldi, whenever they had the tragedy with the school shootings, we were down there and we were able to actually broadcast our feed to our command staff and our department.

[35:13] Kevin Sofen: So you've covered a lot of different hardware and software technologies that you're using from the DJI and Autel to Pix4D and DroneSense. Do you have any other plans as far as different drone platforms or different softwares or other ways that you want to utilize drone technology? And maybe I'm asking you a question about 10 years, 20 years down the road, but maybe even a year or two years Is there other thoughts you have as far as how you could find, implement, use this type of drone technology to continue to support and enhance the work you're doing within the department?

[35:52] Kent Guidry: Absolutely. And we've not only thought about it, but we've actually already started implementing it. So with our need for our drone program to grow and our need to have the drone to be able to do certain capabilities, And we've actually already communicated with Bruce and told him that several months ago that we were actually needing to get more equipment. With that being said, we've already purchased two additional drones, which was the DJI Matrice 30T, which was the newest line of the Matrice before the Matrice 350 came out. And this was the top of the line at the moment because last year when we purchased the drones, we got with Darley. We told them our needs, and we told them that we needed the newest technology to replace our old Phantom 4 drone, and that was actually solved with the Mavic 3 Enterprise series. And that was actually a drone specifically made more for mapping purposes because of the quality of the camera system, but also, too, it is rapid deployment. So we ended up purchasing an additional six drones from Darley, and that way it brought our fleet from original two drones in 2019 all the way up to now to, we have 10 aircrafts, 12 aircrafts. I apologize. And it's been great. So we were actually, that's the new technology that we've actually onboarded and have been working with over the past year.

[37:15] Kevin Sofen: And with that, as far as growth of drones, does that mean growth of training new officers and in kind of establishing different or new evolved SOPs with how you're using the drones? I mean, how are you thinking about how you're scaling the use of this within your department?

[37:35] Kent Guidry: Well, the SOPs, thankfully, and the policies are not gonna change. We're just going to basically reinforce them with the new pilots coming on to make sure everyone understands that we're on the same page with this. With the purchase of new drones and technology, the aspect of training is a must. We have to have that in place, and that's what I did myself By going through so many training courses and seminars, lectures, drone expos, anything I could get my hands on with actual just like learning online, I took a lot of time, basically upon myself, to even purchase training outside of the department so that way I can just further my education. One of those training actually led me to going out to Bryan College Station. I took a class that I found online or a registration online that was for a TEEX program. So the Texas A&M Extension Services Program, which is TEEX, offers a program for basic UAS airmanship classes for individuals who've never actually flown a drone before, don't have any idea what's going on. But even though I've had a little bit of experience, I wanted to do it anyways. When I went out there, I met the individual, the director and the instructor, Taylor Hartman and Chris Gable with TEEX. And I just, I love the program. I had a lot of fun doing the class. But by the end of the class, I was approached about a job offer. They wanted to hire me as an instructor to teach their basic UAS course. And in a heartbeat, I accepted. So I was hired on by TEEX as an adjunct instructor to do part-time training with Texas A&M. So what I'm doing with that currently is I am teaching departments and officers, first leaders, everyone from emergency management, everywhere across the state of Texas right now. I've been to San Angelo, Corpus Christi. I'm going to Livingston next month and Dallas next month as well to teach classes. But these courses are expanded now into basically drones for civil use for civilians and to law enforcement. So then I met with another lead instructor from TEEX and now with his help, I'm able to teach also the law enforcement drone program, so that way we are teaching more about regulations and teaching officers what they need to prepare for to take their Part 107 and why they need to understand that the... you need a commercial license and this is actually why and take you step by step through that. So, taking what I learned with TEEX, I'm bringing you back to the Humble Police Department and I'm training our officers to be able to begin a routine of getting monthly training, learning and keeping fresh about new regulations and implementing our training program with the utilization of TEEX and the Humble Police Department.

[40:25] Kevin Sofen: when the student becomes the teacher. Well done on that.

[40:30] Kent Guidry: I'm gonna be modest and actually say I'm still a student.

[40:33] Kevin Sofen: As you should be, and as we all are, but it shows by you just being a practitioner, being in the weeds and learning, that's continued to get you an opportunity to work with TEEX, and by doing this, you're only learning more, but also sharing your insights as you are today, so thank you. Anything else you wanted to add there?

[40:53] Kent Guidry: Yeah, the last thing I wanted to add As far as our department goes with our technology and what we're trying to do with moving forward in the future, there's a lot of talk whenever you talk with any agency or any like first responder, emergency management. The big talk now is Girona's first responder program, and I'm actually not putting the cart before the horse, but we with the UML Police Department have been working very closely with many friends in the industry and also with the FAA about getting certain types of authorizations from the FAA to be able to operate as a drone as a first responder program. Many people will actually do the research and find out that this program started in Chula Vista, California, and other agencies across the nation where they are implementing drone program utilizing a software drone census, one particular software. But there are other types of companies that are doing the similar things with drones. So with that being said, we are trying to enhance the efficiency of our response to calls for service. With that, we have to take a drone and a drone team, which we are going to have on top of a roof, which is our police department. And the software is going to allow us to be able to fly our drones to calls for service as they come into our 911 dispatch center. As we're getting these calls for service, we're actually able to have the pilot who's on top of the roof with the visual observer and the crew resource management team to be able to fly the drone to that location and provide real-time situation awareness before the officers even get dispatched or even arrive on scene. There's a lot that involves getting prepared for this as far as with FAA approval, regulation waivers beyond visual line of sight. And there's a lot involved in it, which we are still very new in the process. But we are taking our direction of our department with that, like many other departments that are currently using similar programs. And that way, eventually, we will be able to do this autonomously. So that way, we will not have to have an individual on the roof, but we'll have an officer like myself or another officer inside an office and controlling this from the dispatch center so that way we can push a button and it will actually go to the call for service or whatever the address is for that location and actually fly and give us real-time situational awareness of that incident in real time.

[43:27] Kevin Sofen: That's a big deal and I know it was a big deal when Chula Vista got in. I've seen a couple other departments moving towards that but again I know there's this kind of maybe partly is one of my last questions is sometimes this privacy concern and especially the engagement with the community where I think initially when drones were starting to come out, there was a lot of concerns about peeking in my backyard or it falling on my head or things like that, which were all valid questions in a sense, but how from engaging with the community and looking at from a privacy perspective, but also communicating the value like we talked about from resources saved and focusing Officer Safety, how have you approached that interaction with the community and what have been some maybe pros or cons or just some insights from that dynamic?

[44:19] Kent Guidry: Well, thankfully, with the support not only from our police department, our mayor, everyone in our city that gives us support, we give the community support. And with that support from the community, we were actually able to do our jobs more efficiently, because we take every advantage to actually interact with the public. And we engage in every kind of city public event, whether we're doing Coffee with a Cop, whether we're doing National Night Out, whether we're doing Trunk or Treat, where we engage during Halloween time, engaging with the public. We have local festivals with the City of Humble. We have our Humble Rodeo and Barbecue Cook-Off, and we have our good old days that are actually done downtown, where we have our booths set up. we actually have a table for the police department, for the fire department to specifically interact and engage with the public. So that way we're not hiding what we have, we're putting everything out on the table, so to speak. So we are giving them the time to be able to ask the questions if they do have concerns, and we're able to actually tell them, no, we're not just looking in someone's backyard. No, we have the software and the training and the technology to actually help us do our jobs efficiently. And this is actually what we're using it for. And when they actually hear someone giving them the time of day to know that I'm not just spying on somebody or I'm harassing somebody, what we actually have to go through to be able to even put our hands on one of these drones in the first place really puts them at ease and knowing that they can come to any of our events, they can come to our police department at any time, they can ask to speak with us and we can actually show them that not only one, our drones are operating correctly legally, we were actually able to use our software to back that up. Our logging software, which is like DroneSense, we have DroneLogbook, there are many other different ways that pilots can actually log their flights, which whenever an individual flies a drone, it has a flight log. And that flight log will be able to contain information about where the drone was and where the camera was facing more importantly. So that way they know that we're not just flying, looking down, but we're actually looking at the horizon, for example. we know that we're flying to a location we don't need to be looking down somebody's backyard and we're not recording. So any data is not being stored or kept unless it's for a specific mission that actually meets the requirements of like the state government code and we're able to do that in accordance with current laws and regulations.

[46:49] Kevin Sofen: Seems like it just comes down to communication and engagement and making sure that the public feels that gains an understanding of who, what, when, where, why, how drones within your department and why it's something that actually is benefiting them from them being citizens of the community from a safety perspective by a drone, by the police department having drones.

[47:10] Kent Guidry: Absolutely and the communication is key. I mean if we weren't out there showing them what we have we can't get their buyback, their buy-in and having them on board with it because they're the first ones that say yeah I've seen your drone flying over here and I saw that was the coolest thing and most times they'll actually come up to us when we're actually on a mission and they'll be We try and actually engage with us and to a degree, we'll answer their questions, but we have to, for security purposes, keep them at a certain distance. But going to the public events really gives them a chance to get up close and personal so that way they don't feel intimidated like police and first responders can be intimidating sometimes for the public to come up to and engage with, but they haven't had any problems whatsoever to this date. And we really fully encourage the public to be able to come up to us with any concerns that they have, so that way we've spoken with our citizens police academy that we have, with our department, interacting with the public, going with our city department as far as training for other reasons that would actually involve the drones with, and making sure everyone understands from the fire department, the police department, to the fire marshal's office of why we're using the drones and how they benefit us.

[48:24] Kevin Sofen: Well, in good context, Kent, I appreciate you laying out some of those best practices, and I want to maybe kind of wrap it up here with sort of your student and a teacher, I guess a practitioner of all things drones. And you've been on the cutting edge of implementing drone hardware and software to enhance your operations, improve officer safety. If there was a fire department, police department, or some government agency that was thinking about starting a drone program, or they were kind of on the fence and they weren't really sure, I mean, what sort of advice would you give them and maybe any sort of tips and tricks or best practices to kind of go from it's just an idea and I watched a YouTube video to I want to make something happen starting tomorrow? Any thoughts or insights there?

[49:12] Kent Guidry: Good question. It's actually what I'm doing right now with the Lone Star Police Department. With the Lone Star College, I've actually made contact with their deputy chief, Gomez, and they are interested in starting a drone program. And actually, I expressed to them what my experiences are, what I've had, and what training I'm doing with the police department and with TEEX, and telling them, like, I would recommend anybody else, make friends, do your research and find out what everyone else is doing because you have to be able to use every resource that you can from contacts, from your co-workers to working multi-agency contacts, getting on something as simple as social media. There are many social media websites. and platforms that you can actually get on to engage with other individuals that are like-minded and that are doing the same thing with drones for their departments. And that way, that's basically how I got started. And that's how, in the beginning, I was very fortunate enough to make contact with an individual who worked for the Paralympic Police Department. His name is Brandon Carr. He is one of the top minds and leaders of the industry. From there, I made other contacts speaking with Wayne Baker, everyone from different police departments, and direct contacts with DJI and Autel, some of their lead instructors and developers of the programs. So it's pretty mind-blowing to think that I went from, I found that we had drones to now I want to become a licensed pilot. Now I'm meeting the people who are actually not only selling, but developing these software into these technology platforms. And it's really a blessing to be able to actually get this much positive feedback from these individuals, because like the recommendations to other departments, you're going to find out who you can reach out to get your help with, and then find out what do you need to do for your program by finding out and establishing what you need the drone for. With that being said, you're going to actually have resources to come out to you and be able to demonstrate what the different types of drones are, what the uses are for, and then be able to have those distributors like Bruce did so kindly, come out to our department, show us what there is really to choose from and what we actually have to work with. So that way, you're able to show the advantages and disadvantages of certain type of platforms, but they will actually get it in your hands. So that way, best advice, know that, like myself, I'm not the smartest guy out there, but I have lots of friends. If I don't know the answer, I'm going to get it from someone else. And the best thing for departments to realize is you won't know what you need until you have it in front of you. So that way, I'm always recommending talk with other agencies, and I've actually offered myself to go out to their agencies, bring our equipment, and show them what it does and how we use it and if it could benefit them or not because until then they're just reading something on a computer screen or on a piece of paper. That's really not going to help them.

[52:23] Kevin Sofen: Well said Kent. I mean you gotta touch it, feel it, talk about it and it's always good to surround yourself with people that elevate your game. I like to think about that with my friends and my wife. One plus one equals three bringing the game up. So I mean Kent, we've covered a lot here today. And I've got a couple pages of notes and a bunch of questions that we ran through. But maybe sort of final thoughts from you. I mean, do you have any sort of mic drop or a question or a quote or a challenge? I mean, it's sort of open-ended here. But you've shared a lot today. But any sort of final pairing thoughts that you could leave with us here today?

[53:04] Kent Guidry: The main thing I really want to make sure I just drive home is don't be afraid to ask. you're not going to be brave enough to say that I don't know the answer, ask the question, find out who does know the answer to that question, and be able to get help because I wouldn't have gotten to where I am today by asking questions. And typically, it's usually by the one or two particular people that I'm asking the same questions over and over again, and I'm kind of bugging them all the time. And they don't mind, they understand that I'm always asking questions, so I'm always bugging them. That's just really what it's about and doing something that, thankfully, I don't consider a job. This is just a passion for me. I'm really excited to be able to actually take this one step further so that way I can do something more in my job than just the day-to-day routines, but elevating it. Like you said, just taking it one step higher, one plus one, we're going to actually make that into more contacts and be able to really just show the value of what this can do and how your people can help you make this happen.

[54:13] Kevin Sofen: Kent, good stuff, man. It's really great and inspiring to hear the work that you're doing and continuing to inspire others around you. So kudos to you. Keep going. Just on behalf of Darley and Smart Firefighting and all of the public safety community, Fire Law EMS, thank you for what you're doing. And I look forward to continuing to follow the journey that you and everyone at Humble Police Department are doing as you're integrating technology to elevate safety for your officers and your community.

[54:46] Kent Guidry: I appreciate that, Kevin, and thank you for the opportunity to let me speak today. I know I've helped Bruce out before in the past, talking at a drone conference in Burnett, Texas, and it was my pleasure, and I'm always happy to help, and I'm really glad that we have this relationship and Darley family.

[55:03] Kevin Sofen: Well said, Kent. I appreciate that, Darley family, your family, and we look forward to talking again soon. Thank you so much, Kent. Have a good day.

[55:12] Kent Guidry: Thanks. Take care.

[55:16] Kevin Sofen: Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting podcast today. If you enjoyed what you heard and got any value, please drop us a rating, leave us a comment, or reach out to us on social media. Have a great day, and together we can advance the future of smart firefighting.