The Fairfax County Police Department’s use of drones has caught the attention of the Trump administration.
Federal officials, including Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, visited the FCPD’s Real Time Crime Center on Friday (April 24) to hype up the potential of drones to transform public safety and the U.S. economy.
“I believe the drone industry can be and will be the cornerstone of rebuilding American industrial capacity,” Kratsios said during a press conference at the Fairfax County Public Safety Headquarters (12099 Government Center Parkway). “This combination of innovation, domestic capability and real-world applications that we see in Fairfax is what American drone dominance looks like.”
To jumpstart the industry, the FCPD’s drone vendor, Skydio, announced that it will invest $3.5 billion over the next five years to quintuple the size of its factory in Hayward, California, and bolster U.S.-based suppliers of critical drone components, including computer chips, motors and batteries.
Called “Sky Forge,” the initiative aims to establish a domestic supply chain for drones, reducing reliance on foreign companies, particularly in China, and will create thousands of jobs, Skydio co-founder and CEO Adam Bry said.
“This level of investment has never been possible before in the U.S industry, and it’s not coming because we’re raising outside capital to do this,” Bry said. “It’s coming to meet the demand of the customers we’re serving and really meet the needs of the moment.”
Among those customers is the FCPD, which publicly launched a Drone as First Responder program in March that deploys Skydio drones from docking stations to assist police officers and the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department when they’re dispatched to a crime scene or emergency.
Operated by certified “pilots” in the Real Time Crime Center, which also has access to surveillance camera feeds and automated license plate reader data, the drones are “literally changing the DNA of how we police,” Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said.
“We are very proud to be leading the national capital region, and quite frankly, the East Coast and the country, to be at the tip of the spear when it comes to identifying technology to ensure safer outcomes for police officers and community members, and that’s just what this does,” Davis said.
According to Davis, the drones are able to arrive at scenes in under a minute and a half, often before human responders, making them a key tool for preparing officers and deescalating potentially chaotic situations.
As examples, he pointed to the use of a drone to monitor a foot chase earlier this month that concluded with the arrest of a man who allegedly broke into several homes in a Centreville neighborhood while nude. In another case, a 911 caller reported that a man was standing in a road median pointing a bow and arrow at passing vehicles, but a drone showed that the person was actually only waving a stick while in the midst of a mental health crisis.
The FCPD anticipates being able to operate drones from 18 different launching locations across the county by this summer, including at least one at every district station.
“Our intention is to cover enough of the geography where data tells us crime and disorder happens most often,” Davis said, adding that the deployment locations are also informed by data from the fire department.
While the county’s police won’t benefit directly from Skydio’s announced investment, that level of commitment to the technology is reassuring to see, according to FCPD Major Hudson Bull, who serve as commander for the Real Time Crime Center.
“This announcement today gives us trust in the vendors we’ve selected to deploy our technology that they’re continuing to advance their systems, so we know they are constantly improving,” Bull said. “When we see things like flight time is reduced because the speeds have increased on a software update, that gives us great confidence.”
