Pod Insights a16z Podcast The Plan to Make American Crime Obsolete About this episode David Ulevitch speaks with Col. Jeffrey Glover and Rahul Sidhu about how AI, drones, and sensor networks are reshaping public safety and what it takes to bring new technology into law enforcement at scale. As departments face staffing shortages, burnout, and rising complexity, they examine how the right tools can make officers more effective, safer, and better supported.
The conversation covers how drone-as-first-responder programs are changing the speed and safety of emergency response, from high-risk warrant service to Amber Alert pursuits. Glover describes how Arizona DPS is building a full technology ecosystem around its officers, including body-worn camera analytics for burnout detection, brain scan wellness checks, and international intelligence-sharing partnerships ahead of FIFA and the Olympics. Sidhu explains how Flock Safety's layered sensor network — license plate readers, gunshot detection, and drone dispatch — is turning reactive policing into proactive, data-driven response.
They also discuss what founders get wrong when building for law enforcement, why spending time on the beat matters more than any product spec, and how the next decade will fundamentally change the skills required to be a police officer in America.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There's two things cops hate, for things to change and for things to stay the same.
0:03 Speaker 01 Most of the cops in the field are going to have to change the way their skillset is shaped. Because it's going to be a little bit more investigative, it's going to be a little bit more nuanced. It's not going to look the same anymore.
0:15 David Ulevitch? Are people just going to start to see drones flying around? Is that where we are?
0:18 Speaker 00 You hear a gunshot go off and the drone finds a shooter getting into a car and driving off, and then pursuing the vehicle. It's kind of almost hard to see that it isn't inevitable. We can't do that with a helicopter today unless you've just kept five helicopters up 24/7, and that's just not sustainable.
0:32 David Ulevitch? What advice would you give to founders who are less interested in optimizing ad clicks and more interested in actually building something that helps first responders and save lives? My advice?
0:44 Erik Torenberg? American law enforcement is being asked to do more with less. Departments are short-staffed, officers are burning out, and the complexity of the job keeps growing. But the technology available to public safety has never been more powerful. Drones that respond to 911 calls before a patrol car can leave the station, license plate readers that flag an Amber Alert vehicle in real time, body worn camera analytics that detect burnout before an officer hits a breaking point. These aren't prototypes, they're deployed today in departments across the country. The harder question is how you actually get this technology into the field. Law enforcement moves slowly by design. Trust is built over years, not product cycles.
1:26 Erik Torenberg? And the gap between what's technically possible and what departments will adopt is wide. Colonel Jeffrey Glover and Rahul Sidhu speak with David Ulevitch about rebuilding public safety for the 21st century.
1:41 David Ulevitch? I'm on the board of Flock Safety. There's other companies like Skydio that make drones. I'm the recipient of constant notifications from you guys. "Hey, we found a kidnapped child. We use the technology in this way. We were able to de-escalate a situation." I remember one story where someone called 911 and said, "Hey, there's a guy in the alleyway with a shotgun." Well, you can imagine how a police officer would respond to that call, but it turned out the drone provided situational awareness. It said, "Wait, there's just a janitor with a broom. That's not a guy with a shotgun." And it totally de-escalates the situation. So it was really incredible. Anything else we should know Rahul about? Where are we in the sort of nationwide in the state of drone deployment? Are people just going to start see drones flying around? Is that where we are?
2:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, drones are they're flying robots. And as we see AI robotics sweep every industry, like all these industries are looking for ways to either automate things, make things more efficient, make things more effective. Drones are a similar piece of that. And in public safety, the short answer is we are going to see more drones. We're going to see also potentially more hostile drones that we have to be prepared for. You're going to see more police and fire department drones responding to fire calls across the country and flock safety. It's not just about drones. For us, we have multitudes of sensors in the communities. We have light display reading cameras. We have gunshot detection capabilities. All of this is coming together. All this data where you're able to determine, oh, that's an Amber Alert vehicle. And the drone takes off and chases the Amber Alert vehicle.
3:09 Speaker 00 Or you hear a gunshot go off and the drone finds, you know, a shooter getting into a car and driving off. And then pursuing the vehicle even on the highways with DPS. That's something that it's kind of almost hard to see that it isn't inevitable. We can't do that with a helicopter today unless you've just kept five helicopters up 24/7 and that's just not sustainable. This is the only way to actually achieve that level of safety.
3:30 David Ulevitch? I joked earlier that it's a bad time to be an enemy of America from Maduro to Amencho to Ayatollah. But it sounds like it's going to be a bad time to be a criminal here in America. Colonel Glover, talk about some of the other technologies and capabilities that you've been able to deploy that really changes the equation for law enforcement, either helping the officers or helping the general public, or in most cases, both.
3:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's a couple of different things that we're doing, sort of like an ecosystem or platform within the agency that we've done. One piece of it is being able to make sure that we're giving the officers what they need to do to be successful. But it's also about their own mental health and wellbeing. So we utilize Vitania Heal the Heroes. It's basically brain scanned. So we start off the day and everything to figure out exactly, you know, how are you doing, you know, temperature check? Then they go out, they can do their shift. Behind the body worn camera, we have analytics that's truly That's running behind the body worn camera just to see for the behavior and interaction. Part of that was, you know, looking at, you can do a scorecard for how the trooper is interacting with the public, but it also gets a little bit of information on how the public is interacting with that trooper to see if they're combative or not.
4:36 Speaker 01 And then it can flag the situation as well for the supervisor. Outside of that, you have what essentially is, it helps with them being able to have that filling up. I have a little bit of a layer of protection because with this is going to flag for the burnout as well. And that was one of the things that the associations and speaking with them about this was that from the advent of our body worn camera and being able to take that technology, run those analytics behind it, be able to check for those that had burnout, where if we need to pull them from the field, if we need to do something a little bit different, we started instituting well checks and sabbaticals for those that are at the 15 and 25 year mark, to be able to help optimize their performance. So that way, when they go out in the field,
5:19 Speaker 01 they feel good about what they're doing and they have job satisfaction.
5:23 David Ulevitch? Absolutely. It's been amazing to see the public sentiment shift over things like body cams. At first, people were very against body cams. Even some of the officer unions were against body cams. Then they realized, wait a minute, you see all the dumb things that the criminals do. So that's pretty good. It protects our officers, but it also provides you game tape, gives you footage. It could be coaching, mental health services, make sure that somebody who needs a break gets a break and really incredible technology. I remember the same discussion happened with TASER. So we see this over and over again with technology that we sort of have to go through a hype cycle of reaction, but it's great to see those things being deployed. Do you want to talk a little bit real quickly about the intelligence gathering apparatus? I think that you've mentioned it a couple of times that we shifted law enforcement to
6:08 David Ulevitch? really making sure that we have all the information we need. Talk about the Department of Public Safety, how you're working to really make sure that officers have the best information available.
6:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, so one of the things that we're leaning into as well is that we have the Arizona counterterrorism center, the Arctic. So with the fusion centers around the US are collaborating and working together in tandem to make sure that they're sharing information. You have the TRX program, which a lot of us are doing for FIFA right now because that's the big event that's coming up, as well as the Olympics. But one of the things in Arizona that I'm doing is I'm leaning heavily into making sure that we're having sort of an international presence as well. So we have a lot of partnerships with different groups, especially, you know, of course, we are a border state, so we have the state of Sonora, Mexico, that's right next to us. We're looking at being able to have the ability of having intelligence officers
6:57 Speaker 01 from Mexico, from the UAE, from Liberia, from different parts of the world, because the world is getting a lot smaller. We all know that crime is happening everywhere. Being able to condense that down and distill it to where we can have good information sharing that's unclassified, to just be able to share one another on trends, and being able to backstop that with some of the technology and AI helps us with being able to actually stop a lot of the trends before they start.
7:23 David Ulevitch? Absolutely. We saw, very sadly, in Austin, that global events have local repercussions. So I think we've seen in New York City that their counterterrorism work at the NYPD has been very successful, and excited to hear that you're bringing that kind of a program into Arizona. Rahul, you started out as a policeman, as a paramedic. Now that you've seen all this technology, some of which you've brought to bear in public safety, do you think there's still great opportunities in public safety? What advice would you start to give to founders who are less interested in optimizing ad clicks and more interested in actually building something that helps first responders and save lives? What would you say?
8:00 Speaker 00 I already know great founders that are working in public safety. It's funny, the Colonel was talking about tracking the performance of the members of his department. Burnout, there's a founder here, Ben Curly, in the audience that is the CEO of Sharp Performance that does exactly that. You should, I should get you after this, you haven't met him already.
8:15 Speaker 01 We're already talking.
8:16 Speaker 00 All right, good, good. But there's plenty of great founders out there that are tackling public safety. My advice for them is, look, it comes off as very intimidating. I'm sure the Colonel's heard this saying, but there's two things cops hate, for things to change and for things to stay the same. And so it feels like a very narrow thread that you have to hit. But the reality is that if you can picture something that feels like an inevitability, in the same way that we talk about drones, AI, some of these things, recognize that change will come, no matter what. It'll come because it's the best thing for them. It's the best thing for the communities. It's the best thing for the country. And just take it upon yourself to be the person that brings the change. Don't be intimidated by it just because they're cops. And then if you do it, I would say, spend a lot of time with the cops too. Just like Dr. Carp said previously, it is hard if you don't know what they've been through,
9:00 Speaker 00 what it feels like to be on the beat. Spend time, do some ride alongs, really get an understanding of it. Be a reserve cop if you want to, really get into it. And that'll really help you not only speak the language, but know what to build for them.
9:11 David Ulevitch? Colonel Glover, any final words that you want to share for the people that want to work with law enforcement, work with public safety officials? What's the best way to partner and work with you?
9:20 Speaker 01 Well, back to Rose's point, it's really is jump in. I mean, jump in, really engage, connect. You're going to find there's a lot of law enforcement leaders that are looking to figure out the best ways of implementation and trying to get ahead of the curve with technology. We know that it's going to be something that's going to really dominate this profession over the next 10 years is that we're going to see such a shift and change that most of the cops out in the field are going to have to change the way their skillset is shaped. Because it's going to be a little bit more investigative. It's going to be a little bit more nuanced. You're going to have a different framework of being able to work with in terms of your mindset, because it's not going to look the same anymore 10 years from now. It may not be about kicking in doors and other things.
10:03 Speaker 01 It's going to be looking at the technical aspects of this video you just received and looking at AI and certain things that are going to come up from a fraud standpoint as well. And so it's going to be very nuanced in that way. And so every leader is looking at, how do we make this adjustment? How do we become a little bit more flexible and adaptable to what's going to be the need?
10:24 David Ulevitch? Awesome. Well, thank you both, gentlemen. Appreciate the work you do out in the field as technologists. And thanks for being with us here today.
10:31 Speaker 01 Thank you.
10:31 Speaker 00 Thank you.
10:34 Erik Torenberg? Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.
11:18 Erik Torenberg? For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
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