Episode 11 – Kris Allshouse: The Use of Drones in Law Enforcement

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Kris Allshouse. Kris is the executive director of LA County Regional Training center and a former SWAT operator for a large Southern California agency. Kris and his team at LA CRTC have emerged as some of the primary thought leaders in the use of drones, more specifically sUAS for law enforcement.

Kris, I appreciate you joining me today on The Debrief!

Kris Allshouse: Thanks for having me, Jon!

Jon Becker: Just for background, will you kind of give us a little bit of your career in law enforcement first?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, sure. I spent my career in law enforcement at the Long Beach Police Department, where I was on the SWAT team for 13 years. Work gangs, worked our training division. I finished in our advanced training unit before I retired and moved into the Los Angeles County Regional Training center.

Jon Becker: So how long have you been with LA CRTC and what's your job there?

Kris Allshouse: Started working there in 2015. I'm the executive director. We really, in earnest, didn't get started until probably the fall of 2015, but we've just really found a niche in drone training. Incident command. We're nonprofit, created to support public safety, initially law enforcement, but that has expanded to public safety, NATO allies. Any way that we could make people safe? That's part of our purview.

Jon Becker: So tell me, when did you guys first become interested in drones and specifically drones for law enforcement?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, I think right when we started in 2015, I started going to conferences because I didn't know anything about drones whatsoever or anything aeronautical. Ended up connecting with an old friend and we started training and we started training and started building this drone training program. And it was really new for some, for most. So anyway, pardon the expression, took off with the demand.

And then we just started pulling in instructors from all the really robust programs out there. So they brought all their knowledge, things done right, things done wrong, best practices to the table, each one from various parts all over the globe, really internationally.

Jon Becker: So we could probably spend hours talking about drones and many different public safety applications. Law enforcement, fire, I mean, everybody from the forestry service down is using it for this purpose. Let's focus in on law enforcement if we can. How have you seen the evolution of drones over the last few years for law enforcement?

Kris Allshouse: First, I think the right answer is the macro view, because I remember having a phone conversation with a northern California major city that said, we will never have a drone in our city several years ago. Now they have a very robust program.

What has happened is the paradigm has shifted where people have realized that these things benefit everybody in law enforcement. Everybody. If you are a black lives matter or a homeless advocate or, I don't like high taxes, it doesn't matter where you are on the spectrum. These tools help you. They benefit you. They benefit everybody, and they really decrease uses of force. They decrease violent confrontations. They really, really stretch the dollar as far as a force multiplier is getting things done. And it's just been an amazing thing.

So the biggest, probably shift that I've seen is this paradigm shift where drones are bad. And when people are starting to see even people who are anti law enforcement, for lack of a better description, they see what it does and then they go, okay, I'm okay with that. That's good. I like that. So that's been probably the biggest shift that I've seen.

Jon Becker: If you were gonna break down the categories. Cause I remember when we first started approaching drones, the idea was, oh, they'll replace a helicopter, and pretty soon you were seeing them used for crime scene investigation and tactical and fire. And if you're gonna break down the categories of usage, how would you split it now?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. And I think you and I talked about this a long time ago. A long time ago. There's that outside large. You know, it's going to be up high and kind of stagnant, maybe even tethered. And then there's something a little bit smaller that you could fly into the backyards and be overwatch, support for tactical teams and that kind of thing, or just area searches or whatever.

And then an interior drone, something specifically designed to fly in very confined spaces with a GPS denied environment. So those are probably some. And we could probably go even deeper. And there's overlap, of course, in all those categories.

Jon Becker: So that's vertically from a platform size. How would you split it horizontally? From a mission set standpoint?

Kris Allshouse: The mission sets are large and expanding. So there's the whole investigative side, first of all, that's really exploded. So there's these 3D mapping softwares that are out there and drones that best work with those softwares. And that is amazing for rapid clearing of crime scene, rapid clearing of accident scenes. As far as time goes, you close a freeway down in LA.

Jon Becker: Yeah, right.

Kris Allshouse: There's a financial number there. I don't know how they come to that, but it's expensive.

Jon Becker: Well, there's a financial number. There's an emotional number. There's a, you know, everybody hates sitting in traffic, so. Yeah. The faster you clear that scene, the happier everybody is.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. And so. And you and I have a little bit talked about this, that the tactical application with the 3D modeling right now, I could put a drone out back in the 1900s. You send a couple of officers out to go scout a target that you were working on, they come back and they're riding with Crayon.

Jon Becker: They come with a crayon sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin, and it's like, that's not even a house.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. How far away is that?

Jon Becker: I don't know about that far.

Kris Allshouse: So now you can go out there, and in two minutes, you can capture the scene, and then you can have it at the command post in a 3D model where you can measure things and zoom in on things in about ten more minutes, 10, 12 more minutes, and you can have that at the CP. That is a game changer for me. Tactically, I can't believe we're not just scratching the surface with data collected.

And that's where those mid size outdoor aircraft go, by the way. Those same ones can also do all these things that we have with barricades in cars or areas or Overwatch for teams as they make their approach, or search and rescue where someone's missing. How do we find them when we have these really high quality thermals?

Jon Becker: It's kind of investigative. Is a silo. Search and rescue applications is a silo.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. And then you have their tactical. Your tactical missions, and there's, of course, overlap, but ultimately, it's gonna be out of the trunk or out of the car.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Kris Allshouse: And they're just gonna pop right out. And it's already happening. Agencies like Antioch PD up north and Huntington beach, and a lot of them, Chula Vista, Torrance, they're deploying rapidly and resolving things safely and rapidly. So it's a huge win, win, win.

Jon Becker: How do you, as far as tactical use, how do you see, like, how do drones improve the safety of law enforcement? How do they improve the safety for the public? How do they improve safety for suspects?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, well, it's a great de-escalation tool. So if I fly, whether it's outside or inside, if I fly and make contact with somebody who's 500 yards away or inside versus, I come around the corner and I have to deal with that person in an armed confrontation or a potentially violent confrontation, even if it's somebody who's suffering a mental health problem.

Jon Becker: Yeah, mental health problems.

Kris Allshouse: How nice is that I have all the standoff time and ability to talk and to provide some services or intelligence to my own team where I can keep them safe, remove that aggressive confrontation until we can resolve it in a different way. That's just touching it. I mean, there's so much more going down this path where it's just keeping everybody really safe.

And now we go inside and I can. It's a flying camera, and it integrates into all the other tools that we've been using over all these years, k9 and positions of advantage, where you can see in and binoculars, for that matter. But all these different tools that we use. Back in the 1900s, we had like 30 foot poles with a mirror at the end to see it pop this camera to fly it to anywhere I want it to.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, you think about a tactical situation where you're first trying to shrink your problem, right? It gives you the ability to shrink your problem rapidly because you know exactly where the guy isn't, which lets you take space until you actually get to the problem.

So now your operators arrive and they're not exhausted from an extensive, you know, stealth contact search. Then you get there and now you have the ability to communicate, see the suspect in a way that he loses his tactical advantage very publicly.

I remember years ago I had a friend that worked, one of the ESU teams, and they had a guy barricaded in an apartment with a knife. And he said, if you come in, I'm set up. I'm going to kill you, whatever. They knocked down the door and pushed a ballistic shield against the door. It was an apartment in New York. And now they're looking at the guy. That changes the negotiation dramatically. There's no more pretending like you're in charge. You're behind the door. Do you think that it improves safety of the suspect as much as it improves safety of the team?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, probably even more. If we're well trained, we're pretty good at it. Not that we want them, but we're pretty good at armed confrontation, violent close quarter combat. We're trained. We don't want to do it, and we try to be there in a way to not let that happen. But if we're there and somebody points a gun and we're in a room, you don't have any options other than lethal force.

This gives you a whole lot of other options, including there's a psychological factor that comes with a robot that's flying and telling you you need to get out or you need to whatever, or just saying, what can we get you? Depending on the scenario, it's a double.

Jon Becker: Edged sword, and we'll probably touch on that later. As to the idea of something flying into your house and negotiating with you, both profoundly effective and creepy at the same time, for sure.

Kris Allshouse: But the alternative is there's another human there, and we all know that as there's an aggression, there has to be a response that's lawful, but that doesn't end well for anybody, and more often than not, it doesn't end well for the suspect. So this is. I think, overall, it is definitely more of a benefit to the public. And this is a big thing coming out with crowd management. So crowd management, you know, it's the new hot button thing, at least certainly it was last year.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Kris Allshouse: And you had a lot of people who were very strong advocates of saying, hey, we have the First Amendment right. We should be able to go do things, assemble. I'll just leave it at that. And I am one of those people.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I do.

Kris Allshouse: I really am a big proponent of that. The problem is you have organized trouble mixed in, and that's true probably for any event. So separating folks that are just trying to express their views on an issue, exercising their First Amendment right, versus those people who are just there, criminally minded, with total criminal intent and no intent to be involved in whatever's going on in the protest or the assembly, removing those, identifying who those are, this is a tool that allows you to do that, that protects people's right to continue to protest because we're removing the things that make it unlawful.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because if you think about the purpose of the First Amendment was specifically to protest the government. That's why it exists. So we want to have that ability. But the challenge with those crowds, as you say, is there are professional agitators. There are people that are there specifically to provoke a reaction. I remember years ago, went through a class, and the instructor said, the thing you've got to understand about a crowd is it's not homogeneous.

There are people that are there because it's interesting or it's novel. There are people that are there because they really believe passionately. There are people that are there to start a fight. And part of the challenge with crowd control and riot control has always been differentiating the good guy from the bad guy, the guy that's there exercising his constitutional rights, who we want, not only we want him to have that right, we want law enforcement to protect that right, versus the guy who's there to break windows and steal stuff and throw rocks at the police.

And I see what you mean by putting a drone up. You do have the ability to start to identify the agitators, identify the trouble.

Kris Allshouse: It preserves the assembly.

Jon Becker: That's a very good point. As teams are moving, we see this movement on the heels of the Breonna Taylor case to move away from dynamic entry for SWAT teams. And whether that's the right decision or the wrong decision is obviously subject to debate. How do you see drones and other robotic devices fitting into this new mindset of coordinate contain or contain and call out?

Kris Allshouse: Right. And, of course, that was happening for us at Long beach before I left, for sure. Probably before a lot of people, long before I left, is, you know, the tactics behind it. I use dynamic when I have speed, aggression, and surprise, and if I don't have those or I can't regain those, then I'm out. Right?

So now, if I don't need that, if there's no compelling reason to put us at risk or put suspects at risk, for that matter, this is a no brainer. So we have all these tools that have really emerged over the years, attachments to armor that allow you to port and open up houses so that you don't have to go in. We can try to resolve that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. We know you're barricaded in the bathroom. We're going to take the bathroom wall out. You're not barricaded anymore.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, I mean, like Sid used to say, it's the center of gravity of the suspect. If they're barricaded, then the walls are the center of gravity.

Jon Becker: Take the barricade away.

Kris Allshouse: Right. These are probably the most nimble of the newest tools, or of any of our tools that we've had. All I got to do is break a window if there's not something open, and I can fly this in and locate the suspect. Now, if they knock it out of the air or whatever. Okay. It's still intelligence. It's still way more than I had. I get to see what's going on inside.

So it's so easy and so rapidly deployed and so much data in such a short amount of time, it's kind of a no brainer to add to the tool chest for any tactical team.

Jon Becker: How do you think it fits into the use of things like K9s, chemical agents? Like, where in the toolbox does that go?

Kris Allshouse: So I would send something not alive before I would send something alive, and then I might send something not alive after I send something alive.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That's a very elegant way to put it.

Kris Allshouse: So I send the aircraft in or integrate it with the dog, which is happening a lot, training with the dog. So I fly, I find something. I perch, I hold. This is what I like about your Loki system is. And I'm a fan of three, by the way. I haven't told you.

Jon Becker: Yeah. One is none. Two is one. Three is the right number.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. I want three on that controller, and I'll leapfrog them all the way up there and hold those. And I put cameras all over the place, so I'm not dependent on any one or any two, for that matter. So in any case, you've used that live feed and then you integrate dogs and anything else. Chemical agency, if you get any movement or anything, all that put together in that tactical plan. I mean, it's unique and case by case, but those are some really great tools to have.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because the most dangerous thing is the thing you don't know about. It's the unknown. And it strikes me that whether the circumstances, a tactical situation or a foot pursuit or a fire or a search and rescue mission, this gives us the ability to solve the unsolvable, to find the hidden thing in a way that is not. Doesn't create risk. I think one of the things that is currently in the news is it seems like the regulatory environment is struggling to keep up with the evolution of technology. It seems like the technology has gotten considerably ahead of the regulatory environment. What do you see as a primary regulatory changes? That's our primary regulatory challenges?

Kris Allshouse: Well, you're hitting me right at the time of the military equipment designation in California for the drone, which is. It's unfortunate to see what most agencies are using you can buy at Costco.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Kris Allshouse: It's not some. I mean, are they highly specialized? I guess, yeah.

Jon Becker: It's not a weaponized predator drone that's dropping a hellfire missile. It's literally an advanced hobby drone.

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. You know, if you're getting it from the military surplus or something, I get it. I understand that there might be a designation there, but it's not. And this really. That's the same mantra I have. It's helping the ones that are in the most need of help besides law enforcement. Yeah. Is it good for us? Heck, yeah.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Kris Allshouse: It's amazing for us. But don't underestimate how powerful this is in helping. Like we just talked about preserve first amendment or address the homeless or. Or black lives matter. I tell this story all the time. I was at a conference in Torrance. Police department put up a video of them chasing a suspect yard to yard with the drone. And they had their manned helicopter above, and they were coordinated really nicely. Excellent job. Right?

So the whole conference, silent watching this and yard to yard. And the short version of the story is just like in any negotiation, you tell the suspect it's futile in some way. Right? We're here. We're not going away. Whatever. Something like that. Well, the drone does that for you. Even without a speaker, it does that for you. I'm here. I'm not going away. And this is how serious we are.

And it chases him about three yards, and you can see in this guy's face, like, and he gives up, he walks out, and everybody's happy. No cops are hurt, running to chase them. There's no use of force. There's no shooting. There's no dog bite. There's nothing. And you know how it is. I'm not going in the backyard with the potentially armed suspect without sending a dog or something. Right?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Kris Allshouse: So none of that happened. This helps protect the people who have any potential confrontation with law enforcement. It's just a – it's a no brainer for me. And so regulatory, it's hard to see the military. Sad to see the military thing. The other side of it is this is a national priority in FEMA, and yet when the funding from the feds come down here, by the time it gets down to the state level, it's hit or miss. Whether it can reach these agencies, these small agencies that are struggling, they're literally going to Costco or they're doing worse. They're taking Officer Joe's drone and using that, which is, of course, a no no.

But it's, you know, part of that is this confusion that a lot of municipalities and counties are seeing about where we going.

Jon Becker: Well, there is this kind of idiotic contradiction that you see in the regulatory environment, which is that if I'm shooting a video of my kids snowboarding and I don't have a, you know, I'm not a part one of seven pilot, I don't have an FAA license, I can kind of do what I want to do because I'm not even aware of the rules and nobody's going to enforce them against me.

But if I'm shooting, you know, if I'm a photographer, taken out of law enforcement context, I'm a photographer taking a picture of a house for a real estate brochure. I'm an FAA pilot, and I'm paying attention to the rules. It strikes me that possibly the most dangerous people, as far as a public airspace environment, have no regulation, and possibly the safest ones have tons of regulation. What are your thoughts on that?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, well, I was talking to Marcus from CATO the other day, and he hit the nail on the head. He said, they're like four years behind us. They think that the privacy concerns and all these things are things that we haven't even thought about. They're already well ensconced in policy and TTPs, police agencies are on it. The policies are not. They're not mysterious anymore. They're out there. ACLU has involvement in them. There is. We are very aware of privacy, of meaningful policies that have a broad stakeholder appeal, which is where we teach everybody, start with the stakeholders, everybody in your community, everybody that's affected by this. Build that support, maintain that support. That's already happening.

The sad part is there's some legislative bodies that are not aware that we're on it. Law enforcement's on it. They are doing things the right way. And you're right, the commercial pilot's license or a certificate of authorization, these are things that we're already dialed in, though, and we're held accountable. Very much so.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's funny, because you look at the commercial drone market is hundreds of times bigger. When I say commercial, I mean the retail hundreds of times bigger than the professional market. And so it's like, just from a ratio of aircraft, it's hundreds or thousands to one. And yet here we are trying to regulate the environment.

Another thing that strikes me is kind of interesting, as you look at the rapid expansion ground based cameras, there are cameras everywhere. We have cameras in our refrigerators now, cameras in our TVs, cameras in our computers, and there is national policy. How are drones different than cell phone video, than body worn camera, than traffic camera? Anything else in your mind?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah. Well, they're more regulated. There is, and I get it. There is a real fear of big brother, which, it's funny because, like you said, there is no more privacy, but it's not because of the quadcopters that cops are flying. It's just not. Not even close. And so it is more restrictive, but this is also so much more recorded.

So the way we teach, the way public safety is doing it, is we log everything. We have training records, we have flight records, we have maintenance records. We have safety management systems, and now we have this software that integrates all of it.

So if I want to see what you flew and the path that you flew and the speed that you flew, it's right here. And how long that was and what your battery life was like and on and on and on. It's all right there now. And so there is no more. There's nothing hidden. It's all very, very transparent. So it's a no brainer from my perspective, no matter where you are on the spectrum, as far as privacy issues, as far as cops using drones, that kind of thing, because it's all verifiable and we're starting with stakeholders first and we're keeping them involved.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting question because I always think of the example of you walk by somebody's house, the back fence of somebody's house. You can't see into their house with a drone, you can. So there is that expectation of privacy question. Do I have an expectation of privacy in my backyard surrounded by fence? And I can make an argument that I do because nobody can see from the ground. But then again, anybody that flies over can see it. And so the drone kind of ends up between those two.

Kris Allshouse: It does. It does, Jon. So here's the thing. People ask this kind of stuff all the time, and the answer is, the constitution does not change. It hasn't changed just how we apply it some. And we don't have any really good case law yet. We just don't. We're going off helicopter case law.

Jon Becker: Well, generally speaking, any topic, there is no good case law, usually only bad case law.

Kris Allshouse: But there are some general things. Do you have a legal right to be there? Are you doing something right? If you discover something, was it discovered in good faith, or were you on a fishing mission where you had to manipulate and fly under something to see that kind of thing?

So good faith, legal right to be there. General concepts like that that are constitutional, constitutional under Fourth Amendment, and it doesn't change. So if you're looking at the concepts of being right, of unreasonable search and seizure, and you mentioned expectation of privacy, if you're looking at those concepts and you're understanding them and you're making wise, thoughtful decisions, you're going to be just fine.

Jon Becker: Do you think that the drone should require any different use of search warrants than any other investigative technique?

Kris Allshouse: The only time I would think that it would require a search warrant is where you're going someplace that you do not have a legal right to be and that the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, and you're going to fish there, you're going to try to discover something that would be a case where you would need a warrant.

But if you're just flying the aircraft in the normal, routine function of your enforcement or something else even, and you come across something again in good faith, where there may or may not be any reasonable expectation of privacy if it's in an open backyard, probably not from above. Right? Especially if you're in Southern California, helicopters everywhere.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So in your mind, this is just another investigative device. The Fourth Amendment, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence covers all of this, and there isn't a need to make an exception. Do you think that that changes with exigent circumstances? Do you think that it's the exigent circumstances should just continue to be what they are?

Kris Allshouse: Well, so, you know, you can conduct the searches on those three things, consent, exigent circumstances, or warrant. So how you conduct something that requires a search warrant is irrelevant, whether that's whether I walk into a building, whether I fly into a building. It's just I'm conducting a search that required one of the three conditions to conduct that consent, exigency, or warrant.

I don't think this is a big one, though. It should not be written in how you plan to serve a search warrant. If I have a search warrant, I'm authorized to search. Whether I search by walking in or flying in doesn't have to be written into my affidavit.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's an interesting point. How do you think we best balance, obviously, as an attorney and as a con law guy, I love constitutional law. That was my area of interest. How do you think we balance our constitutional rights against privacy in this context?

Kris Allshouse:

Well, again, I don't think it changes. It should be balanced. And of course, we have to rely on the judicial branch to interpret that. Sure. But the same questions, regardless of how, have to be answered, and I don't think that changes in this case.

Jon Becker: There was recently a news story about a startup drone company that was proposing weaponizing drones at the border and using that as a means of securing the border. And it created quite a bit of outrage, and obviously people were spun up about that. Do you think that there are circumstances where it is legitimate to weaponize drones for law enforcement?

Kris Allshouse: I absolutely think so. Not in that case that you described.

Jon Becker: Yeah, nor I.

Kris Allshouse: But I do think, and here's the answer every time, is it going to save somebody's life or great bodily injury? And if I can find situations, which of course I can, whether it's taser or some less lethal option, if I can do something like that that prevents me from having to take another human's life or use deadly force on somebody. That's a win. As much as that doesn't sound like a win, that's a win. So I would never want to rule that out.

So limiting that saying I can't weaponize it, it's just saying, okay, well, then you forced me to put a human there.

Jon Becker: It has a weapon. It's interesting, I've had this discussion with friends where they say, well, you should never be able to remember. There was the incident in Dallas where Dallas SWAT used a robot to kill a guy with an explosive device.

And the reaction to that, had that happened in California, probably we would have eliminated anything robotic, including cars for police officers. But it was in Texas, and that's a different environment. But that raised the question of, like, is that okay? And I had friends who were like, that is never okay. That should never be allowed.

And I said, so if the guy stepped out and took a shot at police officers, they're gonna shoot him anyways, right? Like, how is that any different? And do you – I get the argument for non lethal. I think lethal is a more sticky environment, for sure.

Kris Allshouse: Well, but this is it, again, something for the courts to decide, because here is the question. Is the governmental interest so significant that we do not want that person to step outside? That's how compelling the governmental interest is in seizing him. If it is that compelling, then lethal force is authorized.

So you're weighing that against the individual liberties. And if you can make the case that our governmental interest is so compelling that that person should not be able to step outside or in view or whatever, then you've made your choice.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's usually another place that I think there's been a lot of attention is the use of UAS or other forms of robotics by terrorists as an attack device. And obviously, the idea of somebody using a UAS as a UAS born IED is terrifying in any context. How do you think we can best prevent that from happening?

Kris Allshouse: First of all, that's a horribly underreported event. It's happening a lot globally. Amazingly, we've dodged a lot of bullets here in the United States with this. But here's a couple things that I would just. Food for thought along this topic. In our incident command class, chaos. Working in the edge of chaos, we have the students come up with a terrorist attack. Every class comes up with a drone attack. And I make them have to do research and prove that this is doable. It's like, I'm gonna get a nuclear bomb and stick it.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Kris Allshouse: Okay. No, no. Tell me how you could do it. And they come up with really realistic terrorist attacks.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I don't think you have to be a math major to do that one.

Kris Allshouse: And so then you go back to the Connecticut kid who put a Glock on a phantom four. And I always go back to this Harrison Klebold in Columbine kids, not funded kids, they had secondary devices. If they all had explosive devices throughout, if they were an adult, terracell, or just an adult who's just not well, they could have really done a lot of damage. And then you add this capability, like, I can do a lot with the drone.

So this is why it's a national priority for FEMA, why the money is there, to try to do emerging technology and counter drone technology. There is a lot out there. The hard part is we're struggling to get it down to the state and municipal level, even down to the cities who are really dealing with some tough stuff, including just coming into your CP, flying over you.

Jon Becker: Yeah, flying over you, flying out to look at the positions of police officers, scouting things, you know, flying into airports like it's – Do you think there should be a national counter drone strategy?

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, and I think that is coming. I mean, I think with the traffic, air traffic management systems that will be coming online, every drone that's in the air will be known who it belongs to or where it is, what's it doing, what it's doing, what its whole flight pass. That's right here. That technology is not hidden. So I think that's absolutely gonna be the case where you can't launch a drone without. Without a regulatory body seeing what's going on.

Jon Becker: Do you think it's reasonable for state and local governments to be building counter drone strategies, or do you think that's something that has to happen at federal level?

Kris Allshouse: I think it best probably served at federal level, working with state, local agencies, where it's a total collaborative event.

Jon Becker: Kris, a recurring theme that pops up when the subject of drones comes up is this idea of a dystopian future. People cite the example of the Terminator and Skynet. Eventually we're going to build the right technology, that the planet's going to kill us, computers are going to kill us. We're all going to wipe ourselves off the planet. What are your thoughts on that?

Kris Allshouse: I have to admit, I'm one of those people that's a little bit afraid of it myself. I mean, Skynet's here. AI linked autonomous vehicles are here. So it does scare me for sure. And we were talking earlier, right? I want humans making decisions, especially ones that affect humans. Yeah, that's a – And I don't know what. I don't know. But, yeah, that scares me. And I'm selling it, or at least teaching it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because I do have this, like, I have this internal conflict. Right? I find that I don't know why the subjects of drones bring this up more than robots did or autonomous cars. Maybe it's just the visual of something flying that human beings are key to a primitive level to react to. But I do see this tension of the ability to observe decreases the likelihood for lethal conflict, the ability for us to make decisions.

I agree with you completely. Human beings need to be making decisions, but human needs, we need to make decisions based on good information. And so there is this feeling of, like, the more information we present, assuming it's filtered and doesn't overwhelm us, is we're more likely to make a good decision. But how do you think we prevent that? In your mind, what's the best way to walk that balance?

Kris Allshouse: Well, I think as we move more and more down the technological path, that we never underestimate or undervalue the quality of really good decision making. Really good training. Training to make good decisions. So, in law enforcement, we're always fighting this. You know it as well as everybody. We're always fighting budget cuts and training cuts. And then they wonder why a 23 year old kid made a bad choice. He's a 23 year old kid.

Jon Becker: He's a 23 year old kid who's been through tactical training for 8 hours and is shot one time this year.

Kris Allshouse: And now that I'm old and retired, I think, boy, I finally know how to make good decisions. I finally know how to talk to people right in the field. Hopefully, I wasn't horrible, but I know that I know more now than I did then. I don't know what the balance is with training and all that, but not to get too far off the technology stuff, but that's all going to be integrated where you have benevolent people who are well trained, managing whatever technology we're using.

Jon Becker: Kris, I really want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me on The Debrief today!

I think that these are really big questions, and I think that we're trying to balance constitutional rights against safety, and we're trying to balance technology against privacy.

And, you know, I am concerned about that as I know you are. And I am glad that there are guys like you that are doing the math and doing the heavy lifting and hopefully going to help us make the good decisions.

So thank you so much for joining me!

Kris Allshouse: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jon!

It's always fun talking with you. Thanks!