Coming To A School Near You : Defensive Drones

"It's almost like where gaming and school safety collide."

"I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools." 

Curtis Lavarello School Safety Advocacy Council

 

"School districts have finite budgets and limited attention."

"If we spend significant resources on technologies designed to  respond after shooting begins we have to ask what we're not investing in instead."

Jaclyn Corin, executive director/co-founder, March for Our Lives 

Remote operators pilot Mithril Defense's Campus Guardian Angel drones, which the company says can deter active shooters. Mithril Defense

 

"These are the first schools we're deploying into now."

"We think every school should have some kind of active-shooter suppression system, and five years from now, you wouldn't send your kids to a school that doesn't have one."

"An officer should never have to risk their life doing something that a drone can do, because we don't care if the drone gets shot. It's a lump of plastic."

"We just jump in with the next one. But an officer's life is irreplaceable." 

Mithril CEO Justin Marston   

Drones capable of zooming through hallways, smashing windows and pepper-spraying active shooters are set to be installed in schools in at least three states. Nine schools -- three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado -- have signed up with Austin-based Mithril Defense to have storage boxes housing the plastic, non-lethal aircraft which can be activated by teachers and are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds. 

 

"Once I get the drones on you, you just can't escape them", retired Navy SEAL and Mithril Defense co-founder Bill King explained of the aircraft designed to distract their targets through flashing strobes and blaring sirens, while spraying the target with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 100 km/hr. 

 

Threats of school shootings in the United States, an increasingly commonplace disaster, have spurred a wave of spending on high-tech security for campuses. Statistics show that close to 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at their schools, according to a Washington Post tracker, since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado. In that time, 435 shootings have been recorded, accounting for the multi-billion dollar industry.

 

The first campus to install the system was Deltona High School just north of Orlando, Florida, its 1,700 students protected in the last year. Another two Florida schools were chosen by the state to complete the $557,000 pilot project through state legislators. The drone systems will be tested in five schools in Georgia following state legislators approving a $500,000 pilot program with Mithril Defense, the systems to come online with the new school year. 

 

John Adams Academy, a public charter school in Sterling, Colorado plans to self-fund a drone program for its inaugural year for students from kindergarten through to grade 12. An app or classroom panic button will be available to teachers to activate the drones, with Mithril Defense's professional drone pilots remotely operating them. 

 

People stand outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022.

Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images

 

The project was inspired, according to Justin Marston, by the massacre that took place in Uvalde, Texas at an elementary school where in 2022 19 students and two teachers were murdered while law enforcement waited over an hour on the school exterior before entering the classroom. Marston  was inspired by the Russian/Ukrainian military forces use of cheap drones, feeling that a non-lethal version could save lives threatened by school invasions. "The first 120 seconds are incredibly critical, because that's when most of the shooting happens."

 

While schools across the U.S. have welcomed a range of defence technologies from artificial intelligence-powered cameras, to weapons detectors in response to the threat of campus shootings, some feel that military-grade equipment such as the Mithril drones are misplaced on campuses full of schoolchildren. School security consultants argue that low-tech measures such as locking external doors are as effective as high-tech solutions to school shootings. 

 

 

"The primary selling point for these drones is their ability to offer live footage to law enforcement from areas where it previously would not have been available and to deploy deterrents, like strobe lights and pepper spray."

Pelican Institute for Public Policy  

 

"Our drones are already on site on charging pads in the school, and are flown remotely by our team as part of a managed response service. Our elite team in Austin can cover every school in the nation from a single operations center."

"Our drones cruise at 30mph to 50mph inside the building and sprint at 100mph outside."

"We place multiple boxes of 6 drones at locations throughout the school ahead of time, so we can select the closest box to the shooter and get there faster."

Mithril Defense, Austin