GuardianAire Community Safety System

Urban crime impacts residents ability to live safe, productive lives. Racially-biased policing exacerbates the ever-growing tension with communities of color. GuardianAire is empowering communities with technology to protect themselves and deter crime before it ever happens, leading to reduced crime rates and greater prosperity for urban businesses and residents. If a resident feels unsafe, or plans to travel through an unsafe area, they can use a smartphone app to call a safety drone to escort them from above. The drones are locally managed by an established community organization who hires and trains trusted community members as 'guardians'. A community guardian uses the drone camera to monitor for potential threats, communicate to the resident through the app and, if needed, trigger a drone siren or spotlight to deter a crime act. The safety escort drones are housed in docking stations on neighborhood rooftops and only emerge when a resident requests it.

Underserved minority communities, in cities like Baltimore, suffer from disproportionately high crime rates that impacts resident’s ability to live safe, productive lives. Nationwide, predominantly African-American communities average five times as many violent crimes as predominantly white communities. According to Baltimore Open Data, in 2020, Baltimore residents were subject to almost 26,000 violent crime acts including 5,300 aggravated assaults and 1,700 street robberies.  

Existing approaches for improving neighborhood security involve long-term changes to environmental factors, or community intervention programs to stimulate dialogue. There are few options for addressing immediate security concerns outside of increased police activity. However, police responses are largely reactive and not preventative. Furthermore, the ongoing history of racially-biased policing and police brutality in minority communities is highly inflammatory and has instilled a generational distrust in law enforcement. A novel capability is needed for urban communities, in Baltimore and throughout the United States, to self-administer proactive crime deterrent technology to reduce crime rates and create safer neighborhoods.

GuardianAire is a community-managed drone escort technology designed to protect residents from becoming victims of potential crime activity. GuardianAire consists of three components: 1) safety escort drones - equipped with siren, camera, and spotlight - housed in docking stations located on dedicated neighborhood rooftops, 2) a free smartphone app to summon and interact with the safety escort drones, 3) Community Guardians - local community members hired and trained to oversee the drone operations from a local neighborhood operation site. A resident who feels unsafe, or plans to travel through an unsafe area, can call a safety escort drone, from one of the docking stations, to accompany them. The safety escort drone will follow the resident from above while a Community Guardian uses the bird's-eye view from the drone camera to monitor the surrounding area for potential threats. The Community Guardian can use the app to communicate potential threats to the resident and, if necessary, suggest alternative walking routes. If a threat arises, either the Community Guardian, or the resident, can trigger the drone's siren and spotlight to dissuade a potential crime act. After the escort, the resident can use the app to dismiss the drone back to the docking station. 

The GuardianAire Community Safety System will be deployed in urban neighborhoods to serve communities of color that are subject to disproportionately high crime rates and racially-biased policing. GuardianAire provides a community-managed, pro-active crime deterrent technology to reduce crime rates and improve the prosperity of urban businesses and residents. While the technology will be made available to all residents in a neighborhood of color, a specific focus for ongoing community engagement will be to the most vulnerable residents, including the LGBTQ+ community, women, children, and the elderly, who have the potential to be impacted by neighborhood crime. As GuardianAire expands, it will also be applied to provide security for other vulnerable people groups, such as the Asian-American community, who have been subject to an increasing spate of hate crimes. 

In each city, GuardianAire will partner with an established local community organization who will manage and operate the safety escort drone system. In Baltimore, we are partnering with Harbel, a community organization that has served NorthEast Baltimore for over 50 years. Through our partnership with Harbel, we are participating in community meetings with residents, elected officials, and stakeholders to present our solution, obtain their feedback, and refine our initial process and assumptions as we develop our pilot system. GuardianAire will sign-up participants targeting specific demographics in age, gender, and orientation, and will formalize the initial community response through a combination of surveys and focus groups. Once the pilot system is deployed in Baltimore, GuardianAire's VP of Community Engagement will organize bi-monthly follow-up phone interviews with the participants to evaluate the effectiveness of the technology and obtain feedback on methods of improving the operations. At the end of the one-year pilot program, we will conduct final surveys to determine the effectiveness of the system and to quantify community acceptance. This will establish a foundation for further expansion in Baltimore, and in other US cities. The smartphone app will provide GuardianAire continued opportunities to engage users as the technology rolls out to additional cities. 

Distressed urban communities are not provided with effective security solutions to mitigate disproportionate crime rates. Police actions are largely reactionary, not preventative. The control and authority is squarely in the hands of authority figures who can be racially-biased and have limited connection to minority communities. GuardianAire empowers minority communities to pro-actively control their own security and is locally managed by an established community organization with deep community ties. Local community organizations are uniquely positioned to administer a neighborhood security solution with greatly reduced racial bias. Furthermore, GuardianAire is well-suited to protect vulnerable communities, such as Asian Americans, from hate crimes.

GuardianAire has built and tested an initial prototype and now holds a patent for the escort drone technology. GuardianAire is seeking investment funding to develop a refined prototype and launch a pilot program in NorthEast Baltimore in partnership with Harbel Community Organization. Two to three safety escort drone systems will be deployed in a specific neighborhood and operated for a year with extensive community feedback. The technology will be expanded throughout Baltimore in the second year while establishing a foundation for continued expansion into other underserved communities that are heavily impacted by crime. 

The GuardianAire Community Safety System completely reimagines community protection by utilizing a novel integration of smartphones and drones to enable on-call security, directly at a resident’s location. The USPTO has acknowledged that our approach is unique and awarded us Patent No. 11,003,186 B1.

• Innovation 1: Commercial drone use is increasing for package and food delivery as well as search and rescue operations. However, these applications all require an operator to bring a drone to a location, setup, and then control it from the site. GuardianAire’s approach is to have the drones stored, in advance, in dedicated roof-top charging stations throughout the neighborhood. The proximity of the drones enables a rapid response to a resident who summons a drone escort.
• Innovation 2: Residents can summon or preschedule a drone escort using the smartphone app. This is a new paradigm in neighborhood security to enable residents to schedule a safety escort right from their phone, similar to how a resident would summon or schedule an Uber.  
• Innovation 3: The GuardianAire Community Safety System is controlled by the community and not a government institution. An established, trusted, non-profit manages the system, and neighborhood residents are hired and trained to monitor the drone operations. This has two key effects: 1) it creates job opportunities for residents in the community, and 2) it greatly reduces the chance of racial bias in the security operation.

GuardianAire is in the prototype phase and is not currently servicing residents. In the first year of operation, GuardianAire will be deployed in a small group of neighborhoods in NorthEast Baltimore. Throughout the first year we will target 5,000 neighborhood residents to download the app and register for the safety drone escort service. We expect 25% of the registrants to be regular users, 25% to be moderate users, and 50% to be rare users (to be confirmed through year one testing). 

We will focus on horizontal scaling at two levels: 1) we will increase saturation in Baltimore by deploying to additional neighborhoods and adding users based on intense community engagement to communicate the experiences of early adopters, 2) we will provide safety drone escort services in additional cities and grow the userbase in those cities using the same community engagement model. Within five years, we expect to have full saturation in Baltimore with 100,000 to 200,000 residents signed up (50,000 to 100,000 consistent users). Nationwide, we expect to have partial to full saturation in ten cities within five years and 1M to 2M residents signed up (500K to 1M consistent users). 

Our revenue model is to work with local city council to reallocate <0.5% of the local police budget to fund Community Guardian operators and drone systems in each community we expand to support scaling. We are also targeting future AI system development to allow Community Guardians to manage more simultaneous service requests to increase operator efficiency and reduce costs.

The smartphone app provides a quantifiable method of tracking total number of users who are signed up for the service along with the number of safety escort drone events. Even if the resident opts to delete the safety escort drone video, the app will record that a drone deployment occurred which will be tracked by central servers. If a crime act occurred, the Community Guardians will document the category of the crime act and the outcome. 

Objective data sources, like Baltimore Open Data, collect city-wide crime data statistics. Yearly crime data trends and distributions will be used to correlate the presence of GuardianAire Community Safety Systems with an expected decrease in crime activity to track the overall effectiveness of the technology.

GuardianAire's executive board includes five people, including three engineers who are highly experienced in the technical solution area. However, GuardianAire will also partner with Barron Associates, a technical R&D company to provide engineering services. Barron Associates has 26 full-time staff with advanced engineering degrees and expertise in unmanned vehicle systems.

David Neal (MS Mechanical Engineering) is founder and CEO of GuardianAire. Mr. Neal has 13 years experience in end-to-end design, development, fabrication, and testing of custom air vehicle systems for various government agencies as a Senior Research Scientist at Barron Associates. Mr. Neal launched GuardianAire out of an overwhelming frustration with biased police practices in minority communities while still appreciating that crime remains a serious issue in some communities. He was also motivated by fear that his sons could eventually become victims of police brutality. Mr. Neal recognized that security automation could be utilized to simultaneously address crime and reduced biased policing. Technology (including drones) is often weaponized against communities of color. Mr. Neal was motivated to empower communities of color with technology they use to manage their own security in an unbiased manner.

Kimberly Brock (Licensed Master Social Worker) is Director of Community Engagement for GuardianAire. Ms. Brock was born and raised in Baltimore City. Ms. Brock has 13 years experience in Baltimore government social services. Ms. Brock is intimately familiar with the Baltimore neighborhoods and people where GuardianAire will initially be deployed.

Craig Wiese (MBA) brings a broad business background to the GuardianAire team, including the launch of a number of successful startups. He is particularly passionate about deploying cutting-edge technology in ways that protect privacy, enhance the dignity of work, and deliver a tangible public benefit.  

David Neal, is CEO and Founder of GuardianAire. He conceived the initial drone escort technology, and is sole inventor on the patent specifically to service communities of color. Kimberly Brock is Director of Community Engagement for GuardianAire. Ms. Brock was born and raised in Baltimore and has served in Social Services with Baltimore government for the past 13 years. With Mr. Neal and Ms. Brock serving in key leadership roles, two-fifths of the initial Board of Directors are African-American. It is important that, as GuardianAire grows, the Board of Directors continues to reflect the communities being served.

Furthermore, GuardianAire is building an advisory board in and around Baltimore consisting of motivated professors, elected officials, and community leaders. The members of the advisory board all reflect the diverse make-up of the community being served. As GuardianAire expands to additional cities, local advisory boards will be formed that reflect the communities being served.

The exercise of submitting the application forced us to consider the fundamental aspirations and direction of our social impact venture and answer important structural questions. We are very interested in networking to identify potential community organization partners in minority communities throughout the United States. We are also interested in gaining exposure to socially-minded angel investors who are interested in our concept so that we can move the technology forward expediently.   

Financial: we are trying to connect with socially-minded investors who are supportive of community-based security initiatives in underserved neighborhoods.

Regulatory: there will be challenges to gaining approval for beyond visual line of sight drone operations. It would be immensely valuable to connect with a group that has been through that process already with the FAA who could provide advice/guidance.

The CDC recently declared racism a public health threat. We believe that racially-biased policing and police brutality is a critical issue for communities of color. Likewise, neighborhood crime remains a serious issue for cities like Baltimore. In minority communities, technology and power for administering security is concentrated with police institutions that often have little connection with the communities they are serving. GuardianAire completely reimagines the security paradigm in minority neighborhoods by empowering the communities with technology and tools to administer their own security in an unbiased manner. GuardianAire will create safer neighborhoods leading to improved mental and physical health outcomes for residents. As the public clamors for alternative strategies to promote unbiased safety and security, GuardianAire fills a unique niche in the form of a community-controlled safety initiative.

If awarded, the funding would be applied in four main areas: 1) the maturation and development of the safety escort drones and the docking stations, 2) development of the GuardianAire software app, 3) advancing our community engagement efforts with focus groups and surveys in the community to educate residents about the technology and to encourage adoption, and 4) supporting our partner, Harbel Community Organization, in developing the operator training program.  

The premise of the GuardianAire technology is to decrease crime and increase the sense of well-being and safety in minority communities. GuardianAire completely reimagines the security paradigm in minority neighborhoods in a novel fashion by empowering the communities with technology and tools to administer their own security in an unbiased manner. GuardianAire will create safer neighborhoods leading to improved mental and physical health outcomes for residents. As the public clamors for alternative strategies to promote unbiased safety and security, GuardianAire fills a unique niche in the form of a community-controlled safety initiative. The GuardianAire Community Safety System is a forward-looking security innovation that will support the advancement of 'smart' neighborhoods. 

If awarded, the funding would be applied in four main areas: 1) the maturation and development of the safety escort drones and the docking stations, 2) development of the GuardianAire software app, 3) advancing our community engagement efforts with focus groups and surveys in the community to educate residents about the technology and to encourage adoption, and 4) supporting our partner, Harbel Community Organization, in developing the operator training program.  

The premise of the GuardianAire technology is to decrease crime and increase the sense of well-being and safety in minority communities. GuardianAire completely reimagines the security paradigm in minority neighborhoods in a novel fashion by empowering the communities with technology and tools to administer their own security in an unbiased manner. This creates local training and employment opportunities in minority neighborhoods to serve as Community Guardians (remote drone operators). This training provides immediate opportunities in the administration of the GuardianAire Community Safety System. However, the training will also carryover to other technology-forward careers. The GuardianAire Community Safety System is a forward-looking security innovation that will support the advancement of 'smart' neighborhoods. 

If awarded, the funding would be applied in four main areas: 1) the maturation and development of the safety escort drones and the docking stations, 2) development of the GuardianAire software app, 3) advancing our community engagement efforts with focus groups and surveys in the community to educate residents about the technology and to encourage adoption, and 4) supporting our partner, Harbel Community Organization, in developing the operator training program.  

The premise of the GuardianAire technology is to decrease crime and increase the sense of well-being and safety in minority communities. We expect that the technology will be most utilized by vulnerable groups including women and children. With the GuardianAire safety escort drones, a woman could walk outdoors, alone, at night and be protected. She would know that a trusted community member is looking out for her and prepared to trigger the drone siren or call 911. This technology will open up opportunities for women to live and prosper without being limited to only traveling at certain times of day or in certain areas. 

If awarded, the funding would be applied in four main areas: 1) the maturation and development of the safety escort drones and the docking stations, 2) development of the GuardianAire software app, 3) advancing our community engagement efforts with focus groups and surveys in the community to educate residents about the technology and to encourage adoption, and 4) supporting our partner, Harbel Community Organization, in developing the operator training program.