“How We Can Eliminate Crime” | Ben Horowitz and Garrett Langley

If you don't enforce crime, what you end up with is lost generations.

Yeah. If I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it's actually double bad.

Yeah. Well, we're throwing people away, right? That's the worst possible thing. So, the best thing is to say, “Hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're going to get caught.” And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else.

I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make 10x what I can make in a minimum-wage job as an entry-level worker, and then in my neighborhood there's not even a social stigma associated with it—in fact, you're looked up to if you're a criminal—it's just too easy, and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.

Outside of Vegas, the national average is around a 47% clearance rate. So, you have a coin flip—

—for murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

Flip a coin. The ironic part is, when we do get criticisms from people who are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, “Open your eyes.” If the federal government wanted to find you, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dump.

Yeah.

And I will know your exact location in real time.

By the way, which is what they do.

Yes, because it's way more effective. So, I think the privacy thing is quite false. The trust is real, though. If you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department.

Yeah. Garrett, welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thanks for having me.

So, this group here is heavily invested in eliminating crime: Garrett, obviously, you with Flock Safety, and Ben with his work in Las Vegas as well. Let's say that America declared a national goal to eliminate crime, and we were taking a multifaceted approach and asked you, Garrett, to sit on a committee to help identify the different levers—or the comprehensive strategy—to eliminate crime. What would be some of your main advice?

Let's break it down in terms of people, products, and policy. To people, I saw a funny quote online that the way to solve our infertility issues is just to remove income tax once you have 3 kids. I was like, “That's actually pretty novel.”

We have a massive student debt problem, right?

Yeah.

Why not create a Teach for America for law enforcement, where you say, “Look, if you've got student debt and you go serve in your community for 2 years or 4 years as a patrol officer, crime analyst—there are a ton of roles you can have in a police department—great, we'll retire your student debt”?

So, instead of just giving it away for free, actually go work for your government. For 2 years, you don't have to go overseas and fight in a war. You can literally just stay at home.

And that would dramatically fix one of the biggest issues in policing, which is a staffing crisis.

Yeah.

And a skill-set issue. So, that's the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. I'd go have a national law-enforcement act for staffing.

Right. And also raise the status of police out there. So, how much of the people issue is the fact that we went from a very pro-police culture—police are heroes, every new show was a cop show—to complete vilification of the police: defund the police—

Abolish the police—

Abolish cop shows. They're all gone. They're all off the air. How much of it is cultural versus just a shortage of people?

It's entirely cultural.

Yeah.

Because you think about it, there's nothing that has changed in the last 30 years that would indicate that the percentage of people who were born and wanted to serve has changed. The only thing that's changed is the stigma attached to the job. And you can see that because if you look at the early-retirement numbers—

I mean, early retirement skyrocketed during both the social unrest and then COVID.

Yeah.

And they've never bounced back.

Worst possible time.

Yes, worst possible time. So, do you think, Ben, to your point, like—

The only way I see to do a kind of cultural reset is to just make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt—

Yeah.

—to go help their communities.

Yeah. I think that's actually a very important and underrated idea, because one of the things that we've seen is that, because of the shortage, many police departments have lowered their standards. So, the criticism of the police was, “Okay, you have—and it really, if you looked into it, there were some psychos who joined the police force. They couldn't get them out for whatever reason, and then they did some heinous thing, and it tainted the whole police force.”

Well, now, because there aren't enough available people, they're lowering standards to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals.

Yes.

And then there was a famous incident where the criminals just went and murdered a guy. It wasn't funny, but I was showing the video of that incident to the Vegas police, and the first thing they said was, “Oh, that's not police brutality. They targeted him. They went to kill that guy. That was a homicide.”

Yeah.

And I was like, “Oh, boy.” But then you look into the backgrounds, and the guys who committed the homicide were, in fact, criminals who got hired to be police.

That's also, interestingly, what happened with the LAPD's Rampart scandal right after the Rodney King incident. Everybody got fired, and they had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs, and those gang members ended up, among other things, killing The Notorious B.I.G. and this kind of thing.

People don't realize the reaction to criticism. I think we just have to be careful about looking forward and saying, “Okay, what is the actual problem?” as opposed to “Police are bad.” I think that puts us in a very different kind of world that we don't want to be in.

Agreed. And I think you're right when you look across the board. In the last year, I've only been to one major city that seems to be making a dent in staffing.

Mhm.

But they've gone to such extremes. They'll buy you a house.

Oh, wow.

You get a take-home car.

Amazing.

I mean, it's always personal. There are literally millions of people who could do this job. I just don't think it's a cultural issue.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, a big thing in Vegas that we're doing, with Flock Safety and some of the other technology we bought, and the Cybertrucks and so forth, is trying to improve the image for recruiting, because that's such a big thing. We have the highest population of veterans in Las Vegas—like, in the whole country. So, we have plenty of people who could be great police officers, but we have to continue to improve the image.

It's really funny you mention the Cybertruck, because I know there was some criticism online—like anything good in life. My parents' hometown, where they still live, bought 4 Teslas for their fleet about 6 years ago.

Yeah. Yeah.

And the chief was like, “Every single 18-year-old wants to drive this car. This is why I'm doing this.” And he was heavily applauded in that community.

Because he's a very logical marketing ploy. I mean, these are a bunch of 18- and 20-year-old men. They like shiny toys—a cool-looking truck.

Yeah. If your choice is driving a Toyota Camry or a fire truck—

What makes it feel cool?

Well, the Cybertrucks have been great for recruiting, despite the criticism that I got. TechCrunch portrayed me as the Penguin, like I'm a crime boss in Las Vegas and I'm making these donations in order to—

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

—to pay off the police to do my evil bidding.

You're evil.

Yeah, because Andreessen Horowitz is not a good enough business. I need to be in whatever the crime ring in Vegas is. So, yeah. But they do, and people love them. Interestingly, since we got the trucks, the number of requests for them to appear at community events is off the charts because they look so cool.

In fact, when we did Paid in Full, Dr. Dre—famous for the song “Fuck tha Police”—saw the Cybertruck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of the Cybertruck at his request.

Yeah. That's gross. So, that's people.

Yeah.

Then, products. I think Vegas is a good example. We can pick on Vegas because they've got a pretty good technology stack. You have to go crime by crime. So, if you have a gun-violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know. The majority of gun violence does not generate a report. If I shoot you, I'm not going to call 911 myself.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, if I have a good shot, you're not going to call 911 either. So, that's a problem. You have drones—Vegas has a great deployment of drones. San Francisco does as well, as you saw in the news. So, you need drones. You need cameras. You've got all these sensors, right?

And then what's missing historically is this AI layer and this orchestration layer on top to say, “Wow, I've gone from no data to an abundance of data.”

How do I make sense of it? We’ve got that. The third piece that we care a lot about is how you also do this in a way that provides accountability and transparency. Because at the end of the day, the police department works for us, the taxpaying citizens, and you want to know how your money is being used. It’s being done in a way that’s societally just and forward. So that’s the product side, and then policy is: You have to hold people accountable.

Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen the social experiment in parts of the country.

Right. You need to actually prosecute the crime.

It’s seemingly straightforward, but a lot of the time we decriminalize things that should be criminal, and that causes a problem. So that’s what I would do if I was in charge.

Yeah. I think one of the things that people don’t think through when they think about crime is that you don’t have that many choices. You have a choice of lots of crime, or, if you’re going to prevent crime, there’s the Singaporean model, which is very harsh: capital punishment, hanging people in the town square, hitting them with a cane, or locking them in an El Salvadoran prison. Or there’s intelligence.

What intelligence does is basically make everybody safer. It makes the suspect safer, and it makes the police safer, because now everybody understands the crime situation. You’re also much more likely to get caught. There’s an old Chinese saying: “Certain punishment means no punishment.” That is the only way that you can actually achieve a reduction in crime in the U.S.—better intelligence.

People say, “Well, root cause—if we get rid of all poverty and this, that, and the third.” Sure, if you create a utopian society, which nobody’s ever done. The people who have tried have created societies that have been much more brutal, with many more people killed, than societies that don’t go for utopia. In reality, you just have to deal with the situation as it is, I think.

By the way, nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals—more than anybody. They know exactly what the policies are, what the technology is, when police change shifts, and all that kind of thing. If you have great law enforcement, you’re very likely to discourage crime.

What was that quote that you mentioned just before?

The Game had a song where he said, “Real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts.”

But to your point, I’ll never forget that, maybe in 2022, a rap song was released in Southern California with a reference to Flock that got folks to stay away. I was like, “We’ve made it.” This is really important culturally.

Yeah, it’s a key KPI to keep track of.

I think that’s right. If you grow up outside of the system and the most viable way to make a living is crime, then that is a career path. By reducing law enforcement, you create a crime career path, and it lets us avoid creating real career paths for people in that situation. It’s a cascading effect of just badness.

I think the other point is that if I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it would actually be doubly bad, because prison is already very expensive, right?

There’s an economic cost when that person is no longer productive in society.

Yeah.

We’re throwing people away, right? With minimum sentencing and everything, it’s very hard to go to prison and come out. Then you have this black mark on your life where you can’t get an apartment, you can’t get a gun, you can’t vote, and you can’t get a job. That’s the worst possible thing.

The best thing is to say, “Hey, look, if you commit crimes, you’re going to get caught.” That changes the societal incentives, the culture, and everything else.

Totally agree. Are we doing the wrong thing by making it unclear that you’re going to get caught—or making the deterrence less than 100% clear than it should be—while arbitrarily imposing long prison sentences instead?

Yeah. I think that if you have great technology and a comprehensive Flock deployment, you don’t have to advertise it.

Yeah, because the streets are watching. To quote Jay-Z, the streets are watching. That’s going to happen.

If you don’t enforce crime, what you end up with is lost generations. If I can become a criminal and make 10 times what I can make in a minimum-wage job as an entry-level thing, and then in my neighborhood there’s not even a social stigma attached to it—in fact, you’re looked up to if you’re a criminal—it’s just too easy. It’s too much. It’s a societal failure for everybody who’s in that situation.

On that note, what do you say to people who say, “We weren’t advocating for defunding the police. We were saying, ‘Redirect that money to group therapy, mental health services, or other services that are more preventive’”? What would you say to that argument?

It’s just a misunderstanding of incentives, I think. Incentives drive culture. If you get rid of law enforcement, we don’t have a strong enough, consistent, heterogeneous-society ethical structure to make people say, “Robbing somebody is bad,” or, for sure, “Selling drugs is bad,” or “Bookmaking is bad,” or whatever the crime is. A lot of people don’t even know that something is a crime until they’re much older.

It’s not viable to stop crime with a weak incentive. You can go talk to somebody as a social worker and say, “Hey, you shouldn’t do that,” but if they say, “I have a very strong cash incentive to do it,” how is that going to work? I’m not against social work, but you can’t do it at the expense of law enforcement. We saw that—we ran the experiment, and it didn’t work.

People would say, “Well, we didn’t hire enough social workers.” But social workers can’t deal with a robbery, murder, rape, or violent crime in progress.

These are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. To Ben’s point, in some parts of the country, in some cities—even whole cities—there isn’t a stigma attached to something like stealing a car.

Yeah, you don’t change that overnight with more social work. I’ve seen programs where their phrase is “at-promise” versus “at-risk” programs. If you don’t want to get into this cycle, create that path. But you still have to fix the root problem, which is that you should be held accountable if you steal someone’s car.

It was interesting that you brought up Dr. Dre’s “Fuck tha Police,” and now he’s taking photos with police. Some people say hip-hop has at times glorified a certain criminal lifestyle. Are other people evolving as Dr. Dre has? How has the community’s thinking about this evolved over time?

I think “Fuck tha Police” had a real basis in that, if you look at the LAPD in that era—the drug-war era—they were very, very aggressive. It was a “brutalize first, ask questions second” kind of culture in that police force. So he was making a real comment on a real thing. Ice Cube and others were doing the same.

The answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing. That’s the right way to police. Let me give you an example. The Las Vegas police said that before the drone program and before Flock, if you didn’t have Flock, you’d get a call saying there was a blue 1988 Toyota Corolla that had been stolen and was driving in a certain direction.

Then a police officer pulls over the wrong guy. I’m getting pulled over by the police, they’re highly suspicious, they’re nervous, and I’m wary of the situation. I’m a Black man, so I’m already trained to be wary of this. Now you can have an incident.

Whereas if it’s a Flock camera, you know that’s the guy. You’re not sending in 1 police officer because you know it’s the guy; you’re sending in a team. You’re going to apprehend him safely, and you’re going to take your time because you don’t have to move on to the next one. It’s a totally different situation.

Then you can start to build relationships in the community because you’re not falsely arresting people and doing that kind of thing. Las Vegas has the highest murder-clearance rate in the country—well over 90%. Why is that? You talk to them, and they’ll tell you it’s because anytime a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. In most cities, they don’t talk to the police.

By doing community policing, they’re able to get that information.

And they're able to clear the murders. They're able to make the community safer. Mostly, by the way, people should understand this: The victims of crime are poor people by and large. When you defund the police and say we're not going to enforce the law, you're basically terrorizing the poor community.

And this is what was called the Ferguson effect, right? Crime actually went up.

Yeah. No, of course. Of course it did. People just don't think these systemic problems all the way through. They just go to the very first thing, like, “Police are bad.”

Yeah. Well, the system hasn't been working, so let's fix the system as opposed to vilifying any individual.

Yeah.

Garrett, can you say more about why the clearance rate—or just the rate at which we catch or solve murders and crimes—has been dropping?

Yeah. I think I'll provide 1 positive reason why clearance rates are down, and the rest is very negative. On the positive side, our expectations as a society for arresting someone have gone up, which is good, right? The number of people you hear about getting released 10 years later because now we have DNA, or 10 years later because now we have video evidence—that's actually a good thing, right? It should be harder to put someone in jail for life.

Yeah.

That's 1 reason, and that's a good thing. Some of that comes from TV. You watch NCIS and you're just like, “There's cameras everywhere.”

Yeah.

So, that's the 1st reason. The 2nd is—and Ben mentioned this—witness cooperation is gone. What's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk? No one shows up, which is a huge problem. Society has given up on pretending we're going to help you, so that's the 2nd issue.

The 3rd issue is a pretty big mix shift in crime. If you think about the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the majority of crime was domestic. You would kill a partner, or you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend, so it was not randomized crime. Now, the majority of homicides are random. It's a drug deal gone wrong or a gang rivalry over territory. That is the predominant type of crime.

That is way harder to solve because if it was a traditional type, you would go, “Okay, let's check the family. Great, we're done. Case closed.”

The 4th issue is that the amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way, but faster than both skill sets and technology have kept pace. So, even though—let's pick on Vegas—it has hundreds, probably thousands, tens of thousands of cameras, you've got to search them. You've got to put it together. That doesn't just happen.

Nobody's watching the cameras.

No one's watching them, right? We can look at recent events where there have been shootings on college campuses, and people ask, “Why don't they find them faster? There are thousands of cameras.” I'm like, “The technology is not there yet.” Now, Flock has some tools to help with that, but they're not deployed everywhere.

The last issue, which we touched on, is staffing. We talked about early retirement.

Yeah.

So, even if we pick on Atlanta, it was at a low of 60% staffed. They're now up to 75% or 80%. That gap is all 21-year-olds.

Yeah.

They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years. But your seasoned, experienced detectives have all retired.

Wow.

And so, it's this compounding effect where it doesn't look pretty good. Outside of Vegas, the national average is around a 47% clearance rate.

So, you have a coin flip for murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

Flip a coin. Flip a coin. Yeah.

And you have to imagine that if you're in the upper quartile—

You should get away with it forever.

Wow.

Yep.

Sorry to bring the mood down. I do love your Teach for America but for policing idea. For people who are listening and are inspired, what would it take for that to get off the ground?

Well, if you remove the degree requirement part, actually, not that much. I think the biggest change is that today you're typically looking at almost 52 weeks of training before you get out in the field. That's too slow.

You know, I think Teach for America does probably a 4- or 8-week program. I don't actually know, but it's probably pretty quick.

Yeah.

You're college educated. You're going to figure it out.

Yeah.

Policing has a different expectation. I would continue to see more civilian jobs, which some agencies are doing, where they're just creating entirely different departments for civilians. In that case, there's no academy.

You also don't have a gun, which is fine, right?

But I think that's actually not much to pull off. I think it just takes a major city—most likely, it needs to be a major city—to say, “I'm going to create 200 entry-level jobs. You require a college degree, it's a 2-year commitment, and I think it's pretty doable.”

Talk to a mayor about it.

Yeah. And I do think that as police forces get much higher-tech, it gets much more interesting for college graduates and people with higher education because it changes the nature of what policing is.

When you have full intelligence, I can't overemphasize how much safer everybody is.

Yeah. Police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped about 75% when we first put the cameras and the drones in place. You're not in this weird, unknown situation where you don't know if they have a gun, you have a gun, or there aren't enough police around. All that makes for an extremely dangerous situation.

That's how you end up with this militarized-police situation, which is not a very sustainable idea.

Let's go deeper on Vegas as a case study. Ben, what has most surprised you in your work with Vegas, or what do you think other cities can learn from the work that you guys are doing?

I think the most surprising thing to me is just how much the actual community likes it. We've gotten criticism in the press and whatnot, of course.

“Surveillance, Big Brother, like Ben's a penguin,” all that kind of thing.

But the community—everybody who lives there—and Vegas is kind of a unique city in that it's got crime tourism.

Yeah. People fly in.

Yeah. Let's do some crime and then fly out and all that kind of thing. And then there's a lot of people who go bananas.

Yeah.

In Vegas, it's way beyond any criminal motivation. That's mental health, and mental health combined with hard drugs, combined with Vegas. So, there's a lot of that.

But for the people who live there—all the hospitality workers, the people who are working for tips, and all that kind of thing—the fact that we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right culture, and then adding the technology to that, has made the community go, “Wow. I am proud to be here. I feel safe. I know that if a crime gets committed—”

We always say, “You can commit a crime in Vegas; you can't get away with it.” People really appreciate that. I've had so many people come up to me from all over the city saying, “Hey, thank you. We really see the difference and appreciate what you're doing,” and so forth. I didn't think it would be that visible that fast.

I think the other thing, too—and you may not actually know this—is that the model of what Vegas is doing has caught on more nationally. This public-private partnership is picking up speed because the pace of government innovation is quite slow.

Yeah. In private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, there are mutual incentives to be safer. Think about who the largest supporter of the Mooresville Police Department is: Lowe's, because Lowe's is based there.

And they have thousands of employees who live there.

For Lowe's to spend $1 million is very small for them, but it can transform that police department. More cities are waking up to the fact that there's a better way to run a city.

This is so important because if you look at the Las Vegas PD, it's like, well, they've got—I don't know—thousands of officers. They've got a huge budget and this and that and the other. But can they make the marginal investment in technology? Absolutely not. It's very, very difficult. It's extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. They don't want to have to lay off people to do it.

And it's mostly headcount, right?

Yeah. It's mostly—it's almost all—headcount. By adding less than 1% to the police budget, you can completely transform the police force. It's pretty amazing.

It's very rewarding work, too. Just little things: We had a tremendous attrition problem in 911. 911 is a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody, and everybody was quitting.

They had 5-minute call waits for 911. Imagine waiting on hold for 5 minutes on 911. I was like, “Well, what’s the problem?” And they’re like, “The work conditions are hard. There’s no ice machine.” That was literally it.

So I was like, “Fuck that. I’ll buy that.” I bought an ice machine and an espresso machine. We put in a gym.

And now the call waits are less than 30 seconds.

I think, to your point, in Atlanta, I’m on the police foundation board. I think we contribute about $30 million a year to the police department.

Yeah.

I’ll never forget this. A couple of months ago, the head of the SWAT team came in and was like, “I would like new equipment.”

Yeah.

I was thinking, “Yeah, how bad can it be?” He walks in and it’s like—

I mean, you would be embarrassed.

Your job is actually to go into the line of fire. He was like, “I would like $1 million to get all-new equipment for our SWAT team.” It’s very logical, but it’s hard when you’re a city. You have no flexibility in your budget. You have no ability to react.

Cities in general are under tremendous budget pressure. Most of them have run programs for years by borrowing from the future. They’re highly in debt, and they’ve got big pensions to pay off, so it’s really hard to change a city budget.

It seems like relatively small amounts of money for these companies or individuals can make a massive difference. Is this repeatable in cities beyond Vegas? In San Francisco, how many companies would pay money to make it safer for their employees to come into the office every day?

I hope a lot.

Yeah. As soon as people see it, they want to do it. People just don’t know that’s possible. They’re like, “What? I can give money to the police?”

If you look at all of the latest innovations in San Francisco—

Yeah.

In San Francisco, they’re 100% privately funded.

Really?

100%. Now, they’re choosing to stay as quiet as they can, but I know—

Yeah. In San Francisco, look, we don’t want a repeat of Penguin Biden. So, like, you don’t—

Well, let’s get a coalition.

If I were donating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well.

Yeah. Well, hey, it is interesting. For anyone listening, you should go tour the San Francisco Police Department’s Real-Time Crime Center. It’s powered by Flock.

I guarantee you will walk away and say, “Where do I sign a check to give?” Because you want a drone in your neighborhood. You want more cameras in your neighborhood. This is the way to do it.

How much do we have to pay for the Xi homeless, you know, program when he comes?

It’s $1 million. Yeah, right, right. They literally raise taxes for this. It’s such a tiny amount of money compared to those sorts of things.

Wow.

Just to close the loop on it, what we typically see, too—and this is the same in Vegas—is that the expectation is the first 1 or 2 years are covered, and then the city has to decide, “Do you want to keep it?” You roll it into a budget because, with enough notice, they can afford all these products. It’s just hard to get started.

Yeah. As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished, and Flock hasn’t been exempt from that because of all the great work that you’ve done solving a huge—is it like 20% of

We do about 1 million arrests this year.

So what are the criticisms that you get?

I just want to point out: arrests of the right person. This is such a big thing in America. The number of people who, particularly if you live in the wrong neighborhood or look the wrong way, get arrested for the wrong crime—or get arrested when they’re totally innocent—has been a massive problem. One of those is a complete tragedy. So the fact that they’ve arrested 1 million of the correct people with a perfect AI match is really, really significant.

It is a cultural shock to a police department when you go from subjective-based policing to objective-based policing, like Ben’s describing. We get predominantly criticized for privacy, which I find falsely focused. I don’t think there’s any privacy erosion in Flock. I think Flock puts a spotlight on trust issues.

I’ll give you a good example.

And, by the way, the Flock cameras are all in public spaces.

Yeah, yeah. And it’s—

So whatever you’re doing in public, somebody probably has a phone and is really invading your privacy.

The ironic part is, when we do get criticisms from people who are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I’m like, “Do your eyes work?” If the federal government wanted to find you, a license-plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I’ll just get a cellphone dump.

Yeah.

I’ll know your exact location in real time—

By the way, which is what they do.

Yes, because it’s way more effective. So I think, for the privacy thing, it’s quite false. The trust is real, though.

If you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department.

Yeah.

That’s what this highlights. If you don’t trust your police department, you don’t want them to have guns, you don’t want them to have technology, and you want them to go away. There are some communities where that trust is deeply fissured, and we’re not going to fix it. I don’t think that’s our job. We’re not fixing it; we’re just highlighting it.

Typically, when we see critics, they call it privacy, but that’s just a cover for, “I don’t trust the police to do their job effectively.” What we try to do, at least in our tools, is build those levers. If you’re in Piedmont, California, you can go to their transparency page and see: Why are they using Flock? How are they using it? What are they doing? That’s actually good for building more and more trust.

Yeah. It seems like some people are scared about a world in which there’s so little trust in the police that basically everyone is getting private security—all these neighborhood—

That’s the irony of “defund the police.” It’s defund the police for poor people; it’s privatize the police for rich people.

Yeah, which has failed in many countries.

Yeah, and it’s not a good idea, by the way.

No, no, no. Yeah, and say more about why that is.

Crime is committed 98% against poor people. Those are the victims of crime. So you take away the public funding of police for poor people, and you basically end up with a completely degenerate society. You turn whole neighborhoods into the Third World, which, by the way, we have in the United States in a really major way.

You just have to put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to raise kids in that environment. It is crazy that that happens in this country. It’s absolutely insane.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at the core premise of America, it’s economic mobility. I want to do better than my parents. I want my kids to do better than me.

You have to have 3 things to do that. You have to have food, right? And to Ben’s point on privatizing, one of the biggest issues in poor communities is a lack of food sources. Second is that you have to have shelter. Third is that you have to be safe.

If you don’t have a bedrock of safety in your life, nothing else can be done. Your entire mind becomes occupied by, “Can I actually walk to school?”

Yeah.

“Will I make it to 18? 21?”

Yeah.

If you look at that, by privatizing, you remove a core tenet of economic mobility, which is what you see politically. We start to say, “I don’t believe in the American dream anymore because it didn’t work for me.” I think the fundamental risk is that we have a generation of kids who don’t think America will work for them.

Yeah.

I think that’s actually a huge problem. You also mentioned that 98% is against poor people. It’s also done by a very small percentage of people who commit all the crimes.

Yep.

And so what do we do with that percentage of people? People talk about criminal-justice reform. Sometimes they talk about basically not putting criminals in prison and letting them free. What is the steelman of how we solve for this? What do we do to address this?

Well, look, I think, first, there’s a separate conversation about prison reform. The way the prison system works, and the incentives in it in the United States, has a lot of issues. Principally, we’ve gone completely away from rehabilitation, and some of this comes from time-based sentencing and other things.

Our recidivism rate is over 70% in the United States. In countries that do a better job, it can be much below 40%. So we are throwing away people. Look, there are certain people who are psychopaths, and we’re never going to reform them.

But there’s a big distinction. Most people in prison—I had this conversation with my friend Shaka Senghor, who was in prison for 20 years—are actually better people. So there are people whose idiot friend had the idea to go rob the local drug dealer or whatever, and then they get caught up, and then they’re in prison. Now, the problem is those people who could be productive citizens, once they get to prison, become trained to be much harder criminals.

That would be a huge cost savings for the country, too. It would be much better for society and much better for people who get arrested. But I would just say that’s an independent problem from law enforcement. I think the problem with mixing those two is that the prison system needs reform and needs to be improved, but we still have to keep people safe.

You have to address those a bit independently. You’re not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. You just punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which I think is a very dangerous thing for a society to do. You basically create an incentive for nobody to be productive: an incentive for murder, an incentive for robbery, an incentive for rape, all that kind of thing.

Yeah. G, why don’t you say more on the policy side? Are there certain cities where certain policies are much more effective that others should learn from?

Yeah. Well, to Ben’s point, just to close that out, there’s evil in the world. Flock, or any of us, isn’t going to fix that. We will always need some place to deal with them.

The question is about the 99% of criminals today who are not evil. They’re more capitalistic or opportunistic criminals. To your point, there are some interesting activities, particularly around nonviolent juveniles or young adults, where putting them in prison is the worst thing to do. They will go from nonviolent to violent in months, and they will get stuck in it for their entire life.

We’re seeing more and more cities say there’s a better way to do this. You can go to 2 places, 3 places, right? You can go to work, you can go to school, or you can go home. It’s way better than jail. It’s cheaper for the city, and it’s actually teaching them to become productive members of society.

I think for us, that’s probably the most important policy change we’re starting to see: less of a mindset that we should throw people in jail. The other thing we’re looking at—and we actually had a great conversation with the DA here in San Francisco, Brooke Jenkins—is that there also needs to be some technology. Either Flock is an enabler, or someone should build one to make that part of the process go faster.

I was in Shelby County in Tennessee, in Memphis, and there are thousands of people waiting for trial. What do you think is happening in that place? They’re becoming criminals. There’s also an effort to speed up the judicial system, and I don’t think more humans are the answer.

We’re also seeing more and more cities adopt technology to speed that up.

Yeah.

Yeah. Actually, in Vegas, just to show you how fixable this problem is, they have this anti-recidivism program called Hope for Prisoners, which teaches prisoners coming out of jail how to get back into society and helps them get jobs. The Vegas prosecutor will, if you’re an 18-year-old kid and you commit a first-time offense and it’s not violent, send you to Hope for Prisoners. They won’t prosecute you; they’ll send you to Hope for Prisoners, and you go through the rehabilitation program. They have close to 0% recidivism on that program.

Just because a lot of the time, people become criminals because that is a career path.

Yeah.

If you create an alternative career path, nobody wants to go to jail. Nobody wants to be on that path unless you’re insane or a real psycho. That’s not the path people want to be on; it’s just a path they end up on. Creating other avenues is really good, but you also have to disincentivize the criminal career path.

Yeah.

Those go together.

Delancey Street Restaurant is another example. Is that a successful example?

Yeah, of course. Definitely.

It’s a restaurant, and they take people who have previously been in prison and give them sort of—

Yeah. No, look, I think businesses hiring people, particularly out of prison—and I think the Delancey Street hires a lot of people out of juvenile hall—taking kids out of the system early is very productive.

Once you’ve been in prison for 10 or 20 years, it’s really hard to adapt back into society. It’s a very different world.

It gives them a lot of dignity. They tell their story to people. It’s a very moving place.

What’s interesting is that there’s sometimes what I’d call a form of gaslighting, where they say, “What are you complaining about? Crime is down. Look at all the numbers. Why do you feel unsafe? That’s just a clip you saw on Twitter by some right-wing person. Why are you feeling unsafe walking the streets of San Francisco?” What’s the right way of thinking about that?

It’s funny you mentioned that. There’s an elected official, a state representative of a certain state—I won’t disclose her information—and she was a very loud antagonist to Flock. Sadly, she was like a lot of political figures: she was the victim of a targeted attack. Her house was shot at.

She’s a massive fan of Flock now because that person was arrested within minutes because there was a Flock on her street. Number 1, they’re like, “Yeah, we got the guy. He’s in custody,” and he had been posting online about, “She’s this, she’s that.”

There is a bit of, “Oh, we want to defund the police, just not in our city.”

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And that’s the main message.

Well, a lot of the politicians who want to defund the police have massive private security.

Yeah. If you’ve got 3 guys walking around with you all the time, you feel fine.

But I also think, for me at least, our expectations of safety should only go up.

Just like we expect information at our fingertips, why shouldn’t we feel safe everywhere we go?

They say, “Hey, living in a city is dangerous. That’s what you signed up for.”

I’ve only gotten into 1 argument with an antagonist. I said, “I just don’t think crime should exist.” He was like, “I think it’s just a part of living in a big city,” and I was like, “That seems horrible.” It’s like trash, too. I like clean streets. These are not unreasonable things to ask for.

Yeah. That seems like a very odd perspective.

I understand. Particularly if you’re a young person, I could see why you’d worry about overly aggressive policing, putting too many people in prison for the wrong crimes, or militarized police.

All those seem like reasonable concerns.

Yeah. I guess the thing for me is—

Who’s going to decide how many homicides is okay?

Right?

Yeah. And is it okay to say that you or your family or your friends are the ones who should be subject to that?

And then most people would say no to that. It’s fine for the other guy.

Yeah.

What I think, to Ben’s point, too, is that the number of times we’ve been in debates where you’ve got a privileged person in a community articulating a desire for less policing, yet the person who actually needs it is sitting there saying, “Wait, wait, wait. Time out. I actually want more.”

And that’s what every town hall looks like. You shouldn’t be making decisions for other people.

Yeah, I’m so empathetic. I want you murdered, right? That’s the—

It’s the safest thing for you.

Yeah, it’s so crazy.

Well, the other thing on crime statistics is that it’s pretty widely known that a lot of crime statistics have been faked, underreported, et cetera. If you’re not prosecuting crimes—particularly in San Francisco, we had this where they don’t get called in—if your car got broken into in San Francisco and you called the police, they would be like, “What do you want us to do? We’re not going to prosecute it.” So people just stopped calling.

The real measure of this is the surveys that they’ve done in almost every city: have you been a victim of a crime? That goes in the opposite direction from the actual official crime statistics.

Yeah. Over longitudinal data, I just think it’s a narrative that’s supported by fake numbers, right?

It’s also the stuff that’s unreported: do you feel safe walking in your city? Do you feel safe with your kids walking at night?

And, by the way, the reporting on that did change after 2020.

So, literally, the practices of how crimes are recorded and how crimes are prosecuted changed. People say, “The trend line is correct even if the numbers...” No, it’s not. It’s not correct.

Yeah. And what I love about what you guys are doing at Flock is that you’re giving cities and states the technology so they can choose where they want to be on the spectrum, basically. Talk a little more about that, because different places have different values.

Yeah. I mean, there are probably 2 big levers that a city can pull. One is retention. Before Flock was started, there were other companies in this space, and they would historically store location data in perpetuity. My philosophy starting the company was that this seemed more of a risk than an asset because it was just a lot of data. We store it for 30 days, but you can flex that up and down.

In New Jersey, they store it for 5 years. That’s the state law; that’s not our choice. California has a maximum of 90 days. We have some agencies in California that store it for 7 days. You could store it for 1 day.

The efficacy is probably linearly correlated with the retention period, because how often do you call in a crime the same day it happens? Actually, not every time. You may be away, your car may be stolen—whatever it could be. So, one is data retention, and the second is data sharing: what other police departments do you want to work with?

Criminals don’t really care where cities start and stop, but cities do, by design. You can control where you share. In some states, like California, the data can never leave the state. Virginia recently adopted a similar bill. Illinois, Colorado, and more states are saying, “Hey, we trust our state.” I think that’s an okay approach. I worry about it, though. Ben, do criminals ever leave California for Nevada? I think they do.

By the way, this is one of the things we ran into on the Tupac case. The LAPD did so much stuff to foul that case in Las Vegas, which is why that murder went unsolved for almost 30 years.

And why did they do that?

Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt. There were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac. Thankfully, we reopened the cold case and caught the guy.

When you think about it in terms of the actual victim—

Yeah, and how bad it was that one of the great artists of the half-century ended up being portrayed as this weird criminal, a victim of a crime, because we never solved it.

That’s what happens when you don’t share information. That’s a real issue.

Yeah.

But for us, we’ve got some agencies in some of the most liberal cities in the country that are huge fans of Flock. They tweak it to their liking, and I think we just get back to the fact that it’s not our job as a company to write the law or decide what laws are enforced.

Immigration is not enforced in California. I don’t care. That’s up to Californians. I live in Georgia, and we have different expectations of what’s criminal and what’s not criminal. There’s a difference between local, state, and federal authorities.

We just try to stay out of it and say, “Good luck, everyone. We’re here to support.”

I think you have bigger fish to fry, certainly, Garrett. Sometimes, as a society, it’s really hard. This is one of the challenges with democracy: some of these problems are very complex. Crime and punishment is a systemic, complicated issue, and it’s hard for people who are really digging into the problem to design the right system.

Once you throw it into politics, anybody says anything, and it gets all convoluted—this and that and the other. It’s really tough to deal with that. I think that’s why we don’t have a much better system than we have.

But I think the other thing, too, Ben, to your point, is that when it happens, that complication becomes very simple when you have strong leadership with a backbone—normally in a mayor, a DA, a city council, and a sheriff—where they say, “I’m going to arrest you if you commit a crime in my city.”

Yep.

You have to say that out loud. You have to say it and do it.

Well, but then the problem is you’re going to get arrested, the prosecutor is going to prosecute you, and the judge is going to enforce the law. It’s a much harder combination than you might think. There has been—

Wow.

—a huge push to decriminalize crime, essentially, in this country, and it’s still going on. There are still prosecutors and judges who are funded basically for the purpose of not convicting people.

Yep.

Yeah.

And is that for ideological reasons? Do we have a big organized-crime problem in this country, or was there, as you mentioned earlier, a big disorganized-crime problem?

I will say, though, that the sheer sophistication of some criminal groups is actually astonishing. There is definitely low-level crime, but there are truly a large number of Eastern European and South American gangs operating large-scale businesses.

I call them businesses because, while they commit crime, they don’t run sloppy. I’ll give you an example in the logistics space. Ben and I are 2 buddies from Eastern Europe. We go and buy a freight-forwarding company—a legitimate company—and we start receiving semis full of product.

Guess what? They just disappear. After about a month, we shut the company down and disappear. We’ve taken tens of millions of dollars of goods, and then we flip them on Facebook Marketplace and all the secondary places, and it’s clean. No one gets shot, and everything looks clean on paper.

It’s obviously not easy. You have to be sophisticated, but this is large-scale, and it works.

This is what happened when crime went really crazy in San Francisco. I had a long conversation with Mayor Breed about it. In San Francisco, the whole political movement was, “People are hungry. You can’t arrest them for shoplifting,” and so forth.

As soon as we did that, massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up shutting down the big mall. There’s no shopping in San Francisco whatsoever anymore, so all the citizens got punished. But it wasn’t hungry people. It was organized crime systematically selling the goods.

The people they deployed were low-level criminals. You can just pick a kid to rob the thing for you and pay them. But that’s not what’s going on. It’s not that the kid is hungry; it’s that the kid is now a career criminal working for an organized gang, probably from South America.

The side effects of these off-the-cuff, nobody-thought-it-through, crazy ideas are highly consequential.

Yeah.

Garrett, talk about what the world looks like in a world where Flock achieves its goal. What’s the future of policing? Flock cameras on every block—talk about that.

I think the word Ben used was “intelligence,” and so much of that shift is starting to happen. I would add “precision.” I’ll paint for you a picture of a recent success story that, to me, is the future. It just hasn’t happened in every city yet.

There’s an individual who leaves a hospital mentally unwell and shoots someone in a drive-by, just driving by and starting to shoot people. This is a real story. Because all the police departments in the city and the neighboring cities worked together, they put out a hot-list entry: “Hey, we’re looking for this vehicle. Armed, dangerous, mentally unwell.”

That vehicle pulls into the largest commercial center in one of the cities. It’s a big mall, and the mall is also a Flock customer. The police department gets a ding on that camera and says, “Hey, we found this guy.”

Now, let’s pause. The traditional response is that you deploy SWAT, and it’s going to take about 15 minutes to get everyone ready. They’re going to come in hot, and someone’s going to die. It’s not clear who—either a citizen, an officer, or the suspect—but let’s assume someone’s going to die.

Just as a matter of fact, that mall is also going to see a dramatic decline in attendance. It could probably lead to the end of the mall, which isn’t good for that city, either.

Okay, let’s unpause. What happened? Sitting at a comfortable desk like we are here, a real-time crime-center operator clicks a button that says, “Launch drone.” The drone is at the mall in about 40 seconds. From about half a mile away, we can zoom in and find that the individual has a tattoo.

We pulled that because we have a product called Nova. When an LPR hit comes through, we can say, “Oh, wow. This person has been arrested 6 times. Is there any—oh, there is interesting information. This person has a very distinguishable forearm tattoo.” So, we spot the tattoo halfway.

This guy has no idea we're following him. We don't see a gun. Two plainclothes officers walk up. The whole time, they know they've got overhead protection. They're being helped just like you would in the Army. They take him down. No one has any idea.

Then they present this to city council, and city council was like, “We need drones everywhere.”

Yeah.

We need drones everywhere. It's safer, it's more precise, and there's a level of intelligence.

Yeah.

When I look at this police department, they've got all their data integrated. They have all their sensors integrated. It's just happening. And I think for us, when we think about a kind of agentic layer on top of that, you can start to reduce some of your staffing problems.

Some of these jobs—no one wants to work the night shift. Some jobs are just not fun.

There's a way to do it with software.

So I think that kind of intelligent, precise policing is where we want to go. I think the net effect of that, to Ben's earlier point, is officers spend more time with their community.

Yeah.

Less time filling out paperwork, less time writing reports, and more time engaged.

Just one quick last story. Don't you have a couple of stories of actually saving a baby?

Oh, I mean, we helped return over 450 missing children this year.

Oh, my God.

And that's the not-funny aha, where people are like, “Oh, we should ban Flock,” and I'm like, “Until your child is stolen.”

Yeah.

I've got 3 kids, and I want to know that if anything goes wrong with them, Flock is there.

Yeah. And this is like, you get carjacked, and your baby's in the back seat, and they take the baby—that kind of thing.

I know it happened. I mean, there was a case down in San Diego this year where this happened—it was at a mall. A guy hops in, with a kid in the back. Obviously, that wasn't part of the plan, but it became part of the plan. Thankfully, they've got a lot of Flock cameras in San Diego, and we were able to get the individual.

That doesn't happen every day in your city, but it happens every day in the country.

Well, Garrett, you're doing heroic work, and one of the most inspiring things about working at a16z is working with you. So thank you for the work that you do.

Thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Thank you.