大规模监控、警方滥用，以及谁在控制你的 Flock 摄像头——对话 Flock CEO Garret Langley
- Flock 目前已进入美国略超6,000座城市，Garrett Langley称去年借此侦破的案件超过100万起、找到超过10,000名失踪人员；Langley估计，数据保留后90%的案件能在7天内侦破，这也是 Flock 最近把默认保留期从30天砍到7天的原因。 剩下的10%是最棘手的案件——比如数天后才被发现的谋杀案，或“受害者因为还没准备好，直到一周后才拨打911”的强奸案——Langley坚持认为，最终应由民主选出的市议会，或适用时由州政府，决定数据的保留期限。
- 这轮反弹确实造成了打击，但按 Langley 的说法仍在可承受范围内：客户流失率从0升至约1%，已有接近20座城市重新开启摄像头。 主持人称取消服务的城市有数十座，并提出60–70座，但具体总数并未确定。Flock 在年初新一轮融资后仍处于增长模式。按前瞻口径，LPR收入占比略低于50%，无人机是增长最快的业务单元。
- Langley 将问责工具置于 Flock 应对争议的核心位置：上线仅4个月的“Audit Assistance”基于100万起已侦破案件的正常使用数据、对比略少于12起被发现的滥用行为打造，如今已成为所有客户的强制工具，并且已经促成警员被解雇——一名 Georgia 警察局长称其部门解雇了9人。 “如果客户不愿接受问责，我也不想把他们当客户”——他预计，那些问责更弱的竞争对手最终也会被这种缺乏审查的做法追上。
- Flock 的核心差异化主张是：不做人脸识别、不录视频、不查看车内情况，也不允许在 LPR 系统中搜索其他人——“这与我们最大的几家竞争对手形成直接冲突，因为他们做了我刚才提到的所有事情”。 大量流失的业务都源于错误信息：一座城市早期退出的原因，就是在 Google 上搜索“ALPR facial recognition”后，根据竞争对手的网站取消了 Flock。
- 在 AI 问题上，Langley 划出了一条绝对红线：“我们绝不想成为定义何为可疑对象的公司”——他拒绝《少数派报告》式的预测性怀疑，坚持公共安全场景必须有人参与，并要求在部署会产生重大后果的 AI 前，先由“一个实际上不希望这套系统成功的人”进行第三方验证。 他警告城市不要鲁莽地把911线路切换给 AI 机器人，并称这是“巨大风险”。
- 按 Langley 自己的判断，隐私反弹的根源在于他追问一名批评者后得到的回答：“Garrett，我完全不信任警察”——Jason 也承认这种担忧有其正当性，并举出警察关闭随身摄像头、ICE 特工戴着面罩执法的例子。 监管拼图极不均衡：New Hampshire 将 LPR 数据保留期上限设为3分钟（“相当于零”），下一个最短的是 Washington 的21天，而 New Jersey 强制保留5年。
- 两人最终都指向一个投资者应当注意的分配效应：反对声音往往来自已经拥有大门、保安和摄像头的人，而“通常正是没有其他自保手段的人需要它”。 Langley 给出的案例是，一名反对 Flock 的 Illinois 官员在 Flock 摄像头找到向她家开枪的人后，变成了“我们最大的支持者之一”： “你无法选择自己什么时候成为暴力受害者。”
1. 成立9年后，Flock称已侦破100万起案件——以及随之而来的聚光灯
- Langley 对公司起源的描述是：9年前，Flock 开始向社区销售车牌识别器，目标是让人们“住在更安全的社区”。这套技术会拍下驶过车辆的静态图像并读取车牌，如今还能识别车顶行李架、保险杠贴纸、凹痕和损伤。当前规模已达到略超6,000座城市；“借助 Flock 侦破的案件超过100万起，找到的失踪人员超过10,000人”。仅7月一个月，系统就协助找到约1,125名失踪人员，并追回超过20,000辆被盗车辆。
- 他反复使用的案例是：上周 Atlanta 有一辆被盗汽车，后座还坐着一名2岁儿童；Atlanta PD 借助 Flock 摄像头，在1小时内安全找回了孩子和车辆。“没有 Flock，我不知道会发生什么……那就是我上周所在的城市。”
- 规模做大后不可避免的代价，是“影响越大，人们的问题就越多……我希望生活在一个更安全的社会里，也希望在此过程中保有隐私，但这很难”。
2. 数据保留期由市议会决定，7天可侦破90%的案件
- 地方政府是一个残酷的市场：“上一家服务地方政府并上市的公司，已经是20多年前的事了。” 市议会拥有最终决定权，因此 Flock 去年参加了接近10,000场市议会会议——这些会议全部向公众开放——“因为我们希望人们知道自己买的是什么”。
- Flock 对数据保留的基本判断是：“这类数据是负债，不是资产。” 公司的默认保留期原本是30天，最近降至7天。Langley 估计，90%的案件在数据保留后的7天内就能侦破；剩下的“大多数”在30天内也能解决，但那10%“会出现在新闻里的案件”，可能是没有人拨打911、数日后才被发现的谋杀案，也可能是“感到内疚、羞耻的强奸受害者，她还没准备好，所以一周后才拨打911”。
- 各州法律规定差异极大：New Jersey 州法强制保留5年；California 和 Washington 设定的是上限；New Hampshire 的规则允许保留3分钟，Jason称这“相当于零”（“live free or die”）。下一个最短的是 Washington 的21天。Langley 的立场是：“最终决定权应该属于民主选出的官员”，但“我们必须设定强有力的默认值”——即使一个社区只保留2天或3天，也“远胜于什么都没有”，因为 Amber Alert 和 Silver Alert 仍然可以侦破。
3. Flock 拒绝开发的功能，正是竞争对手在做的事
- Langley 直截了当地说明差异化边界：“我们不做人脸识别，不录制视频，不查看车内情况，甚至不允许人们通过我们的车牌识别摄像头系统搜索其他人”——“这与我们最大的几家竞争对手形成直接冲突，因为他们做了我刚才提到的所有事情”。他的希望是，行业龙头受到的审视最终能迫使整个行业跟进。
- 错误信息正在造成实质性的商业损失：最早离开的客户之一在 Google 上搜索“ALPR facial recognition”，进入了竞争对手的网站，随后取消了 Flock——“他们没意识到自己看错了网站。这是我的责任，我需要把这件事沟通得更清楚。”
- 一起 Atlanta 谋杀案的调查，就是从唯一的目击线索开始的：嫌疑车辆缺少右后轮毂盖。“把这15分钟窗口内所有没有右后轮毂盖的车辆找出来。” Langley 强调，这只是调查的起点，而不是终点；侦探最终找到了涉案人员。
- 对于 San Francisco，Langley 表示，Flock 只是更大范围转型中的一小部分，其他因素还包括更强的民选官员、更有力的执法、警察和地方检察官领导力，以及社区对安全的需求。
4. 破坏摄像头、失去客户，以及反弹效应
- Jason 不接受把剪断摄像头电缆的人称为“恐怖分子”，而是称他们为行动主义者；Langley 则把重点放在重罪后果上。那些“在 TikTok 和 Instagram 上被煽动起来”的人正在犯罪，其中一名 Ohio 或 Illinois 的涉案者可能面临15–20年刑期，而推动这类行为的网红“只是为了点赞和浏览量”。“对于那些选择犯重罪、而不是去市议会为自己的信念大声疾呼和斗争的人，我心里确实没有多少同情。这就是民主程序本身。”
- Langley 讲述了一起取消服务的代价：Washington 一座城市关闭了摄像头；下一个周末，一名小男孩遭枪击，邻近城市的 Flock 摄像头找到了涉案车辆，并促成逮捕。“孩子没能活下来，这太可怕了。至少他的家人知道正义得到了伸张。”
- Jason 给出了 Austin 的反例：Austin 在2025年取消或未续用 Flock，随后发生一起涉及3名未成年人的枪击案——据他所述，3人的年龄分别为15岁、16岁和17岁——但由于 Manor PD 仍在使用 Flock，案件在28小时内告破。“那就是警钟。” Jason称，他理解的 ACLU 提案是保留数据48小时，Langley则认为这是“合理的立场”。已有接近20座城市重新开启摄像头。
5. “脏警察”问题：从无人查看的审计日志到强制滥用检测
- Langley 讲述了自己如何改变看法：“有人说我天真。我会说，也许是过于乐观……我一直信任 Atlanta Police Department。” 直到一名批评者告诉他：“Garrett，我完全不信任警察。他们撒谎、作弊、偷窃。” 他的回应是：“如果你是对的，而我是错的呢？” Jason 也认可这种担忧：警察曾规避或关闭随身摄像头，ICE 特工曾戴着没有识别编号的面罩执法——“公众有充分理由感到担忧，而且他们把你和警方视为一伙。”
- 旧式审计日志之所以失效，是因为使用量太大：Southern California 一家机构每天大约有1,000名警员使用 Flock；如果每人每天搜索5或6次，一个人每月查看一次日志，也只能抽查10或20次。4个月前，Flock 构建了“Audit Assistance”，其依据是100万起已侦破案件的正常使用数据，以及8年间发现的略少于12起滥用行为。最典型的滥用模式，是警员反复手动搜索某一车牌，而不是把它加入重点关注名单——“如果你在跟踪我，你不会希望其他人知道这件事正在发生。”
- 实际结果超出预期：“我们抓到了很多坏警察……数量非常多，比我原本希望的多得多。” 一名 Georgia 警察局长公开表示，其部门解雇了9名警员。Langley 随后将这项工具从默认配置升级为强制要求：“我们必须找出这些坏警察，把他们清除。他们不应该拥有警徽。”
- Jason 提议建立“双钥匙”机制：每次搜索都必须由一名警司批准，这样“你是个脏警察，就得找到一个脏警司”。该方案目前“还在白板上”，但 Langley 强调，一座只有20名警员的 Texas 小镇，不可能承担与大城市相同的流程负担，规则可能需要按城市规模分层。作为规模参照，California 的州级数据库去年记录了7,000起报告中的滥用事件。
- Langley 接受失去那些拒绝问责要求的客户：这些客户可以转向没有相关工具的竞争对手，但他说自己不希望他们成为客户，并预计竞争对手缺乏审查的做法最终会追上他们。
6. AI 红线：不定义可疑对象，也不鲁莽部署911机器人
- 面对城市因预算和人员压力而激进引入 AI 911 系统，Langley 发出警告：“想象一下，有人闯进你家，你拨打911……结果它开始和你聊午饭吃了什么……风险实在太高，而我们根本不知道这些东西是怎么运作的。” 更合理的路径应该是，只有在电话线路全部占满时才由 AI 接听——“但现在发生的不是这一套。” Flock 不处理911呼叫，但 Langley 将这个问题视为一则警示案例。
- Jason 提出 Precog 式模式识别：一辆车缓慢绕行，踩点6栋房子。Langley 直接拒绝：“我不想做这个……我们绝不想成为定义何为可疑对象的公司。这真的很危险。” 他的方案是，公共安全场景必须有人参与，并在上线前引入第三方验证——“一个实际上不希望这套系统成功的人应该进来说：‘猜猜怎么着？它真的有效。’” 目标是让 AI 帮助警员“更客观、更少主观判断”。Flock 原本也可能一口气上线一个又一个 AI 功能，但公司现在“有意放慢速度”。
7. 安全保障分配不均，反对声音也一样
- Langley 的公平性框架是：政府有义务让所有人获得同等安全保障，但“肤色、财富水平、种族——抱歉，还有性别”都会影响人们的安全感。“女性比男性更没有安全感，这是事实。” 他还表示，少数族裔比 Jason 和他本人更没有安全感。两人都把反对声音与特权联系起来：拥有大门、保安、摄像头和私人安保的人，可能会问为什么有人还需要更安全；但“通常正是没有其他自保手段的人需要它”。
- 转变立场的案例是：一名 Illinois 民选官员曾是“我们最大的反对者之一”，但警方借助 Flock 摄像头找到向她家开枪的人后，她变成了 Flock 最大的支持者之一——“你无法选择自己什么时候成为暴力受害者。”
- Jason 也披露了自己的立场：作为家长，他愿意接受30天的车牌数据保留，但这是一笔有边界的交换——“我不希望政府拥有全国性的 Flock 数据库，也不希望政府做人脸识别。在我看来，那是不可逾越的界限。”
8. 无人机是增长最快的业务单元，公关损伤主要打击士气
- 业务层面，LPR 目前占前瞻收入略低于50%，无人机是增长最快的业务单元；Flock 在年初完成了新一轮融资，客户流失率从0升至约1%。最大的损伤体现在内部士气上——“为什么人们会因为我们没有做的事情而对我们如此愤怒？”——但这轮争议“让我们与客户走得更近”；一名警察局长称，按打击犯罪的效果看，Flock 是“继 DNA 之后最好的东西”。
- Dallas–Fort Worth 的一则典型无人机案例是：一名女子拨打911，称加油站有一名持枪男子。与其让警察驾车冲入现场——“心跳加速，手里拿着枪……马上就要有人死了”——不如让一架从机库起飞的无人机升至400英尺、以60英里/小时飞行，在不到1分钟内抵达；其40倍变焦最终显示，对方拿的是打火机而不是枪。“这不只是犯罪问题，更是安全问题。”
- 透明度基础设施已经存在，但有边界：多数客户会运营门户，展示审计日志、摄像头数量和无人机飞行记录，不过会刻意延迟发布，以保护正在进行的调查。至于是否公开所有无人机飞行记录，Langley称“技术上可以做到，但从未有客户要求这么做”；除航空安全外，联邦层面目前没有任何监管。他把这与随身摄像头类比：后者最初也曾引发“巨大愤怒”，后来才被认可为更好的工具。
- Jason 称 Tucker Carlson 已经“彻底击垮”Langley，随后问他是否愿意登上 Carlson 的节目。Langley 没有正面答应：“我不知道这是不是我手里的牌。” 他说，Flock 希望去那些社区真正听得进去的地方。他也承认，前方还有很长的路，公司仍需要更好地沟通。
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-In Interview. This is where we find the people building the future: sometimes a politician, sometimes a CEO, sometimes an investor, and all the time, an important discussion.
One of the most important discussions of the moment is balancing safety and privacy. There is one company at the center of this, and we're so lucky to have Garrett from Flock here—Garrett Langley. Garrett, you and I spoke on This Week in Startups, my other podcast that I've been doing for 16 years. I don't know how many years ago that was—6 or 7 years ago.
6 or 7 years, yep.
I've been following your company. Full disclosure, I was trying to invest at one point. I'm not a shareholder, but I've always been intrigued by what you're doing and, on the margin, sometimes concerned. It seems like you've been so successful with Flock, which makes safety cameras—specifically, license-plate readers. We're going to get into all the details today.
In the last year, because of the tremendous success of Flock, it has been adopted in many communities. We're going to get into that, and it's had a really great impact on reducing crime. But there is now a group of people who may have privacy concerns. You and I have talked over the years, and we're going to get into it. We're going to go right at the controversies and this grand debate we're going to have.
Yeah.
How much privacy am I going to give up to get safety? It's really interesting to me that there's been so much energy on this recently, because when I see that kind of energy as an investor or as a podcast host here—the world's greatest moderator™—I know there's something at stake. I'm going all in. AppLovin started with an $8 domain and no VC funding, and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Now, that same engine powers AppLovin ads for e-commerce. Your ads run inside mobile games, reaching over a billion people with full-screen, distraction-free attention. The platform finds buyers and optimizes for profit. You set the target, it does the rest. One cookware brand went from $4 million to $16 million, turned profitable, and is on pace for $80 million this year. Visit applovin.com/allin to launch your first campaign today. I'm going all in.
Tell us a little bit about Flock Safety and how many communities you're in now.
Yeah.
And then also the drone component, because people know the license-plate readers. Maybe they don't know the drones. So let's just get that footprint and build a mental model for the audience here.
That's great. And, Jason, thanks for having me.
1. Flock's Safety Mission
I started the company 9 years ago with a pretty simple mission: to live in a safer neighborhood. That was our initial pitch. If you look at our first 2 or 3 years in business, it was just neighborhoods. We sold to neighborhoods, and we sold a license-plate-reading camera, which is pretty basic technology. A car drives by, we take a still image of the vehicle, and we read the license plate.
The system has gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack, a bumper sticker, a dent, or damage. But at its core, that's what the technology does. Last year, to your point, we had a tremendous impact on the country: north of 1 million crimes solved using Flock, and north of 10,000 missing people found. That includes everything from our grandparents with dementia to our children.
Just last week in Atlanta, there was a stolen car that happened to have a 2-year-old in the backseat. Thankfully, because of the very hard work by the Atlanta Police Department and our cameras, that little kid was safely returned within the hour. I don't know what would have happened without Flock. That's one story, but that's my own city last week.
Hmm.
If you look at July as a data point, last month was about 1,125 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. Those are the cars we use to drive our kids to school and to drive to work.
We're in just over 6,000 cities across the country. The consequence of being that consequential is that people have a lot of questions and a lot of debates.
I think it's worthwhile to talk about what kind of society we want to live in. I want to live in one where we're safer, and I want to keep my privacy while I do it, but that is hard. Finding that balance is not easy.
I remember when we had our first discussion, gosh, so many years ago on This Week in Startups. We were talking about it, and I had brought up, “Hey, what happens with abuse in the system?”
Yeah.
Once in a while, you get a dirty cop. If you watch any kind of procedural TV, you watch Law & Order, you watch The Sopranos—Tony Soprano's got a dirty cop who's in the hole for some gambling debt, and they run a license plate for him, right?
This is a trope in the news, and it's a trope because it's common—not on a percentage basis, but we all know that any system that records data could be abused. We saw it at Facebook. Engineers there were famously stalking their exes and reading their unencrypted messages, and the industry had to make a lot of changes.
I remember at the time you were telling me, “The settings”—and this is where we're going to get really granular today—“are set by the local community,” and these cameras are installed by a local community. The communities I've lived in have had them.
So let's answer these 2 questions. Number 1, how does a community wind up having Flock cameras installed? What's that decision-making process typically like? Then we'll get into, very granularly, what you're recording, for how long, who has access, the audit logs, and what's not recorded.
2. Local Control Sets Retention
That's a great question. One of the reasons we struggled so much to raise money as a business is because it was traditionally—and was for Flock—very hard to get contracts done with local government. The last company to go public that serviced local government was over 20 years ago. This is a really hard space because city councils have the final decision.
Every 2 weeks, a city council meets, and the city manager's direct reports—be it a police chief, a fire chief, or public works—present ideas and concepts they would like to get approval for. Flock is on that list.
Last year, we went to something close to 10,000 city council meetings as a business. I have a huge team whose entire job is to go to city council meetings explaining what Flock does and what Flock doesn't do. It's just a cost of doing business with local government.
It's really straightforward. I was actually talking to the chief, our first-ever police chief down in Jersey Village, Texas, a couple of weeks ago. That video of that council vote 6 years ago is still a public record.
City council meetings—
They're all public.
They're famously recorded.
It's tough.
It's a wacky environment. It can be.
It is. It can be particularly wacky, but we go because we want people to know what they're buying.
Yeah.
They buy the product. What has been true for the last 9 years is that we've always said, “This data is a liability, not an asset. You should have a set retention period.”
That retention period—how long this data will be stored—is going to determine the efficacy of the product. If you delete this data in a day or 2, it's going to be less effective. It's still going to be better than nothing. If you hold it for 30 days, it's going to be pretty effective, and if you hold it for a year, it will be more effective.
Hmm.
We always believed city councils should have the final say in how long they want to store it and who they want to share it with. For the longest time, 30 days was our default. We've recently shifted that down to 7 days. We think that's a reasonable trade-off, but we still think cities should decide—or states, for that matter.
Someone who is democratically elected should have the final decision on how this technology works in their community. But I think you probably agree that, as a technology provider, we have to set strong defaults.
Defaults matter, as we say in the industry.
Yes.
If you think about the number of crimes—of 100 crimes, how many would, and I'm sure you have some idea of this, if we have 100 crimes that occurred, whatever their nature, how many are solved with 7 days of data, 30 days of data, or require more than 30 days of data? Do you have that?
We have a good sense. I'm going to give you an aggregate data point across the whole country. We think 90% of crimes will get solved within 7 days of data retention.
Beautiful.
It is, Jason, but I would tell you, I’ve probably talked to 2,300 police chiefs this week, and they remind me—and I tell them, “You should tell your city council this too.”
The 10% we’re talking about, or the 10% you read about in the news, though.
Yeah.
Right? It’s the—
Yeah.
It’s the homicide where there was never a 911 call because someone was killed, and it takes 5 days to discover the body because of a welfare check. Then it’s a complicated case. Or it’s—
Yeah.
Look, and I’m sorry to go to this topic. It’s a rape victim who—
Hmm.
—felt guilt, who felt shame, and she didn’t call 911 until a week later because she wasn’t ready.
Yes.
And that’s real life, right? I deal with this every day, so I’m probably less sensitive to it. But these victims deserve privacy. They deserve accountability for the people who—
Yeah.
—attacked them.
It’s a process to even identify the crime. So what you’re—
Yes.
—saying is, now, would 30 days of the 10% remaining—and we’re just ballparking here—
Yeah.
—but that last 10%, how many of those out of 10—
Yeah.
—would be resolved with 30 days of data?
We think the majority.
Okay.
And look, we’re not going to lose—we’re not going to tell cities how to run themselves. To be clear, there are states like New Jersey where state law is 5 years, and so every customer holds it for 5 years. In the state of California, there’s a maximum retention period. In the state of Washington, most states have now adopted regulation.
Hmm.
And they set a maximum limit. But I think for me, Jason, what’s more important than my default is making sure city councilors and mayors are educated that they have control. They can make this choice, and they should actually spend time with their police chief and figure out what he or she thinks is best for that community.
Hmm.
And I think there are some communities that are going to push for 2 or 3 days, and I think that’s so much better than nothing, because that Amber Alert and that Silver Alert—which are the things we all lose sleep over—
Yep.
—they’re still going to get solved too.
Yeah.
So it’s just a balance.
I literally lose sleep over it. I got one at 2:00 in the morning the other day, and I wake up and read it. I’m like, “I’m not a cop—I don’t know what I’m going to do with this data at 2:00 a.m. I’m in bed.” But—
Yeah.
—okay, so this seems completely fair in terms of how you’re expressing it.
Yeah.
3. Privacy And Public Trust
To be clear, when I had you on TWiST back in the day, I was like, “Well, don’t you need to know who’s in the driver’s seat? And wouldn’t you want to get a picture of the windshield?” I found myself advocating in my community: “Hey, I would be okay,” just as J-Cal the dad, and somebody who sometimes, on the margins, has some privacy and security issues. They’re not acute like for, I don’t know, Sam Waltman, tragically, and what’s happened at his house twice. But I have my own security cameras. I use Unity. It’s incredible.
Yeah. Great product.
And I have a license plate reader on mine. I have facial recognition on mine. That is on my private property, of course. Some of it does look out on public roads—
Yeah.
—because I have access roads, so I am technically able to record the license plate of everybody who drives by the front of my house. I think that’s legal to do here in Austin.
It is legal. It is.
Yeah.
It is legal.
So are there communities that are using other systems that are not Flock and recording every single person in and out? When I go in and out of private communities once in a while, I see there are 4 or 5 cameras. I know I’m on camera. Aren’t people already doing full video in their communities without using Flock?
Yeah, no, and Jason, you’re spot-on. We don’t do facial recognition. We don’t capture video. We don’t look inside the car. We don’t even allow people to search for other people in our system for our license plate-reading cameras, and that’s in direct conflict with some of our biggest competitors, who do all of the things I just mentioned.
Hmm.
Unfortunately—or fortunately—we’ve been very successful, and as the industry leader, the spotlight’s on us. And that’s okay.
Yeah.
Because my hope is that the changes we’re making, and the changes we’ll continue to make, will force the rest of the industry to follow suit. I hope councilors ask questions about the systems they have if it’s not Flock, and maybe they’ll switch to Flock if they want a privacy-first solution.
And you guys have had a bit of a communication challenge. People were ripping down the cameras. There’s an—
You know, people care about privacy, not just here in the United States, by the way. In the UK, people are ripping down cameras. There are a group of people who are entitled to this opinion, and I share it on the margins. When I had children, it changed dramatically, because number 1 for me is security. I’m willing to give up my license plate data. If somebody knows my exact whereabouts for 30 days from my license plates, I’m okay with that.
Yeah.
Because I have children, and I’m okay with giving up that amount of privacy. I would be a little concerned, I think, with facial recognition, if I’m being totally honest.
Yeah.
But it’s kind of a moving target, and I guess the reaction you guys had—and I think I had talked to you about this—is you called them terrorists, the people taking the cameras down and this kind of thing. Where does this audience that’s ripping down cameras—
Yeah.
—I mean, they’re obviously not terrorists. I think they’re activists; I would say that’s a better descriptor. But you guys haven’t communicated this perfectly, in my opinion.
Correct.
So where are people coming to you with valid concerns?
Yep.
And then how have you evolved your ability to communicate what you’re doing? That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this, because I looked at it and I was like, “I don’t think you’re doing a particularly good job of communicating this.” I also think the people who are ripping down the cameras think they’re in a surveillance state with permanent records and facial recognition. They don’t actually understand the nuances and contours of the product. So talk about where you got it right, where you got it wrong—
Yeah.
—and how you’ve evolved in communication.
Yeah, no. And look, I’m far from perfect, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the last year and, good God, over the last decade. I tried to write it down one time, and the list got pretty long. I was like, “This isn’t helping me move forward. I’m just going to keep focused on what I need to do in the future.”
To your point on vandalism, it’s pretty sad because these individuals are getting amped up on TikTok and Instagram to go take action, and I don’t know if they realize they’re committing a felony.
Hmm.
I saw this individual who just got arrested in, I think, either Ohio or Illinois, and Jason, he’s facing 15 to 20 years in jail.
Oof.
And I’m thinking, I feel horrible, right? I hope maybe he realized it, but what if he didn’t? The person on TikTok or Instagram who’s pushing this—they’re not the ones cutting these things down.
No.
They’re not the ones doing time. They’re just doing this for likes and views, and I don’t like that, right? Because when that camera’s cut down and there’s an Amber Alert, it’s not going to work.
Yeah.
I still don’t have a lot of space in my heart for people who choose to commit a felony rather than go to city council and scream at and fight for what they believe in. That is literally the democratic process.
And vote. They can join city council, and there have been a number of cities that have decided to take Flock down. Am I correct?
Yeah.
And the backlash has caused that, and you’re okay with that if that’s the community’s choice, I would assume.
Yeah, and it’s obviously disheartening when a city chooses to be less safe. That’s tough to hear when there are so many other options to reduce the efficacy of the product rather than just take the cameras out.
To me, the individuals who only look at privacy or only look at safety are both on the wrong side of the equation. We’ve got to find a common ground. That’s the point of the democratic process: common ground on complicated problems. I think safety is up there on Marlowe's hierarchy of things we have to do for our community.
Hmm.
It's one of the most fundamental things that I believe our government owes us: an equal level of safety. And today, the color of your skin, your wealth level, your race—or, sorry, your sex—determines how safe you feel.
Hmm.
Women feel less safe than men. That's a fact.
Sure.
Minorities feel less safe than you and me. That's a fact. If you live in a less affluent city, in a less affluent part of a city, you feel less safe, and I think our government has an obligation to make us all safe.
Hmm.
And that's what we're trying to do, and you'll notice that—
What are the—
Yeah.
What are the privacy folks—where do you find common ground with them?
Yeah.
And where do you find common ground? Obviously, vandalism's an easy one. Okay, let's—
That's an easy one. Yeah.
That's an easy one, but there's a nuance here. Like, “Hey, I didn't opt into this. I don't want my license plate in there.” Is there an ability for them to opt out? And what's the maximum now for the amount that's saved? And really, this is a very nuanced point: what's the audit trail here? If there's a—
Yeah.
Dirty cop, as described, who's into Tony Soprano for 100 dimes for betting on NFL games and he wants to give the mob or somebody a bunch of license plate data from Flock—
Yeah.
What's to stop the dirty cop?
Yeah.
What's to stop this? Do false positives matter? Also, like—
Yeah.
What's the largest window people can use today—
Yeah.
—on Flock?
Let's focus on the abuse thing, because—
Yes.
4. The Dirty Cop Problem
I think that's something that, you know, I was called naive. I would say maybe optimistic. I grew up in Atlanta. I trusted the police. I've always trusted the Atlanta Police Department. Over the last year, I've spent a lot of time talking to people who don't like Flock.
I finally got to the bottom of it. I was like, “Why do you hate this company so much? We sell a camera.”
Yeah.
And I realized this woman was like, “Garrett, I don't trust the police at all.” And I was like—
Ah.
“Ah, that's the root issue.” And I was like, “But why?” And she was like, “They lie, they cheat, they steal. I don't trust any of them.” And I'm like, “Okay. What if you're right and I'm wrong?” And so—
And that might be the case. There have been many—
That might be the case for her.
Yeah, she's right. There have been many cases of police departments that have subverted even the wearable cameras. They turn them off.
Yes.
I mean, we have ICE agents wearing masks and no numbers, so the public—
This is rightfully concerning.
—is rightfully concerned, and they're bundling you as their partner. Now I get it.
Yes. And so this—
So that's where they have a valid concern.
Yes. And so I said, “It's interesting,” and I think if you make it a more macro topic, anyone in a position of power has a higher likelihood of abuse. Look at CEOs, look at elected officials, look at police.
Sure.
When you're in power, abuse tends to follow not too far behind. And so when we met, six or seven years ago, we had the audit log. My assumption was, like, this is good enough. This is what most police systems do: they have this audit log. But what I didn't realize was, you know, I was meeting with a large agency in Southern California, and they've got something like 1,000 officers a day who use Flock. Imagine they're doing 5 or 6 searches a day.
Yes.
And imagine that once a month, one person is supposed to review that audit log.
Yeah.
So they're going to spot-check 10 or 20 searches, which is the best they can do, and then move on. Four months ago, we built this new tool called Audit Assistance. As you know, we solved 1 million crimes last year, so we have a pretty good sense for what normal usage looks like. And then we had just under a dozen abuses over the last 8 years that we had detected and said, “Well, we also kind of know what abuse looks like.”
Hmm.
So we built—
Tell us, what does abuse look like?
Here's a good example. This is the easiest one. Let's say you're an officer and you're trying to stalk me. You would look for me. You'd say, “I'm looking for Garrett's car. It's ABC1234.” And you'd search for it and figure out where it is. Then the next day you'd search for me again, and the next day you'd search for me again. That's very abnormal.
If you were truly trying to find me because I committed a crime, you would have put my tag on a hot list so that anyone else in the police department would also have been notified. You might be asleep, you might be off shift, and because I'm a criminal, everyone has a right—everyone's trying to find me. If you're stalking me, you don't want anyone else to know it's happening. So that's maybe the easiest one we can flag.
We built this tool 4 months ago. We put it out there not knowing whether it was going to work well, how good it was, or how much signal-to-noise there would be. You've seen the headlines over the last few weeks. We've caught a lot of bad cops, and—
Really?
Oh, it's a ton.
Yeah, unpack it for us, then. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a ton. It's more than I ever would have hoped. You look at my home state here in Georgia, where some of our customers have been with us for years, and I have to give those chiefs an applause because they're not hiding behind it. They're publicly saying, “I fired 9 officers today,” which is the most severe offense in Georgia for abusing the system. “They're out of my police department. I don't want them.”
Wow.
And I think that's good. We shouldn't be criticizing those guys. We should be saying, “Thank you, and who's next?” Who else wants to have a clean police department? We now require that as mandatory. It's not even a default; it's a mandatory feature you have to have turned on. We have to find these bad cops and get rid of them. They shouldn't have a badge.
Amazing. And so this is very interesting, I think, because if we assume that, you know, let's just pick a number, 1% of cops do bad things, some people might think it's all cops, and some people might think it's 10%.
Yeah.
I'm just going to say 1%. It's a very small percentage, but in a city with 30,000 or 40,000 police officers, like New York City has, I believe—and I think Los Angeles has 10,000 or 15,000 cops—1% all of a sudden becomes 100 or 300. That's a lot of bad cops. And you've set, in a way, a honeypot for those bad cops.
Yeah.
They probably don't know that this is being tracked. My question to you is, when I make a request—I'm a rank-and-file cop, and I go do this—why should rank-and-file cops be able to do this? Shouldn't there be a higher-level person to whom they put the request? Or maybe there could be a supervisor, and that supervisor says, “I'm looking into this case. I explain why I'm looking into it.” Then a senior person, like a sergeant on duty, has to say, “Okay, you can run that search.”
Yeah.
And then a third person has to look at the sergeant's approvals, and they put a note on it. You could also build that into the system, which is, I think, like a double-key system—
Yeah.
—where 2 people have to say okay to this. Now, if you're a dirty cop, you've got to find a dirty sergeant.
Another dirty cop. Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think what you're describing—we have the, I can show you the screenshots of what it would look like and how it would work, and it's definitely something that's on the whiteboard for how we continue to curb abuse. I think the challenge we face—and you've dealt with this in your software companies—is that we have some customers who have thousands of employees.
I was just on the phone with a police chief in Texas with 20 employees.
Hmm.
The burden of what you and I just described would be pretty big for him, with just 20 officers. He's also not using the product every day. He doesn't need to. There's only a town of 2,000 people.
So the audit log is very slim.
The audit log is slim, so he doesn't need any of the things we're talking about.
Yeah.
And so I do think this is where defaults do matter. This might get to a level of nuance where, okay, for big cities, these are the rules; for medium cities, these are the rules; and for small towns, you have different rules.
They're different than their academies. To become a police officer in New York City is harder—it's a longer academy—than to be a police officer in a small town because there are just different expectations.
Yeah.
You're spot-on. We're not done. I think abuse is a problem that's industry-wide.
It’s not just a Flock thing.
Yeah.
And you look at California: There were 7,000 reported abuses of their state database last year. 7,000.
7,000 abuses of the state database, which means you should have some percentage of that in your system.
Yes.
And I saw that The Washington Post did a story on this, and so the company is evolving and reacting to that. You are responsible now, as a technology provider, for the worst behaviors of your customers. The lesson there is that even if you want to say, “Hey, we just sell a tool,” the reality of running this company is that, since people have to give up some level of privacy to get that security, you actually have to own it.
Yeah.
There’s just no choice. I think previously your approach was, “Hey, it’s a tool. Do with it what you will. You made that choice.”
Yeah.
Which is not exactly an unreasonable thing to say. People sell laptops and cameras and guns to a local police department. They send Tasers to a local police department. We don’t say to the Taser company, “Hey, you’re responsible when somebody gets tased and it was an inappropriate, unjustified tase.”
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To your point, I think our view—my view—of our responsibility has evolved.
Mm.
I would prefer if every elected official understood perfectly how all this technology worked and made decisions that represented their community’s values. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation, because that means they also need to know everything about data centers and everything about waterworks. They’re relying on their police chief to tell them what is best.
Mm.
And that chief is relying on me to educate him on what I think is best.
Mm.
And so I do think the responsibility falls on us to give them strong defaults and then allow them to pivot against those defaults, while still respecting the democratic process.
Yeah. And as the lead company, you’re going to take the arrows, but there are other people. My friend Jamie Siminoff is an incredible entrepreneur—
Yeah, great entrepreneur.
—and a dear friend of mine for many decades. He has Ring, famously, and during the Super Bowl he did this thing like, “Hey, with Ring cameras”—and I guess I don’t know if they’re considered your number-one competitor, because they sell to individuals and then allow the data to be used by police if people opt into that, which is the individual’s right.
Yeah.
They were like, “Hey, we could find a lost dog.” People lost their minds over that because they were like, “Hey, if you can find a lost dog, then you can have somebody stalking”—whatever people’s valid concerns are. My understanding is that they had to turn that feature off after releasing it.
Yeah. No, I’ve known Jamie for a long time as well. I don’t think they’re a competitor. I’d say they’re friendly. We have the same mission, which is to build safer communities in America.
I think he and I have learned a lot over the last year—maybe that we underestimated people’s concerns about how technology could impact them and that we needed to go slower in some cases. We haven’t gotten into the AI topic, but it’s an area where I think we’re doing it smarter now because there’s a version of Flock where we would have just ripped and launched AI feature after AI feature and said, “This is awesome.”
We’re going intentionally really slow. We understand that.
5. AI Needs Human Oversight
What is the opportunity and the concern with AI? Give us the practical—
Yeah.
—in a police state—if it were China and they were using this, because the CCP has a literal police state—that’s very triggering for Americans. They see that, and then they see Flock on this end and Ring on this end, and they say, “Hey, what’s the distance between these two?”
Yeah.
And AI is the obvious one because they’re tracking people with facial recognition and watching their behavior.
Mm-hmm.
They’re like, “This person littered. This person raised their voice.” It’s pretty gnarly.
It’s different. Yeah.
Yeah, it’s very different. Tell us about the AI features, and then what the detective wants most, because the detective wants to close cases reasonably. Then what you’re saying is, “Oof, gosh, that would close the case, but maybe it’s too much of a privacy concern.”
Yeah. Let’s talk about a simple one that’s kind of in debate right now, which is 911 systems. Today, when you call Delta, maybe you get an AI agent, maybe you get a human, but you’re booking a flight, so the risk of hallucination is pretty low. Maybe they book you on the 7:00 p.m. instead of the 4:00 p.m., and you’re like, “What just happened?” But it’s fine.
Yes.
Imagine someone broke into your home and you call 911, and we’ve now switched over our 911 system to an AI bot, and it starts talking to you about what you had for lunch.
Yeah, no good.
No good.
Yeah.
And the risk is so high. We have no idea how these things work, and there’s no good way to control them. That’s pretty well established. You see cities, due to budgetary and staffing issues, leaning in pretty aggressively, and there have been some bad cases where the AI has gotten it really, really wrong.
Mm.
And so I think there’s a smarter way to do it. The smarter way would be, “Okay, look, we’re going to have AI, but AI is only going to pick up when the phone lines are fully busy.”
Yes. Okay.
So it’s like, okay, that’s smarter. But that’s not what’s happening. There’s a reckless way to do it, which is just flip a switch.
Mm.
Or maybe you start with just—
Do you handle 911 systems at all?
We don’t. We—the industry—we don’t do 911 calls. But I’m watching this unfold, and I’m going, “Man, this is a huge risk.” I look for us in this in a way.
I suppose you could use AI to look at patterns and say, “These are abnormal patterns for this car. This car is slowly driving up to this house, then driving away. It slowly drove up to the next house, drove away, and it did that 6 times.”
Yeah.
Is this somebody delivering a lot of burritos, or is this somebody casing the joint? That would be what the detective would be like: “Hey, yeah, let’s get Precogs here.”
That’s really cool.
Precognition—
Yeah.
—from Minority Report to predict a crime—
Yeah.
—because someone was casing the joint.
I don’t want to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don’t want to do that. I think we’ve been really—
For sure, no.
We’ve been really consistent that we never want to be a company that defines suspicion. That’s really dangerous.
People have asked, I’m assuming.
Oh, yeah. But it’s an interesting happy-hour topic: What does that world look like?
Yeah.
But for us, I think it’s really valuable that there’s a human in the loop when it comes to public safety. We’re talking about people’s lives. We’re talking about people’s—
Mm.
It’s really important stuff. We always want to have a human in the loop, and I think there are some products that we could build. But the difference is, knowing the cost of getting it wrong, you have to deploy this with proper third-party attestation that it’s working as expected.
Mm.
It shouldn’t be up to me. It shouldn’t be up to my customers. Someone who actually doesn’t want this to work should come in and say, “Well, guess what? It actually does. This is really good, and it’s making officers more effective. It’s making officers more objective and less subjective.”
That should be our end goal: AI is used in a way that increases the number of crimes they can solve and decreases the likelihood that they get the wrong person. That, to me, is the ideal state, and I just don’t think we should rush there. I think we should be really deliberate about how we get there.
6. Flock Faces Public Reckoning
You’ve lost, I think, dozens of cities out of the 6,000. Some cities are now saying, “Hey, this isn’t worth the trouble,” or too many people protested. Take me through what’s happened.
In the last year with those, I think it's 60 or 70 cities maybe—
Yeah.
—out of 6,000, if I got my numbers correct. 1% have said, “Okay, this isn't for us.”
Yeah, it's tough, right? I want everyone to be safe, and that's why I started the company. I know what they've had, and I know the results we've had, and unfortunately, the majority of the time they're making a decision based on misinformation. I remember vividly one of the first customers that chose to walk away did so because of facial recognition. They went online and Googled “ALPR facial recognition.” They saw one of our competitor's websites and said, “We're getting rid of this Flock thing.”
Mm.
They didn't realize they were looking at the wrong person's website.
Yeah.
That's tough because that's on me, right? That's on me to better communicate to these decision-makers: “Here's what we do. Here's what we don't do.” That's been the bulk of it. I think the other thing that's been tough to see, Jason, is I saw this one city in Washington just turn the cameras off. It's so sad. The next weekend, a little boy gets shot. A car drives off. It's going to be a cold case, and luckily, the city next door still had Flock cameras, found the car, and made the arrest. The kid didn't live, which is horrible.
Mm.
At least their family knows justice was served.
Mm.
I think we're making really consequential decisions based on inaccurate information, and that's tough. I thought we have to do a better job as a company communicating to our customers and their customers' customers, which would be the community, about what this technology does and what it doesn't do. For me, at least, when I speak to, let's call it, 99 people out of 100 and explain the facts, they go, “Why is this a debate?”
Mm.
“This feels like we have control of the city. We can set limits. We can set guardrails. I want to be safer than I feel today.”
I predict—
I've never met somebody who's like, “I want to be less safe.”
Yeah. I predict as you explain this, change the defaults, put the audits in place, and take the dirty cops out of this, you'll see some number of those cities and city councils readdress this when things cool down a little bit. This happened here, where I live now in Austin, Texas. Austin canceled Flock, or didn't renew, whatever, in 2025, according to my notes. Then, people have guns here. I have a gun. I carry a gun. Everybody's got guns.
We had this crazy shooting with a bunch of kids, and it was a similar situation to what you're describing. They were committing these crimes in Austin proper. They drove out of Austin, and the Manor Police Department did have Flock. They picked up the car, and 28 hours later, the 3 teens were arrested. They were juveniles—15, 16, and 17, according to what I'm seeing—and that was the wake-up call here. That brought it back to the forefront, and now everybody's debating it again in Austin.
The ACLU wants 48 hours, I think—
Yeah.
—that's their proposal. That's the ACLU.
That's reasonable.
That's—
Yeah, that's a reasonable stance.
Okay.
Yeah.
These are privacy organizations focused on civil liberties. We get it. Most cops probably want 30 days. Communities are going to set it at 7 or 14 days. That's it. You have competitors. Tell me about the competitors' approach here and how you deal with that as an entrepreneur.
It's funny.
Are they just saying, “Hey, we're just going to sell you the technology, and we're not going to...” Are they going to keep their heads down and sell themselves as, “We're Flock without limits”?
So, to your earlier point, yes, we've had close to 20 cities already turn their cameras back on because they realize they are now less safe, and they have an obligation to their constituents to be safer. It is tough as an entrepreneur because—
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
You want to build as big a business as possible, right? But you also want to do it in a way that, when it's all said and done, your kids go, “I'm so proud to be that guy's son or daughter.” You have to make decisions that you're going to be comfortable with 10 years later. I had a lot of concerns about requiring accountability for all of our customers, knowing very well that I was going to upset a lot of customers potentially. I said to myself, “Look, if a customer doesn't want to be held accountable, I don't think I want them as a customer.”
Hmm.
They can go to one of my competitors who doesn't have these tools or these requirements, and that's okay with me because this is just business, right? It's just a business. Now, it's a business serving a very important mission, but I want to sleep at night, and I do today. Our competitors, to your point, run more recklessly. They operate without these tools and without the scrutiny, and I think it's going to catch up to them. It will catch up to them eventually.
Yeah. As you are willing to lose customers who want the untethered system without proper constraints, you'll lose some of them, but I don't think you want them as customers anyway because it's going to blow back on you. San Francisco famously has these ALPRs—automated license plate something.
Reader.
Automated license plate reader, yeah. So, with the ALPRs, you said earlier that you're also keeping information about whether there were dents in the car, the color of the car, or the make and model of the car. Is that right?
Yeah, it's pretty cool technology and pretty effective because, if you think about what happens on a 911 call, most people don't instinctively look at the license plate and remember it. They see the thing that was unique about the car: “It had damage on the right side.”
I remember vividly that we had this homicide case near me in Atlanta, and all the person could remember was that the back right tire was missing a hubcap.
Hmm.
The detectives would go in and say, “Okay, show me all the cars in this 15-minute window that did not have a back right hubcap.” That's the beginning of an investigation, not the end of an investigation. That's just the way to get started, and that's all they had.
I got to know that great detective pretty well because he's very good at his job. He worked his butt off and found the person. But that was the start.
So, you think of a place like San Francisco, and I saw a tweet the other day about the Flock effect. Crime is down. Stolen vehicles are down. We are one small part of a very big transformation that's happened in that city, including stronger elected officials, stronger enforcement of the law, a strong police chief, a strong DA, and a community that demands to be safe. That's what should happen. If you live in San Francisco, you deserve to be safe. It's one of the best cities in the country.
And San Francisco has a lot of problems, and people are very libertarian, privacy-based, live-and-let-live-based. That's kind of the problem, having lived there: People are so open-hearted from the Summer of Love. It literally comes from the Summer of Love and the fact that it was a mining town. They just have this live-and-let-live attitude. Obviously, a lot of the culture that emerged there is, “Hey, let your freak flag fly. Do what you want to do.” Even to the point of, “Hey, if people are stealing, why are they stealing? What happened in their childhood?” People there have had enough. The fact that San Francisco—
Yeah.
—and I think this is the correlation—do you have the ability and the entitlement to say, “I don't need to worry about this because I have security at my house. I have a security guard. I have a personal driver. I have personal security,” which, by the way, a lot of rich people now have in some combination, at a minimum? I have cameras, I have people, all this stuff. You start painting that picture, and you have to be extremely aware of your own privilege—that you don't have to deal with crime.
My brother was a cop during the stop-and-frisk era in New York. Stop-and-frisk, which was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, was stopping people because they were hanging out, so it definitely was a little step too far. But New York in the '70s and '80s was dangerous as hell. There were a lot of guns on the street. My brother took a couple of guns off the street. Cops were in a really tough situation. The people in the poorest communities were the most in favor of stop-and-frisk.
They always leave out the “ask,” because they’re like, “We’re just going to stop you and frisk you.” No. They would stop and say, “Hey, what are you up to?” and “Hey, you’re hanging out on the corner. What’s going on?” They’d just try to get a read on people.
By the way, if you ever go to Israel or some other countries, they ask you 20 questions: “Why are you here? Where are you staying?” They might ask you a couple of personal questions, which would be offensive to Americans. But the correlation was really that people who experience crime are in favor of it.
People who live in Pacific Heights don’t need to worry about this, man. Something goes down in Pacific Heights, and there are 20 cops and 50 private security guards rallying around one homeless person, one vagrant, or one person in a car that doesn’t look like it should belong there. They’re going to get swarmed in Pacific Heights.
Yep. You hit the nail on the head. It’s not spoken about as much, but it’s worth looking at who is so against what we do and who is so for it. It’s typically people who don’t have any other way to protect themselves, who need this, who want this, right?
For those who have a gate, a guard, cameras, a security system, Jamie’s incredible doorbell camera, and all these products and services, they’re like, “Why does anyone need to feel any safer?” It’s because most people don’t have any of this stuff. They don’t feel safe when they go to bed, and it’s quite telling.
I’m rooting for you to get everything right and to continue making communities safer. I’m also rooting for communities to make their own decisions.
100%.
I think that is the key part of this that people need to embrace as well. If you’ve chosen to live in a gated community, you’ve made that choice for security, in all likelihood.
If you were to ask poor people, or people who don’t get to live in a gated community—people with families—“Hey, would you like to live in a gated community, or would you like to live not in a gated community?” 100 out of 100 people—I mean, maybe it’s 95. If you offered the average Joe or Jane, “Would you like your community to be gated, with 3 gates and a security guard?” they’d be like, “Heck yes, but I can’t afford that. How much is that going to cost?”
This is where I think people with children and people with homes just have a different view of this than maybe when you’re younger and you can afford to say, “Listen, I don’t have kids. I care about my safety. I care about my privacy, not my safety.”
Privacy.
Yeah, and I understand it. I don’t want the government to have a national Flock database. I don’t want the government to do facial recognition. I find that a bridge too far.
Yeah.
I’ve seen license-plate data retained for 2 weeks or 30 days. I feel okay with it. I’m sorry if people are disappointed in me for that, but as a parent and somebody in a community, I’m okay with my community having license-plate readers for up to 30 days. That’s the decision I came to.
Well, and Jason, I think to your point, I had this interesting conversation with an elected official in Illinois who was one of our largest antagonists, very anti-Flock. It was really sad and scary: she was the victim of political violence. Someone shot at her house, and the police used a Flock camera to find that person.
Mm.
And, to her credit, she changed. She’s now one of our largest advocates because she realizes you don’t get to pick when you’re the victim of violence.
Mm.
You don’t get to pick. Sometimes it’s random, sometimes it’s intentional, but everyone wants justice when something bad happens, and everyone wants to know that they’re going to be safe.
I think you’re right. My hope is that these kinds of conversations actually lead to fruitful debates about how we have both safety and privacy, and that we don’t necessarily let a loud minority dictate our movement toward a less safe society. That would be pretty sad.
Yeah. And listen, you have been in what I would describe as a PR disaster over the last year because of this. How far through the PR disaster are you? You’ve changed a lot of the communications.
Yeah.
Is this something Flock can recover from, or is this company-killing? Like, “Oh my God, we’re screwed”?
Yeah.
To be honest with us about the PR disaster of the last year, how that’s affected you, how that’s informed how you run the company—
Yeah.
—and how damaging has it been?
I think the biggest damage is the internal morale, because you go onto X or Reddit and ask, “Why are people so mad at us when we’ve been doing the same thing for 9 years? And why are they so mad at us for things we don’t do?”
We just want people to be safe, and that’s tough, right? It’s really hard for your work to be challenged so miserably.
I think the interesting part is that it’s brought us closer to our customers, because they have a job to do, which is to keep their community safe. They see this as one of the most critical parts, if not the most critical part, of how they do their job.
Mm.
There was a chief who was like, “This is the best thing since DNA—”
Yeah.
—in terms of fighting crime, and I agree with him.
So that’s on the good side. I think the business is in good shape. We raised more money at the beginning of the year. The company is still growing. We could be growing faster. We used to have zero churn. Now we have—
Yeah.
To your point, 1% churn. Okay, well, I would like to be back at zero. I’m going to fight as hard as I can to get the right message out there, to communicate better, and to listen more. I think if we do that, we’re going to be just fine.
At the end of the day, everyone wants to be safe. That hasn’t changed, and it will probably never change. Just like everyone wants to have food and everyone wants to have a roof, those are core needs we have.
It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Safety is up there, and—
It’s high.
And I think for your company, you’re going to have to lead, and you’re going to have to be ahead of these things. I look at Zuckerberg and Facebook: they’ve always been playing defense and catching up on the impact that, let’s say, Instagram had on—
Yeah.
—young teens, eating disorders, and addiction to social media. X and Twitter had political nonsense and people trying to subvert democracy. All of these social networks had a serious downside that’s now been quantified, et cetera. It would’ve been so much better if he was ahead of it and said, “Listen, I have kids.”
Yeah.
“I understand where you’re coming from. I think there should be an age gate.”
He just wrote that manifesto last week, and I’ll give him credit because I think he was looking at it and saying, “There are obviously selfish business needs.” He wants to be part of the AI revolution, but I think he was also identifying the issue, trying to get ahead of it, and showing some empathy: “Hey, yeah, you could lose your job because of AI. Here’s how I think if you use the tools, you wouldn’t lose your job. And if you have open source and it’s available to everybody, not just the rich, and we give you agents and free AI that other people are paying thousands of dollars a month for, hey, maybe that levels the playing field.”
And I think that’s what CEOs have to do right now—
Mm-hmm.
—in this media-saturated world. A story can go viral so fast, and you’ve got to get ahead of it, anticipate these things, own them, and just be frank about it.
Tucker Carlson demolished you last week. Have you reached out to Tucker to go on his pod?
No, I don’t know if that’s something that’s in my deck of cards. But I appreciate it. I do like T-shirts, I guess is what I’d say. I wear T-shirts. I put a polo on for you.
Okay.
I thought a collar would be appropriate, but no, I’m—
I’m wearing a polo, too, in the hot Austin sun right now.
Yeah, you look great. But no, I think we want to go to places where the community listens. We want to have meaningful conversations, and we’re not done. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and I think we didn’t get to drones.
Oh, yeah.
How did the drones happen?
7. Drones Change First Response
Drones are probably our fastest-growing business unit right now. Our LPR business is just under 50% of our forward-looking revenue. So it’s a big part of our business, but we’ve got drones, live video cameras, and some really cool software.
The story I’d share with you about drones, which is one of my favorite stories, is that these drones live in an HVAC-controlled box—a dock, per se—on top of a roof, typically at a police precinct or a fire department. When a 911 call happens, instead of sending an officer first, you can send a drone.
There was this really interesting case, not too far from you, up in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where a woman at a gas station late at night called 911 and said, “There’s a man walking back and forth with a gun. I don’t feel safe.” Obviously, it’s not illegal to garnish a weapon in the state of Texas, but she was scared, right?
Well, you can carry one, but you can’t be waving it around.
But she did—
Yeah.
Fair enough, fair enough. So she called 911, and normally what would happen is one cop would hear that, flip on the blue lights, race down there, heart racing. He’s got his gun ready, and someone’s about to die.
Yep.
Instead, they launched the drone. The drone’s at 400 feet, flying 60 miles an hour, so it gets there in under a minute.
As the crow flies.
Yep. It’s got a 40x optical zoom, so it zooms all the way in. It’s not a gun; it’s a lighter. It’s one of those toy lighter things.
Yes. Yeah.
They call the woman back and say, “Hey, ma’am, it’s just a lighter. You’re okay.” I share that story because so much of my business has revolved around solving crime, but it’s more than crime. It’s about safety. How do we help the community feel safe?
This is an example where we mitigated what would’ve been a really bad situation for everyone. We have thousands and thousands of stories like that where communities are safer now with our drones, and they’re safer with our cameras. To your earlier point, we’ve got to do a better job communicating how it all works, and we’ve got to teach our customers how to do that, too, because we’re only one company. We have thousands and thousands of customers, and we need their help in telling this story.
Yeah, I think the new tool you’re talking about with the audit trail has great potential. I think a third-party auditor—so if you sell the system, it can come with third-party auditing. People use Ernst & Young or whatever to audit books.
What’s the equivalent here of an auditor that would say, “Hey, the drone got launched. This isn’t a dirty cop sending a drone to stalk their ex-spouse or break somebody’s privacy, and we’re just going to review every drone flight in real time”? Because now you start sending drones, Tucker’s going to look at that or the ACLU’s going to look at that and say, “Okay, so now you’re peeking in my window.”
There have got to be massive safeguards on the drone getting deployed. Is it only deployed if there’s a 911 call? Is that the—
This is the next big chapter for law enforcement: doing a better job implementing drones than they’ve done historically. You look at something like body cameras, and I’m not sure how much you follow this, but there was massive outrage over body cameras. Now it’s like, wait a second, this is actually really good. It’s a better tool. And same with nonlethal weapons.
So, no, there’s still more work to do there. To your point on the third-party auditors, you’ve got a city manager.
Mm.
Effectively, his or her job is to hold the police chief accountable.
And they can see the audit logs.
And then—
They can go in there themselves.
They can see the audit logs. Yeah, they can see the audit logs. They can also see the flight patterns. Most of our customers have a transparency portal. It has the audit log, how many cameras they have, their drones, and their drone flights. Now, there’s a lag, right? We want to delay—
Yeah.
—so we don’t break—
You don’t want people racing and chasing to the crime scene.
—an active criminal investigation.
Yeah.
And so there’s a lag, but I look at that, and what’s going to be hard for our customers is getting comfortable with this ever-growing expectation of both transparency and accountability.
Yeah.
We’re going to push them. We’re going to push them hard.
Yeah.
But the community is also going to push them as hard.
Some of these things, like 911 calls in many jurisdictions, are public.
Public record.
They’re public record, and same thing with radios, although some places don’t have those as public record. Or they don’t have the radios encrypted. So drone flights are one where, should drone flights just be on the website? “Here are all the drone flights that occurred, and here are the 911 calls that are with them.” Are people doing that, or does your software do that for them?
It would be possible.
Yeah.
We’ve never had a customer ask to do it.
Yeah.
We have this concept of a spectator mode, which would be available for city officials and command staff. But I think your question is the right one, and I think as an industry, we’re going to have to make these decisions sooner rather than later about what that default is.
We have a default now, but there’s very little state regulation. There’s zero federal regulation outside of air safety, which is important, but nothing yet on transparency—
What’s the shortest state regulation or city regulation for the—
LPR?
Yeah.
So the shortest—
How many days? Yeah.
You’ve got New Hampshire at 3 minutes, and then—
3 minutes for license plate reading?
Yeah.
Okay, that’s the equivalent of zero.
But that’s New Hampshire. That’s New Hampshire, though. So that—
Sure. Live free or die.
But—
Okay.
Yeah.
Got it.
And then the next-nearest state is 21 days.
Interesting. Wow.
That’s the state of Washington.
Okay.
Well, here you are, folks. If you want to really live off the grid in privacy—
New Hampshire.
New Hampshire: live free or die. Garrett, I appreciate your candidness, and good luck being in such a controversial space and getting ahead of these things. I wish you great luck with it.
We can agree, I think, publicly, for everybody to agree and disagree on the margins about these things, but it’s up to the community to make these decisions—
Yeah.
—I think, and I think that’s the high-order bit here. I think that’s what you’re starting to really get right: This is your community’s streets. You don’t want it, turn it off. You want it for 48 hours, put it at 48 hours. We’re going to have some reasonable caps on this. I wish you great luck with it.