New York
—
On Thursday afternoon in New York City, I sat down with Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley. We met to debate the firm’s enlargement from making cameras for studying license plates to constructing drones for legislation enforcement, and his response to latest privacy considerations surrounding Flock’s expertise.
Just hours later, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez credited Flock’s cameras and expertise for serving to to locate the Brown University shooting suspect.
To Langley, the scenario underscored the worth and significance of Flock’s expertise, regardless of mounting privacy considerations that have prompted some jurisdictions to cancel contracts with the firm.
“America cannot tolerate tragedies like what we saw at Brown and MIT this past week,” Langley mentioned in an X post following the information. “We intend to continue using technology to make sure our law enforcement are empowered to do their jobs.”
Langley advised me on Thursday that he was motivated to begin Flock to maintain Americans safer. His aim is to discourage crime by convincing would-be criminals they’ll be caught.
“I think we run a risk today as a country that a generation of people will not believe America works for them because they don’t feel safe, because in some communities … you don’t feel safe,” Langley mentioned. “It’s too easy to get away with crime in America.”
Flock is a security expertise firm that works with native legislation enforcement companies and personal corporations. The Atlanta-based firm, based in 2017, announced in March that it was valued at $7.5 billion after its newest $275 million funding spherical from main Silicon Valley traders, who embrace Andreessen Horowitz and the Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund.
Its flagship product is an outside digital camera, known as “LPR” cameras, that can learn license plates and determine different particulars about autos as they drive by. Flock’s AI system permits police to go looking its community of footage for a selected automobile. Around 6,000 legislation enforcement companies throughout the United States use its LPRs.
That’s how Providence Police tracked down 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, who police say was liable for each the Brown shooting and the killing of an MIT professor days later.
Perez described plugging an outline of Valente’s automobile into Flock’s system. One of Flock’s cameras had lately noticed the automobile, serving to police pinpoint Valente’s location.
Flock turned on extra AI capabilities that weren’t a part of Providence Police’s contract with the firm to help in the hunt, an organization spokesperson advised NCS, together with a function that can determine the similar automobile based mostly on its description even when its license plates have been modified.
The firm has confronted criticism from some privacy advocates and group teams who fear that its networks of cameras are gathering an excessive amount of private data from personal residents and could possibly be misused. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have urged communities to not work with Flock.
“State legislatures and local governments around the nation need to enact strong, meaningful protections of our privacy and way of life against this kind of AI surveillance machinery,” ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley wrote in an August weblog post.
Flock additionally drew scrutiny in October when it announced a partnership with Amazon’s Ring doorbell digital camera system that lets public security companies request video footage from Ring prospects. Ring has previously faced criticism for the way it works with legislation enforcement, though its video sharing with police has been walked again in recent times.
Even as Flock’s enterprise grows, numerous cities have stopped working with the firm. Police in Redmond, Washington, suspended operation of their metropolis’s Flock cameras earlier this yr after a report that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers had used knowledge from the cameras for deportation efforts. And the metropolis of Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the place the MIT professor was killed, ended its contract with Flock earlier this month, following group privacy considerations.
Flock says it might probably’t management native legislation enforcement sharing knowledge from their Flock cameras with federal companies. When requested about the broader surveillance considerations, Langley advised me it was as much as police to reassure communities that the cameras could be used responsibly.
“If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he mentioned. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.”
Langley added that Flock has constructed some guardrails into its expertise, together with audit trails that present when knowledge was accessed. He pointed to a case in Georgia the place that audit discovered a police chief utilizing knowledge from LPR cameras to stalk and harass individuals. The chief resigned and was arrested and charged in November.
“We have to give law enforcement tools to do their job, and we should also hold them accountable to not break the law,” Langley mentioned.
More lately, the firm rolled out a “drone as first responder” service — the place legislation enforcement officers can dispatch a drone geared up with a digital camera, whose footage is equally searchable through AI, to judge the scene of an emergency name earlier than human officers arrive. Flock’s drone techniques accomplished 10,000 flights in the third quarter of 2025 alone, in accordance with the firm.
Drones may assist legislation enforcement and public security companies already scuffling with understaffing reply extra shortly and successfully to requires service, Langley mentioned.
I requested what he’d inform communities already nervous about surveillance from LPRs who may be cautious of camera-equipped drones additionally flying overhead. He mentioned cities can set their very own limitations on drone utilization, akin to solely utilizing drones to answer 911 calls or positioning the drones’ cameras on the horizon whereas flying till they attain the scene. He added that the drones fly at an elevation of 400 ft.
“My whole philosophy as the CEO of Flock is: No one elected me president, no one elected me to be police chief of America,” Langley mentioned. “It’s my job to build the tools and give the guardrails for how to implement them in different cities.”