Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Controversy, "Surveillance State" Claims, and Privacy vs Safety

Sometimes a politician, sometimes a CEO, sometimes an investor, all the time, an important discussion.

“And one of the most important discussions of the moment is balancing safety and privacy.”

And there is one company that has, you know, is that 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 and start up my other podcast that I've been doing for 16 years. I don't know how many years ago that was six or seven years. Six or seven years. Yeah. And I've been following your company full disclosure. I was like trying to invest that one point. I'm not a shareholder.

But I've always been intrigued by what you're doing on the margin sometimes concerned. And it seems like you've been so

successful with Flock, which does safety cameras, licensed plate readers specifically when you get into all the details today. But 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 at reducing crime. We'll get into that. But there is now a group of people who maybe are have privacy concerns.

“And 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 everything. And this grand debate we're going to have. How much privacy am I going to give up to get safety? And 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, so it's to your world's greatest moderator, GM. I know there's something I'd say. Apple 11 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 Apple 11 ads

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Tell us a little bit about flock safety and how many communities you're in now. And then also the drone components. 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 yet. Jason, thanks for having me. So I started the company nine years ago with a pretty simple mission, which is to live in a safer neighborhood. And that was our initial pitch.

You know, if you look at our first two or three years in business, it was just neighborhoods. We sold the neighborhood to be sold a license plate reading camera, which is pretty basic technology, a car drive spy. We take a still image of vehicle. We'd read the license plate. And then the system's gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or a dent or damage. But that's at its core on what the technology does.

And if you look at this last year to your point, we've had a tremendous impact on the country.

North of a million crimes solved using flock. North of 10,000 people found to we're missing.

And that's everything from our grandparents with dementia to our children. Like just last week in Atlanta, there was a stolen car that happened to have a two-year-old in the backseat. And thankfully, because of very hard work by a natively department in our cameras, that little kid was safely returned within the hour. I don't know what that would have happened if without flock. And that's one story, but that's my own

city last week. And you look at July as a, you know, as a data point last month, it was about 1,025 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. And those are the cars we used to drive our kids to school, to drive to work. And so we're in, you know, roughly six, you know, just over 6,000, they're so cities across the country. And in the consequence, you know, of being that consequential

“is people have a lot of questions. And people have a lot of debates. And I think it's a”

is a worthwhile thing to talk about what kind of society do 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, you know, to find that balance is not easy. I remember when we had our first discussion and gosh, so many years ago on this weekend startups, we were talking about it and I had brought up this, you know, hey, well, what happens about abuse in the system? Because once in a while,

you get a dirty cop. If you watch any kind of procedural TV, you watch a law in order, you watch the sopranos, the sopranos, you know, Tony sopranos, got a dirty cop who's, you know, you know, in the hole for, you know, some gambling debt and they run license plate for them, right? This is like a trope on the news. And it's a trope because it's common, not like on a percentage basis, but we all know that any system that records data could be abused. We saw it at Facebook.

and the industry had to make a lot of change. So I remember at the time, you were telling me, hey, the settings, and this is where we're going to get really granular today. The settings are set by the local community. And these cameras are installed by a local community. The communities I've lived and have had them. So let's answer these two questions. Number one, how does a community

“wind up having flock cameras installed? What's that decision making process like typically?”

And then we'll get into it very granularly. What you're recording for how long who has access the audit logs and then what's not recorded? Yep, that's a great question. So one of the reasons Jason, we struggled so much to raise money as a business is because it is traditionally and was for flock very hard to get contracts done with local government. The last company to go public that service to local

government was over 20 years ago. This is a really hard space because city councils have the final decision. And so every two weeks a city council meets and their, you know, the city managers, direct reports, be it a police chief, fire chief, public works, presents ideas, presents concepts they would like to get approval for. And flock is on that list. And so I think 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 just going to city council meetings explaining what flock does and what flock doesn't do. And it's just a, it's just a cost of doing business with local government. So it's really straightforward. And then I was actually talking to the chief,

our first ever police chief down in Jersey Village, Texas, talking to him a couple of weeks ago.

Unlike that video, that council the six years ago is still public record. Yes, city council meetings are famously recorded. It's tough. It's a wacky environment. It is, it can be particularly wacky. And but we go, right, because we want people to know what they're buying. So they buy the products. And, you know, what has been true for the last nine

“years. As we've always said, this data is a liability on NASA. You should have a set retention period.”

And that retention period for how in this data will be stored is going to determine the efficacy of the products. And so if you don't beat this data in a day or two, it's going to be less effective. It's not going to be better than nothing. And if you hold this for 30 days, it's going to be pretty

effective. And if you hold it for a year, it'd be more effective. And we always believe

city council should have that final say for how long they want to store it. And who they want to share it with. And so for the longest time, 30 days was our default. We've recently shifted that down to seven days. And we think that's a reasonable trade off. But we still think city should decide more states for that matter. But someone who is a democratically elected should have the final decision of how this technology works in their community. But what I think you probably agree with with

the technology provider, we have to set strong defaults. We think that matter is what we say in the industry. Yes. And you know, if you think about the number of crimes of a hundred crimes, how many would, and I'm sure you have some idea of this, if we have a hundred crimes that occurred over whatever the nature are, how many are solved with seven days of data, 30 days of data, or require more than 30 days of data? We have a, we have a good sense, right? I mean,

I'm going to give you an aggregate data when across the whole country. We think 90% of crimes will be solved within seven days of data retention. Beautiful. It is Jason, but I would tell you, I probably talk to two or three hundred police chiefs this week. And they remind me, and I

“can tell them, you should tell your city council this, too. The 10% we're talking about,”

but the 10% you read about in the news, though. Oh, right, it's the, it's the homicide that

there was never a 911 call because someone was killed, and it takes five days to discover the

body because of a welfare check, and then it's a complicated case. Or it's a look and I'm sorry to, you know, go to this topic. It's a rape victim who 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? Like 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. Yeah, it's a process to even identify the crime.

So what we're saying is now, with 30 days of the 10% remaining that, you know, and we're just ballparking here, but that less 10% how many of those out of 10 would be resolved with 30 days of dating? We think the majority. And look, we're not going to lose, we're not going to, we're not going to tell cities how to run themselves. And to be clear, you know, there's states like New Jersey where state law is five years. And so every customer holds it for five years. In the state of California,

regulation. And they set a maximum limit. But I think for me, Jason, what's important more than

my just default is making sure city councilors and mayors are educated that they have control. They can make this choice. And they should actually go spend time with their police chief and figure out, what does he or she think is the best for that community? And I think look, there's some communities who are going to push for two days or three days. And I think that's that's so much better than nothing because that amyreler and that's silver alert, which are the things we all lose sleep over.

Yep, they're still going to get solved too. So it's just like literally lose sleep over. I got one up two in the morning the other day and I wake up, I've read it. I'm like, I'm not, I don't know what I'm going to do with this data to am and I'm in bed. But okay, so this seems completely fair in terms of how you're expressing it. And 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? And I was kind of finding myself advocating in my community, hey, I would be okay, just as Jake had the dad and somebody who sometimes on the margins has some privacy security issues, they're not acute like for, you know, I don't know, Sam Altman tragically and what's happened at his house twice. You know, but I have my own security cameras.

I use unity, it's incredible. Yeah, great products. And I have a licensed plate reader on mine,

I have facial recognition on mine, that's some of my private property, of course. Some of it does look out on public roads 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 it. It is legal. It is legal. So are there communities that are using other systems that are not flock and recording every single person in and out

because when I go in and out of private communities once in a while, I see this four or five

“cameras. I know I'm on camera. So aren't people already doing full video in their communities?”

Not using flock? Yeah, no, I mean, Jason, you're spot on. I mean, we don't do facial recognition. We don't capture video. We don't look inside the car. We don't even allow in our system to search for people for our life steering cameras. And that's in direct conflicts with some of our biggest competitors who do all of the things I just mentioned. And unfortunately, unfortunately, we've been very successful. And as kind of the industry leader, the spotlight's on us. And that's okay,

because my hope is the changes we're making, the changes we'll continue to make will force the rest of the industry to follow suit. And I hope the counselor has asked questions of the systems

they have if it's not flock. And maybe they'll search to flock. When 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, 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 one for me is security. I'm willing to give up my license plate data.

If somebody knows my exact whereabouts for 30 days of my license plates, I'm okay with that, 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 done on this. But, you know, it's kind of”

a moving target. And I guess the reaction you guys had was, and I think I had talked about this, as you call them terrorists, like the people taking the cameras, the how and, you know, this kind of thing, where does this audience who's ripping down cameras? I mean, obviously, in a terrorist, I think they're like activists. I would say would be a better descriptor. But you guys haven't communicated this perfectly in my opinion. So where are people coming to you with valid concerns?

Yeah. And then how have you evolved your ability to communicate what you're doing? And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this, because I looked at them. I was like, I don't think you're doing a particularly good job of communicating this. And I also think the people who are ripping down the cameras, they think they're in a surveillance state with permanent records and facial recognition. So I think they don't actually understand the nuances and contours in the

product. So talk about where you got it right, where you got it wrong, and who's evolved in communication. Yeah. 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 couldn't even, I tried to write it down one time, and the list got pretty long, and I was like, this isn't helping me move forward. I'm just going to I'm going to keep focused on what I need to do in the future. I mean, to your point on vandalism,

it's pretty sad because these individuals are getting kind of amped up from on TikTok and on Instagram to go take action. And I don't know if they realize

it was out of Ohio or Illinois. And Jason, he's facing like 15 to 20 years in jail and I'm thinking,

“I feel horrible, right? I don't think he, maybe he realized it, but what if he didn't? And the”

person who's on TikTok or Instagram is pushing this, they're not, they're not the ones cutting these things down, they're not on Twitter. They're doing this for likes and views. And you know, that I don't like, right? Because when that camera is cut down and there's that Amber alert, something to work. And that, you know, I still don't have a lot of space in my heart for people who choose to commit the felony versus go to city council and, and scream and fight for what they believe in.

That is. And they could join city council and there have been a number of cities that have decided to take flock down, am I correct? And the backlash is cause that and you're okay with that of, that's the community choice. Yeah. Yeah. And it's obviously just hardening when a city chooses to be less safe. You know, that's top to hear when there's so many other options to reduce the efficacy of the product versus just take them out. You know, to me, the individuals who only

look at privacy are only looking safety are both on their own side of the equation. Like we've got to find a common ground, that's the point of the democratic processes, common ground on complicated problems. And I think safety is up there on Marla's hierarchy of like things we have to do for our community. And this one of the most fundamental things that I believe our government owes us is an equal level of safety. And today, depending on the color of your skin, the in your

wealth level and your race, that's sorry, in your sex determines how safe you feel. Women feel less safe than men. That's a fact. Short 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. And that's what we're trying to do”

and you'll notice that. What are the privacy folks? Where do you find common ground with them? And where do you feel obviously vandalisms in easy one? Okay. 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 is the max now for the amount that's saved? And then really, this is a very nuanced point. What's the audit trail here? If there's a dirty cop as described

who's into Tony soprano for a hundred dines for his betting on NFL games. And he wants to give them a mob or somebody, like a bunch of license plate data from flock, what's to stop the dirty game? What's to stop this and do false matter? But also like, yeah. What's the largest window people can use today on floor? Let's only abuse things because I think that's something that 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. And over the last year, I've spent a lot of

time talking to people who don't like flock. And I finally got to the bottom of it. So I was like, why do you hate this company so much? We sell like camera. And I realized this woman was like, Garrett, I don't trust the police at all. And I was like, 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. I'm like, okay, man, what if you're, what if you're right, not wrong? And so, and that might be the case.

There might be the case. Yeah, she's right. There have been many cases of police departments that have subverted, you know, even the wearable cameras. They turn them off. I mean, we have ice agents wearing masks and no numbers. So the public is rightfully concerned and they're bundling you as their partner. Now I get this. Now that's where they have a valid concern. Yes. And so we said,

“you know, it's interesting. And I think if you make it a more macro topic, any one in a position of”

power, there's a higher likelihood of a look at CEOs, look at elected officials, look at police. When you're in power, abuse tends to follow Nazi far behind. And so when we met, you know, six or seven years ago, we had the audit loan. And my assumption was like, this is good enough. This is what most police systems do is they have this audit loan. But what didn't realize us, he was meeting with a large agency in Southern California, and they've got something like 1,000 officers a day

that used to flock. And imagine they're doing five or six searches a day. And imagine on one some month, someone, one person is supposed to review that audit loan. Yeah. So they're going to spot check, 10 or 20 searches, which is the best I can do. And then move on. And so we built four

months ago, we built this new tool called audit assistance. Because, you know, we saw a million

And then we had about, you know, just under a dozen of uses or for the last eight years that we

had detected. And said, we also kind of know what abuse looks like. Tell us about this abuse look like. So here's a good example. This is the easiest one. Let's say you're an officer. And you'll say you're trying to stalk me. You would look for me. You'd say I'm looking for Garrett's car. It's ABC 1-2-4. And you'd search for it. And you kind of figure out where it is. And then the next day you'd search for me again. And then the next day you'd search for me again. That's very abnormal. If you were

truly trying to find me because I'd committed a crime, you would have put my tag on the hot list so that anyone else in the police department would have been also notified because you might be asleep, you might be off shift because I'm a criminal. So 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. And so that's it. Maybe that's the easiest one we can flag. But so we built this tool four months ago. We

kind of put it out there, not knowing is it going to work well, how, how, how, how. How good is it? How much to go to noise. So you've seen the headlines of last few weeks. We've called a lot of about cops. And yeah, it's a ton. Yeah, it's a ton. It's more than I ever would hoped. And you look at my home state here in Georgia where some of our customers are doing this for years. And I have to give those chiefs an applaud because they're not hiding behind it. They're publicly saying

I fired nine officers today, which is, which is the most severe offense in Georgia for abusing the system. They're out of my fleece department. I don't want them. Wow, and I think that's good. And like we should be, we shouldn't be criticizing those guys. We should be saying thank you and who's next? Like who else wants to have a clean police department? And so we now are requiring

“that as a mandatory. It's not even a default. It's a mandatory feature you have to have for”

a dollar. And 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 pick a number 1% of cops do bad things. Some people might think it's all cops. Some people might think it's 10%. I'm just going to say 1%. It's a very small percentage. But as a, in a city with 30 or 40,000 police officers like New York City has, I believe, and I think less than just 10, 15,000 cops. 1% all of a sudden becomes 100 or 300. That's a lot of bad cops. And you have set in a way, a honeypot for those bad cops. And, you know, 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 top and I go do this. Why should rank and file cops be able to do this? Shouldn't there be like a higher level person who they put the request in? Or maybe there could be like a supervisor and that supervisor says, I'm looking into this case. I explain why I'm looking into it. And then a senior person like a

sergeant on duty, they have to say, OK, you can run that search. And then a third person has to look

at the sergeants, OKs, and they put a note on it. You could also build that into the system,

“which is, you know, I think like a double key system, where two people have to say, OK to this,”

which now you're a dirty cop, you've got to find a dirty job. No, I think what you're describing, we have, I can show you the screenshots of what it looks like and how it would work and it's definitely something that's on the whiteboard for how it continued to curb abuse. I think the challenge we face, and you've done with this in your software companies, we have some customers who have thousands of employees and we have some who, I was just on the phone with the police chief

in Texas with 20 employees. The burden of what we, you and I just described, would be pretty, pretty big for him, which is 20 officers. He's also not using the product every day. He doesn't need to. There's only a ton of 2,000 people. So the amount of log is very slim. A lot of log is slim, so he doesn't need any of the things we're talking about. And so, I do think this is where defaults do matter, and this might get to a level of nuance where, OK, for big cities, these are rules for medium

cities. These are the rules, and for small towns, you have different rules. Another thing there are 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's just different

“expectations. So, yeah, your 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 was 7,000 reported abuses of their state database last year. That's a thousand of the state database. Yeah, which means you should have some percentage of that in the system. And I saw the Washington Post did a story on this. And so, the companies evolving and reacting to that. And so, you are responsible now as a technology provider with the worst behaviors of your customers. And so, the less in there is,

you know, people have to give up some level of privacy to get that security. You actually have to

“own it. This is no choice. And I think previously your approach was, hey, it's a tool”

do with it what you will. You made that choice. Which is not exactly an unreasonable thing to say. People sell laptops and cameras and guns through 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 taser and it was an inappropriate taser. It was an unjustified taser. But here we are. This is different. This is qualitatively different because America and Americans really value privacy.

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“To your point, I think our view, my view of our responsibility has evolved. Now, I would prefer”

if every elected official understood how all the technology worked perfectly and made decisions that represented their community values. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation because that means they also need to know everything about data centers, they need to know everything about waterworks like they're relying on their police chief to tell them what is best. And that sheep's relying on me to educate him on what I think is best. And so, I do think the

responsibility must be responsible. It falls on us to give those strong defaults and then allow them to pivot against it and still respect the democratic process, but focus on the defaults. Yeah, and as the lead candidate, you're going to take the arrows, but there's other people,

my friend Jamie Siminoff, who's an incredible entrepreneur. Yeah, great entrepreneur. And a

dear friend of mine for many decades. He has rain famously and during the Super Bowl, he did this thing like, hey, with rain 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 individuals, right? They were like, hey, we could find a lost dog and then people lost their mind over that because they were like, hey, you could find a lost dog

then you can, you know, have somebody stalking, whatever people's valid concerns are, and they had to turn that feature off as my understanding after releasing it. Yeah, no, I've known Jamie for a long time as well. I don't think they're a competitor at say they're friendly,

“we have the same mission, which is to build safer communities in America. And I think him and I”

have learned a lot over the last year of, you know, maybe underestimating people's concerns

with how technology could impact them and needing to maybe go slower in some cases. Like, we, you know, we haven't gotten into the AI topic, but it's an era where I think we're doing it smarter now, because there's a version of lock where we would have just ripped and launched AI feature after AI feature and said, this is awesome. And we're going intentionally really slow. What does the opportunity and the concern with AI? What gives us the practical, you know,

you know, and if we were in a police state, but was China and they're using this, like, the CCP has a literal police state. That's very triggering for Americans because they see that then they say, "Flock on this end and bring on this end," and they say, "Hey, what's the distance between these two?" And AI's the obvious one because they're tracking people with facial recognition and they're watching their behavior. They're like, "This person littered, this person raised their

voice." Like, it's pretty naughty. Yeah. That's very different. So tell us about the AI features, and then what detective wants most, because the detective wants to close cases, reasonably, and then what you're saying, like, "Oh, gosh, that would close the case," but maybe it's too much our privacy concern. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about a simple one that's kind of in debate right now, which is 911 systems. Today, you know, 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 kind of hallucination is pretty low. Maybe they're booking on the 7pm instead of the 4pm, and you're like, "What just happened?" But it's fine. Imagine someone broken to 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 have for lunch. Yeah, no good. No good. And the risk is so high, and we have no idea how these things work.

And there's no good way to control them. That's like, I think that's pretty well in sap. And so you see cities, due to budgetary reasons, and due to staffing issues, kind of leaning in pretty aggressively,

And so I think there's a smarter way to do it. Like, the smarter way to do it, it would be, okay, look, we're going to bring an AI, but AI's only going to pick up when the phone lines are fully busy. Yes, okay. So it's like, okay, that's smarter. That's not what's happening. Like, there's a reckless way to do it, which is just like a switch. Or maybe you start with just, do you handle 911 systems? We don't, we don't, we don't, the industry, we don't, we don't

do 911 calls, but I'm watching this unfolding. I'm going, man, this is a, this is a huge risk. I look, 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, slowly drove up to the next house, drove away, and it did that six times. Is this somebody delivering a lot of burritos, or is this somebody casing the joint? Like, that would be what the detective would be like.

Hey, yeah, let's put three cogs here, pre-conditioned from minority report to predict a crime. Because something that I wanted to do. Yeah, that I don't want to do. Like, I think we've been

really consistent with that. We never want to be a company that defines the space.

That's really, yeah. Oh, yeah, but it's, it's an interesting kind of like a happy hour topic, like, what is that world look like? But for us, I think there's, it's really valuable that there's a human in the loop when it comes to public safety. But how much people's lives, you're talking about people's, like, it's really important stuff. So we always want to have a human in loop. But I think there is some, some products that we could build. But the difference is,

“like, you know, looking at knowing the cost of getting it wrong, you have to deploy this”

with third party proper attestation that it's, that it's working as expected. 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 have come in and say, well, guess what, it does actually. Like, this is actually really good. And it's making the officers more effective. It's off making the officers more objective. Less subjective. Like, that should be our in goal is that AI is used in a way that increases the

number of crimes they can solve and decreases the likelihood if they get the wrong person. That that's an easy ideal state. And I still think we should rush there. I think we should be really deliberate about how we get there. You've lost, I think, dozens of cities of the 6,000. So some cities are now saying, hey, this isn't worth the trouble or too many people protested, taking me through what's happened last year with those, I think it's 60 or 70 cities maybe,

60,000 if I got the numbers correct. Yeah. One percent have said, okay, this isn't for us.

“Yeah, it's tough, right? Because I want everyone to be safe. That's why I started the company.”

And I know what they've had and I know the results we've had. And unfortunately, the majority of time, they're making a decision off of this information. I remember vividly that one of the first customers that chose to walk away did so because of facial recognition. They went online in Google ALTR face recognition. They saw whenever our competitors website and said, we're getting out of this block then. They didn't realize they were looking at the wrong person's website. Yeah.

And that's tough because that's on me, right? That's on me to better communicate to these

decision makers that like, 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 has been tough to see Jason is, I saw this walking city in Washington, just it's so sad. They turn the cameras off. The next weekend, a little boy gets shot, car drives off. It's going to be a cold case. And luckily, the city next door still have block cameras found the car made the arrest and looked at the, the, the, the kid did it live,

“just horrible. Police, their family knows justice was served. And so I think we're making really”

consequential decisions on on inaccurate information. And that's tough. And I shot, we have to do a better job as a company like communicating to our customers and their customers customers, which would be the community. But what the technology does and what it doesn't do. And for me, at least when I speak to it, let's call it 99 people out of 100 and explain the facts. They go, why is this a debate? This feels like we have controls as city. We can set limits. We can set guardrails. I want to be safer

than I feel today. I've never had something as like I want to be less sick. I predict as you explain

this and you change the defaults and the audits get in place and the dirty cops get, you know, taken out of this that you'll see some number of those cities, you know, and the city council's re-address this when things cool down a little bit. And you know, at this happened here in, you know, where I live now in Austin, Texas, Austin canceled flop or didn't renew whatever

I carry a gun. Everybody's got guns. And so 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 manner police department did have flock. They picked it up and 20 hours later the three teens were arrested and they were like juvenile's 15, 16 and 17 here according to what I'm seeing. And that was the wake-up call here. And that brought it back to the front and now everybody's debating it again in Austin. Okay, the ACLU

“wants 48 hours, I think is their proposal. Okay, that's the ACLU. It's reasonable. Yeah, that's their,”

that's a good sense. This is the privacy organization's privacy organization, civil liberties. We get it, you know, most cops probably want 30 days. Communities are going to

set it at seven or 14 days. That's it. You have competitors. Tell me about like the competitors

approach here and how you deal with that as an entrepreneur. They just saying, hey, we're just going to sell you the technology and we're not going, and we're just going to keep our heads down and we'll be the, did they go in and sell themselves as we're flock without limits? To your earlier point, yeah, we've had close to 20 cities already turned their cameras back on. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because they realize like they are now less safe and they have an obligation to their constituents

to be safer. And it is, it is tough as an entrepreneur because you want to, you want to, you want to build as big of a business as possible, right? But you also want to do it in a way that what it's all said and done your kids go, I'm so proud to be that guy's son or daughter.

“So you have to make decisions that you, you, you, you're going to be comfortable with 10 years later.”

And I'd rather lose, you know, I had a lot of concerns about requiring, you know, accountability

for all of our customers, knowing very well that I'm, you know, upset a lot of customers, potentially, and 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 and they can go to one of my competitors who doesn't have these tools, doesn't have these requirements. And that's okay with me because this is just business, right? It's, it's just a business. Now it's business. I think it's serving not very important

mission. But I, I want to sleep at night and I do today and our competitors to your point, yes, they run more reckless, they run without these tools without the scrutiny. And I think it's in a catch up to them. They will catch up to them eventually. Yeah, I mean, as you are willing to lose customers who want the un, you know, tethered system without, you know, proper constraints. Yeah, 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. Sanford Cisco famously with these ALPR's automated license plate, something, automated license plate reader. Yeah. So the ALPR, as you said earlier, you're also keeping if there were dense in the car or the color of the car or like the the make and model of the car, is that right? Yeah. So it's pretty, it's pretty cool technology and pretty effective. 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. Oh, it hadn't it had damage on the right side. I remember so vividly, we had this homicide case near me and Atlanta and all the person could remember was that the back right tire was missing a hubcap. And so the detectives had to go in and say, okay, show me all the cars in this 15-minute window that they did not have a back right hubcap. And that's the beginning of an investigation.

It'll be into the investigation that that's just the way to get started. And that's all they had. And because of that great detective, he's like, he's, I've got to know him pretty well. He's like, it's very good at his job. He worked his butt off and found the, found the person. But that was the start. And so yeah, so you think it was like San Francisco and I love, I saw it tweet the other day, which is, you know, the flock effect. And it's like,

crime is down, stolen vehicles is down. And look, we, we, 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 tree, a strong DA, a community that demands to be safe.

“Like, but that's what should happen. If you love Francisco, you deserve to be safe. That'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-in-let-live-based. It is kind of the problem having live there is that people are so open-hearted from the summer, it literally comes from the summer of love. And the fact that it was a mining town, like, they just have this, you know, live-in-let-live attitude. Obviously, you know, a lot of the culture that's emerged there is, hey, let your freak fly,

fly, do what you want to do. Even to the point of, hey, you know, if people are stealing, why are they stealing? Like, what happened in their childhood? And people there have had enough.

you have 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 have now some combination of these things at a minimum. Like, I just described I have cameras, I have people, you know, all this stuff. And so, you know, you start painting that

“picture, it is, you have to be extremely aware of your own privilege that you don't have to deal with”

crime. And then my brother was a cop during the stop, asked and frisk out in New York. The statistics during stop frisk and ask, which was a violation on the floor of the amendment, like you're stopping people based on like they're hanging out. So it definitely was a little step too far. But New York in the 70s and 80s was dangerous as hell. Like, there are 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, ask, and frisk. They

always leave out the ask, because they're like, oh, we're just going to stop you and fresco knows.

They would stop you and say, hey, what do you up to? And, uh, hey, you're hanging out in the corner. What's going on? And, you know, they've just tried to get a read on people, which by the way, if you ever go to Israel or go to some countries, they asked you 20 questions. Why? You hear, hey, you know, where you're staying? Like, they want to get a read on you, whether you're going into Israel or Tokyo. They might ask a couple of personal questions, which would be offensive to

Americans, but the correlation was really people who experience crime are in favor of it. People who live in pack hights. I don't need to worry about this man. Something goes down in pack hights. There's 20 cops and 50 private security guards, you know, rallying around. One home was person, one vagrant, you know, one person who's in a car that doesn't look like it's a long

“there. It's like, they're going to get swarmed in pack hights. Yep. No, I mean, you have to nail the”

head and 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. And it's typically people who don't have any other way to protect themselves who need this, right, who want this. And for those who have a gate and have a guard and have

camera as an having security system, and they have Jamie's incredible doorbell camera right and they

have all these products and the services they're like, why does anyone need to feel any safer? So because those people don't have any of this stuff and they don't feel safe when they got a bad. And yeah, it's it's quite telling. I'm rooting for you to get everything right and to continue making a new safer. I'm also rooting for communities to make their own decision. 100% think that is the key part of this that people need to embrace as well. If you have it,

if you've chosen to live in a dated community, you have made that choice for security in all likelihood. And if poor people or people who don't get to live in a dated community and you were to ask, you know, people with a family, hey, would you like to live in a dated community or would you like to live with, not in a dated community, like 100 out of 100 people? I mean,

“maybe it's 95. I think if you offer like the average Joe or Jane, hey, would you like to live in a,”

would you like your community to be dated with three gates and there's a security card? They're like, heck, yes, but I can't afford that. How much is that going to cost? So this is where, you know, I think people with children, people with homes, they think just have a different view of this than maybe when you're younger and you can afford to say it wasn't, I don't get kids and I care about my safety. I care about my privacy and privacy. Yeah, and I understand it, like I,

I don't want the government to have like a national flock database. I don't want the government to do facial recognition. I find that like a bridge too far. This is kind of licensed plates for two weeks or 30 days. I kind of feel okay with it. I'm sorry if people are disappointed in me for that, but as a parent and you know, somebody in a community, I'm okay with my community and having licensed plate readers for up to 30 days. That's, that's the decision I came to.

Well, you know, 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. I'm very anti-slok. And really sad, really scary. She was the victim of political violence. Someone shot at her house and the police used a flock camera to find that person and loaned the whole to her credit. She changed, but she did change and she's now one of our largest advocates because she realized

you don't get to pick when you're the victim of violence. 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. And so I think you're right that my hope is that this is these kind of conversations actually lead to fruitful debates about how we have both.

That'd be pretty sad. Yeah. And listen, you have been in what I would describe as a PR disaster last year over this. How far through the PR disaster are you? You've changed a lot of the communications and is this something block can recover from or is this like company killing like, "Oh my God, we're screwed." It's just be honest with us about the PR disaster of the last year, how that's affected you and how that's informed, how you run the company and how damaging

has it been? You know, I think the biggest damage is the internal morale, right? Because you go on to X so you're going to read it and you go, "Why are people so mad at us when we've been doing the same thing for nine years?" And why does it matter us for things we don't do? And we just we feel people to be safe. And that's tough, right? It's really hard for your work to be challenged. So, this really, I think the interesting part is it's brought us closer to our customers,

you know, because they have a job to do, which to keep their community safe. And they see this

as one of the the most critical part of how they do their job. Like there was a chief who's like,

“this is the best thing since DNA in terms of fighting crime and I agree with them. So that's”

something good side and I think, you know, the businesses in good shape, you know, we raised more money to be going to be your company still growing. We could be growing faster if we used to have zero chart. Now we have to your point, 1%. Okay. Well, I would like to be back at zero, and I'm going to fight as hard as I can to get the right message out there to your point to communicate better, listen more. And I think if we do that, we're going to be just fine. Because it did in the day,

everyone wants to be safe. That hasn't changed. And that will probably never change. Just like everyone wants to have food. Everyone wants to have a roof. There's just these cord- mass flow as hard I give me. It's safety is up there. And it's hard. I think for your company, like you're going to just have to lead and you're going to have to be ahead of these things. And

you know, I look at Zuckerberg and Facebook. They've always been playing defense and catch up on the

impact that let's say Instagram had on young teens and eating disorders and addiction to social media, ex and Twitter had like political, you know, nonsense and like people trying to subvert democracy. Like all of these social networks have a series downside that's now been quantified, et cetera. It would have been so much better if he was ahead of it and said, listen, I have kids. I understand where you're coming from. I think there should be an age gay. And he just wrote

that manifesto last week. And I'll give him credit because I think he was looking at it saying there are obviously selfish business needs. He wants to be part of the AI revolution. But I think it was also identifying and trying to get ahead of and show some empathy for, 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 right, your 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 or

“hey, maybe that levels of playing field. And I think that's what CEOs have to do right now in this”

media saturated, you know, a story can just go viral so fast. And you got to just get ahead of it and anticipate these things and own them and just be frank about it. Tucker calls and demolished you last week. Have you reached out to Tucker to go on his pond? No, I don't know if that's something that's in my deck of cards. But no, I appreciate it. I liked that, you know, I do like T-shirts. I guess is what I'd say. I weren't T-shirts. I got to put a poll on for you. I thought that

hell, I would be appropriate, but I'm going to follow too. Yeah, you look great. Yeah, you look great. But no, I think look, we want to we were on the today's show this morning. We're on good morning America. We want to go to places where the community lessons and we want to have meaningful conversations. And yeah, we're not done. We got to we had a long road ahead of us and I think, you know, we didn't get to drones. Oh, yeah. So how do they drive? Yeah, that's what the drones, but how do they

drive their drones? So drones is probably our fastest growing business unit right now because, you know, our LPR business is just under 50% kind of of our forward looking revenue. So it's a big part of our business, but we've got drones, we've got live video cameras, we've got some really cool software. And,

“you know, I think the story I share with you about drones, which is one of my favorite stories,”

is so these drones live in a kind of a HVAC control box, a dock, or say, on top of a roof, typically like a police precinct or a fire department. And when a 911 call happens, instead of sending

an officer first, you can send a drone. So there's a really interesting case not too far from

you up in the Dallas Fort Worth area, where a woman, you know, at late at night at a gas station, call number one and said, there's a man walking back and forth for the gun. I don't feel safe.

right? Well, you can't wear one, but you can't really even get around. Yeah. And he was fair enough, fair enough. And so she called number one and normally what would happen, right? It's like one cop would have heard that flip on the blue lights, race down there, hearts racing, he's got his gun ready, and someone's about to die. Instead, they launched the drone, the drones at 400 feet flying 60 miles an hour, so it gets there in under a minute, as the crow flies. Yep. And it's got

40 X optical zoom, so it zooms all the way in. It's not a gun. It's a lighter. That's one of those toy, like, lighter things. Yeah. They call them them back and say, hey, man, it's just a lighter, you're okay. And I share that story because so much of my businesses have related around solving crime, but it's more than crime. It's about safety. It's like, how do we help the community feel safe? And this is an example where we demitigate and we mitigate it, what we're going to really

bad situation for everyone, and we have thousands and thousands of stories like that where communities are safe and out with our drones, they're safe for with our cameras. And to your early point, we just got a new better job communicating how it all works, and we got to teach our customers how to do that too. Because we're only one company. We got thousands and thousands of customers. We

“need their help to and tell them the story. Yeah, I think that the new tool you're talking about with”

the audit trail, I think that has great potential. I think a third party auditor, so if you sell the

system, it can come with third party auditing, people use Ernsting Young or whatever the 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 stock their X spouse or break somebody's privacy. And we're just going to review in real time slash whatever every drone flight. Because that's now you start sending drones, talkers going to look at that, or ACLU's going to look at that and say,

okay, so now you're like peeking in my window. So there's 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 is is doing a better job implementing drones than they've done with historical policies. You look at something like body cameras and I'm sure how much you

fill this. There is massive outreach on body cameras. And now it's like, wait, second, it's actually really good.

It's a better tool and same with non-lethal weapons. And so no, we have the summer work to do there. And to your point of the third party auditors, you know, one, you've got a city manager, that is effectively his or her job is to hold the police chief accountable. And they can see the audit logs. So you can go in there. They can see all the logs. Yeah, they can see the audit logs. They can also see the flight patterns. So most of our customers

have a transparency portal. It has the audit log. It has how many cameras they have. It has their drones. It has their drone flights. Now, there's a lag, right? We want to delay. Yeah, we want to break and bring things from chasing to the crime scene. Just criminal investigations. 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. And we're going to push, we're going to push in hard, but the community is also going to push it. And some of these things are like nine, one, one 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. They don't have the, they have the radios and crepants. So drone flights is one where like, you know, should drone flights just be on the website. Like, here's all the drone flights that

occurred and here's the 9/11 calls that are with them or people doing that or you're just off

way to that for them. It would be possible. We've never had a customer ask to do it. We have this

concept of like a spectator mode, which would be available for city officials and command staff.

“But I think that your questions are right one. And I think as an industry, you know, we're going”

to have to make these decisions sooner than later of what that default is because 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 but nothing, you know, what's the short-term state regulation or city regulation for the, yeah. So the short-term, so you've got, you got New Hampshire at three minutes. And then three minutes for license plate reading? Yeah. Okay. That's new Hampshire. That's new

Hampshire, though. So for the free ride. Okay. Got it. And then the next year's state is 21 days. Interesting. That's the state of Washington. So. Okay. Well, here, here you are folks. Like, if you want to really live off the grid in privacy, new Hampshire, live the 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. And 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, I think. And I think that's the high order bit here. And I think that's”

what you're starting to really get right is, hey, this is your community stress. 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

through the all in interview program. Bye. Bye. I'm doing all of you. [MUSIC PLAYING]