from the high-on-their-own-supply dept
Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist:
Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S.
That would be Flock Safety CEO (and co-founder) Garrett Langley speaking to Thomas Brewster of Forbes. Flock Safety has grown a lot over the past few years, following paths paved by Amazon’s doorbell surveillance camera acquisition, Ring, and other upstarts in the public/private surveillance mesh network field.
Like Ring, Flock has sold a bunch of products to regular people, starting with the people most likely to have discretionary income and the desire to wield that against other humans beings: homeowners associations and residents of gated communities.
Like Ring, Flock has allowed racists to convert their bigotry into action. And it has also allowed (and encouraged) law enforcement agencies to treat privately-owned cameras as extensions of their own surveillance networks.
Not content to add license plate reader tech to cameras owned by non-cops, Flock now wants to fill the air with another mesh network of public/private ownership via its latest offering:
Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S. They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in America” drones.
Sure, Flock and its CEO may be worth billions. But that doesn’t actually make Langley smart. It just makes him opportunistic enough to take advantage of perpetual false narratives (some perpetuated by Flock itself!) about crime rates. Some people say “Orwellian.” Others, like Garrett Langley, just say “year-over-year growth.”
“I’ve talked to plenty of activists who think crime is just the cost of modern society. I disagree,” Langley says. “I think we can have a crime-free city and civil liberties. . . . We can have it all.” In municipalities in which Flock is deployed, he adds, the average criminal—those between 16 and 24 committing nonviolent crime—“will most likely get caught.”
And there it is: a person in the surveillance tech business refusing to discuss civil liberty concerns honestly, choosing instead to wave them away with a statement that indicates anything that stands in the way of Flock’s continued profitability (or the pipe dream of removing any and all crime and/or 16-24-year-old citizens from US streets) isn’t worth his attention.
But maybe he should be paying more attention to the law, especially the stuff about civil liberties. His company has already been accused of ignoring local laws while selling and/or installing cameras. And Flock recently got dragged back into whatever the opposite of the limelight is earlier this year, when it was discovered Texas cops were able to access Flock license plate reader data all over the nation as they tried to locate a Texas resident who had apparently left the state to obtain an abortion — something that’s illegal in Texas.
Flock didn’t have much to say about this turn of events at the time. And the officers who performed the search claimed their only interest was in locating this person to ensure she was safe, even as they work for a state whose anti-abortion laws make extremely clear that the state government doesn’t actually care about the safety of women.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, Flock is rapidly backpedaling on its information sharing agreements after multiple lawmakers alleged the company broke state data privacy laws by allowing pretty much any government agency from anywhere in the nation to access Flock ALPR data.
Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley.
Among officials in other jurisdictions, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias raised concerns. He announced Monday that an audit found Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois data, although he didn’t say that the agency was seeking immigration-related information. A 2023 law the Democrat pushed bars sharing license plate data with police investigating out-of-state abortions or undocumented immigrants.
“This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of the state law,” Giannoulias said in a statement. “This law, passed two years ago, aimed to strengthen how data is shared and prevent this exact thing from happening,”
That has led to contracts being cancelled in the state of Illinois, which certainly isn’t going to contribute to Langley’s fantasies of “ending crime” via massively profitable mass surveillance systems sold by his company.
Oak Park voted to terminate its contract with Flock earlier this month.
Tuesday, following the state’s audit, the city of Evanston did the same, saying in a statement, in part:
“The findings of the Illinois Secretary of State’s audit, combined with Flock’s admission that it failed to establish distinct permissions and protocols to ensure local compliance while running a pilot program with federal users, are deeply troubling. As a result, the City has deactivated the cameras and issued a termination notice to Flock, effective September 26, 2025.”
And it’s not just limited to a state with some of the most robust privacy laws in the nation. It’s also happening in Texas, the same state that kicked this backlash off when officers decided it was okay to use Flock’s system to try to locate someone who might have been considering violating the state’s anti-abortion laws.
Austin organizers turned out to rebuke the city’s misguided contract with Flock Safety— and won. This successful pushback from the community means at the end of the month Austin police will no longer be able to use the surveillance network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the city.
It’s pretty rich to claim you can stop all crime when you can’t even stop breaking the law or enabling users of your tech to break the law. What’s listed above are the words of a salesman, not a person truly concerned about crime rates or making communities safer. It thrives on the American constant of believing crime rates are really worse than they actually are. And it depends on the wealth of people and governments who also feel civil liberties are privileges that should only be enjoyed by the richest (and, obviously, whitest) people in the nation. Everyone else should just learn to accept their loss of rights and privacy gratefully, for the good of the nation.
Filed Under: alprs, illinois, law enforcement, plate readers, surveillance, surveillance state
Companies: flock, flock safety
