Flock Safety cameras are scanning license plates in communities across the country — but who controls the data, how long is it kept, and what stops someone from misusing it? Local 4’s Lauren Kostiuk sat down one-on-one with Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley to get answers.
How did Flock Safety begin? What problem were you looking to solve?
“It feels like yesterday, but nine years ago, I was sitting at my dining room table asking the question: Why does crime exist? Why is it so hard to solve? And in my neighborhood in Atlanta, we were frustrated that crime was happening, and it felt like the police couldn’t do anything. The individual who oversees our neighborhood said, ‘You know, if we had a license plate, we could catch these people.’ They were breaking into cars and breaking into homes. I said, ‘Really? A license plate?’ I went to Georgia Tech. So, I called two of my friends that I went to Georgia Tech with and said, ‘We’ve got to build a camera that reads license plates.’ And so we did that. About two months later, we had them up in my neighborhood. We made our first arrest. You’ve maybe never had a detective call you, but it’s a little scary. He called to say thank you. Fast-forward nine years, and some of the biggest companies in the world rely on Flock. Almost 7,000 police departments and tens of thousands of neighborhoods across the country use our products every day.”
Originally, Flock was targeted just for neighborhoods?
“Just neighborhoods. It kind of became a business about six years ago. A small town in Texas called Jersey Village said, ‘Wait a second, our neighborhoods have this. Can we buy it for the major intersections of the city?’ And we said, ‘Sure, I guess.’”
You have 120,000 cameras across 49 states scanning billions of vehicles every day. What are the benefits you see with Flock?
“Let’s talk about Michigan. Last month alone, in July, 53 missing people were detected. Those are real humans. That’s our grandparents, that’s our kids, that’s our friends. Over 2,000 stolen cars. Those are stolen cars, you know, that weren’t stolen to take a joyride. They were stolen to go do something much worse. So, that’s about one month of impact in one state. Now, if you scale it to the country — over 1,000 missing people last month and over 22,000 stolen cars. That adds up to real impact. I was on the phone with one of our customers in Florida, a sheriff, and he was like, ‘Look, Garrett, I’ll never be able to prove this, but this whole decline in crime that we’re seeing in America, maybe it’s because of Flock.’ We look at the data and say, ‘I think it’s a good chance.’ We want to continue to see that happen.”
How are the conversations going with departments here in Michigan?
“Just over a third of the state uses Flock every day. I’d love to get back to 100 percent, but what they see are the results from our customers — whether it’s a kidnapping or an attempted homicide. The sad part is crime happens, and for us, what’s even worse is when we see that crime is not equally distributed. Today in America, depending on what ZIP code you’re born into determines your level of safety. I just think everyone should have the right to be safe.”
Let’s talk about the growing backlash concerning Flock: data sharing and privacy. Some have referred to it as Big Brother and mass surveillance. What do you think about that?
“I think you have to break it into two buckets. There’s a part of the bucket which is valid criticism and really healthy debate about things like how much power local law enforcement should have. I would say they should have enough power, but not more than they need to do their job. But with that power should come real accountability and real guardrails. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be safer. Maybe they exist, and I’ve traveled the country, and I have not met that person yet. I think those are really good conversations. Then I think there’s a lot of misinformation. I was with an elected official earlier today in Michigan, and she said, ‘When did you guys add facial recognition?’ I said, ‘Ma’am, we don’t do facial recognition.’ She said, ‘But do you sell the data?’ We don’t sell the data. We don’t own the data; our customers do. We don’t work with ICE. The customer chooses whom to share the data with. So I’ve found that once people see the truth, they go, ‘This feels like a very good trade-off.’ But at the end of the day, we have to find a society where safety and privacy can coexist.”
What do you believe are the biggest misconceptions?
“I think the biggest misconception is that we own the data and sell it. That’s the natural worst-case scenario, and sadly in our industry, that was the case before Flock. The leading provider of this type of technology before Flock owned the data and sold it for commercial purposes, and that’s not illegal, but I don’t think it’s a good balance of safety and privacy.”
Several communities have canceled their contracts with Flock. Do you believe your company is doing enough to protect people’s privacy?
“I think we are doing enough to protect people’s privacy, but I don’t think we’ve done an effective job explaining ourselves. People need to know the trade-offs that can be made. I worry, and I’m sad for those cities that have chosen not to work with us, because they’ll be less safe today than they were the day before. We’ve seen that unfold. You go to places like Austin, which no longer works with us, and there are drive-by shootings, and it takes a small town nearby to find the shooters. We’re thankful to have so many great customers here in Michigan, and I think we look at the customers who’ve chosen to pause or cancel, and what’s less often reported is the dozens of customers who’ve turned us back on as they see the impact.”
There have been a lot of stories recently about misuse and abuse of Flock by law enforcement. What is being done to prevent this from happening?
“Let’s start with the fact that any abuse, be it of Flock’s technology or any technology used by law enforcement, is just unacceptable. I think it’s horrible because 99.99% of law enforcement officers go into this profession to keep people safe, and that one bad apple ruins it for everyone. It destroys trust in the community, and it’s just despicable. Because we’re a technology company, we can do something. When we started the company nine years ago, we knew abuse was possible. We didn’t know if it’d be prevalent or not. So, we have an audit log. Every single action taken in Flock is stored in that audit log, and in most places, like I was just with a town earlier today in Michigan, it is both the city administrator, who’s the attorney, and the police chief who review that audit log. The challenge, though, in a more recent development, is that it might work for a town of 50,000 people. But what about Detroit? Detroit has hundreds of officers who use Flock every day. The audit log would simply be too big. So, we built a pattern-recognition tool called Audit Assistance. Since we helped solve over a million crimes last year through Flock, we know what normal behavior looks like in a system. We also know what abnormal behavior looks like. So, we now flag that behavior for the administrator in real time. That individual can be locked out in real time. Abuse is horrible, but we as an industry can do better for communities to root these people out. I’d say I’ve yet to meet a chief who doesn’t say thank you. They want this technology. They want the ability to find bad actors and get them out of their agency.”
In Michigan, there are currently bills at the statehouse looking to regulate your cameras, including adding warrant requirements, stricter data retention and penalties for misuse. Do you support regulations?
“We definitely support regulation. I look across the country this year, and today, nine states have already chosen to enact regulations. While we might not agree on every I and T, I think regulation in general is a good thing, right? Because we have a beautiful system that’s worked for 250 years, where we democratically elect individuals to make decisions on our behalf. So, we hope a great bill gets passed in Michigan that regulates this and, for our customers, establishes what is and is not permissible.”
How long is data retained? Is that up to the local user?
“Every local municipality gets to choose how long the data is stored, absent state regulation. So, in a place like New Jersey, it’s five years; that’s the mandate. In the state of Washington, it is 21 days. So, cities can choose to do anything below those numbers; they cannot go above them.”
Where does the data go? Who can access it?
“The data is captured and stored within that local municipality, be it a county or a city, and then they can choose whom they share it with and whom they do not share it with. And then, one layer deeper, they can also select what types of crimes can be investigated using their cameras.”
So, if I’m an officer here in Detroit and I want to access the data from Flint, I can do that if they have agreed to share?
“Yes, if the two parties agree to share. This is where regulation can be really helpful, because in places like Connecticut, they’ve decided as a state they want to share not only within the state of Connecticut, but with any neighboring state. But they don’t allow sharing outside of those neighboring states. The state of Washington does not allow out-of-state sharing. Our job as a technology company is to wait for regulation to happen, and then encode that regulation into our software.”
Can ICE access the data? What would stop me if I’m a police officer in Detroit and I’m also on a federal task force? Where is that line drawn? What’s stopping me from accessing Flock?
“That’s a great question. A few years ago in Troy, in partnership with federal authorities, we busted a massive human trafficking ring during the NFL draft. Federal authorities and local authorities were working together. We as a company don’t tell police departments how to interact with federal authorities. There are policies. There are restrictions. There are internal rules for how task forces operate, and those are different from city to city.”
Do you believe that there need to be more safeguards when it comes to Flock? What kind of safeguards do you support?
“I think one of the things that’s missing from most state regulations is severe enough punishment for police officers abusing their power. To me, it’s not enough to simply be terminated from your job. If you’re stalking an ex-partner, if you’re looking up the criminal records of your daughter’s boyfriend, that should be a criminal offense. We give power to those who are entitled and ask them to keep us safe, and the accountability has to come with that. When I look at regulation, I say there are a couple of things we have to get right. We have to decide how long this data should live. Whether it’s seven days, 30 days or a year, the state of Michigan should decide what matches its public safety strategy. We should decide how the data gets shared. And then we should decide the penalties for abusing that power. That’s not just for Flock; that’s for all of the systems they have access to.”
What is your company doing to help states kind of figure this out?
“One of the things that we’re really proud of is we’ll go into these sessions with our fiercest adversaries, including groups like the ACLU, who have the same goal that we have. We want Michigan to be safer. The question is how do we get there, and what trade-offs are we willing to make? So, you’ll often see in a state like Michigan, New Mexico or Georgia, we’ll show up and have the debate. We’ll bring our data, which shows how law enforcement uses it day in and day out. And the ACLU and other peer groups will show up with their opinion of what the right balance of privacy is. I think if you look at them in particular, our biggest debate is how long the data should be stored. And that’s a very reasonable thing to figure out.”
What do you want to say to the critics who believe these cameras should not exist?
“I’m the father of three little kids. I have one job: It’s to keep them safe. It is not acceptable to me that just because my kids live in one part of Atlanta, they’re safer than kids who live in a different part of it. I don’t think that should be the case. I just wish everyone could understand that there’s a world we can build together where safety and privacy coexist, and that’s the world that I want to live in.”
Following the interview with Local 4, Flock Safety announced major system and policy changes to its network following reports of police misuse.
Key changes include:
- Shorter data retention: Flock reduced its recommended default storage period for captured vehicle data from 30 days to seven days. An “Evidence Mode” allows detectives to move specific data into long-term storage for active investigations.
- Mandatory monitoring: The company said its artificial intelligence-powered monitoring tool will be required for all law enforcement clients by the end of the year. The tool flags abnormal search patterns.
- Automatic lockouts: Users flagged for suspicious or abnormal activity will be locked out in real time while an administrator reviews the activity.
- Required case information: Law enforcement searches must include a specific criminal case number or offense type, limiting speculative or unauthorized searches.
- More sharing controls: Communities and local agencies can filter and restrict the types of offenses outside agencies are allowed to search using their cameras.