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

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, 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 is 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, six or seven years ago. Six or seven years, yeah. And 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, on the margin sometimes concerned. And it seems like you've been so successful with Flock, which does safety cameras, license plate readers specifically, when you 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 at reducing crime. We'll get into that. But there is now a group of people who maybe 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. Yeah. 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 in the world's greatest moderator, TM, I know there's something at stake. App Lovin' 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 App Lovin' 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 slash all in to launch your first campaign today. Tell us a little bit about flock safety and how many communities you're in now. And then also the drone. 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. Yeah, 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. If you look at our first two or three years in business, it was just neighborhoods. We sold the 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. And the system has gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or dent or damage. But that's at its core what the technology does. And if you look at 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 who were missing. And that's everything from our grandparents with dementia to our children. Just last week in July, we happened to have a two-year-old in the backseat. And thankfully, because of very hard work by Atlanta Police Department and 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 data point, last month, it was about 1,125 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. And those are the cars we use to drive our kids to school, to drive to work, to go to school, to go to work. And that's what we've done. And so we're in roughly just over 6,000 or so cities across the country. And the consequence of being that consequential is people have a lot of questions and people have a lot of debates. And I think it's 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. To find that balance is not easy. I remember when we had our first discussion, gosh, so many years ago on this week. We were talking about it. And I had brought up this, 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 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 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. You had engineers there famously stalking their ex and like reading their unencrypted messages. 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 in 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 very granularly what you're recording, for how long, who has access, the audit logs, and then what's not recorded. Yep. No, that's a great question. So, you know, one of the reasons, Jason, we struggled so much to raise money is that businesses, because it is traditionally, and was for flock, very hard to get contracts done with local government. You know, 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. And so every two weeks, a city council meets, and they're, you know, the city manager's direct reports, be it a police chief or fire chief, public works, presents ideas, 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 the cost of doing business with local government. So it's really straightforward. And I was actually talking to the chief, our first ever police chief down in Jersey Village, Texas. I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago. And like that, video, that council vote 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. But we go, right? Because we want people to know what they're buying. And so they buy the product. And what has been true for the last nine years is we've always said, this data is a liability on an asset. You should have a set retention period. And that retention period for how long this data will be stored is going to determine the efficacy of the product. And so if you don't beat this data in a day or two, it's going to be less effective. It's still 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 councils 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. We think that's going to be a lot longer. And so we're going to have to wait and that's a reasonable trade-off, but we still think cities should decide, or states for that matter. But someone who is democratically elected should have the final decision of how this technology works in their community. But what I think you probably agree with, as a technology provider, we have to set strong defaults. Defaults matter is what we say in the industry. And 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 the nature are, how many are solved with seven days of data, 30 days of data, or require more than 30 days? Do you have that? We have a good sense, right? I mean, I'm going to give you an aggregate data point across the whole country. We think 90% of crimes will get solved within seven days of data retention. Beautiful. It is, Jason, but I would tell you, I've probably talked to 200 or 300 police chiefs this week, and they remind me, and I tell them, you should tell your city council this too. Yeah. The 10% we're talking about, but the 10% you read about in the news though. Oh. Right? 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, look, and I'm sorry to 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 who attacked them. To even identify the crime. So what you're saying is now with 30 days of the 10% remaining that, you know, we're just ballparking here, but that last 10%, how many of those out of 10 would be resolved with 30 days of data? We think the majority. And look, we're not going to lose, we're not going to tell cities, how to run themselves, and to be clear, 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, there's a max retention. In the state of Washington, most states have now adopted 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 so much better than nothing because that Amber Alert and that Silver Alert, which are the things we all lose sleep over, they're still going to get solved too. So it's just a balance. I literally lose sleep over. I got one at two in the morning the other day and I wake up, I read it. I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this data at 2 a.m. I'm in bed. But okay, so this seems completely fair. Um, in terms of how you're expressing it. Um, 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, how the dad and somebody who sometimes on the margins has some, you know, privacy security issues. They're not acute, like for, 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 a unity. It's incredible. Yeah. Great product. And I have a license plate reader on mine. I have facial recognition on my private property. Of course, some of it does look out on public roads. 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 is legal. 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 there's 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, 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 licensees and cameras. And that's in direct conflict with some of our biggest competitors who do all of the things I just mentioned. And unfortunately, or fortunately, 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 counselors ask questions of the systems they have if it's not flocked. And maybe they'll search 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. 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 privacy. 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 totally honest. But it's kind of a moving target. And I guess the reaction you guys had was, and I think I had talked to you about this, is you called them terrorists, like the people taking the cameras down and this kind of thing. Where does this audience, who's ripping down cameras, I mean, they're obviously not terrorists. 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. Correct. 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 is because I looked at it and 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 of the product. So talk about where you got it right, where you got it wrong, 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 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 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 on TikTok and on Instagram to go take action. And I don't know if they realize they're committing a felony. And I saw this individual who just got arrested in, I think it was either Ohio or Illinois. And Jason, he's facing 15 to 20 years in jail. And I'm like, what's going on? And he's like, what's going on? And I'm like, I feel horrible. I don't think he. Maybe he realized it. But what if he didn't? And the person who's on TikTok or Instagram that's pushing this, they're not the ones cutting these things down. They're not the ones who email them. They're doing this for likes and views. And that I don't like, right? Because when that camera is cut down, and there's that Amber Alert, it's not going to work. Yeah. And that, I still don't have a lot of space in my heart for people who choose to commit a felony. I don't have a lot of space in my heart for people who choose to commit a felony. Go to city council and scream and fight for what they believe in. That is literally a democratic promise. They can join city council. And there have been a number of cities that have decided to take the lockdown. 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 so. Yeah. And it's obviously disheartening when a city chooses to be less safe. That's tough to hear when there's so many other options to the product versus just take them 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 is common ground on complicated problems. And I think safety is up there on Marlowe's hierarchy of things we have to do for our community. It's one of the most fundamental things that I believe our government owes us is an equal level of safety. And today, we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a situation depending on the color of your skin and your wealth level and your race, sorry, and your sex determines how safe you feel. Women feel less safe than men. That's a fact. Sure. But minorities feel less safe than you and me. That's a fact. If you live in a less affluent city and 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. For the privacy folks, where do you find common ground with them? And where do you feel, obviously, vandalism is an easy one. Okay. 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 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 100 dimes for his betting on NFL games, and he wants to give the mob or somebody like a bunch of license plate data from Flock, what's to stop the dirty cop? What's to stop this? And do faults matter? But also, what's the largest window people can use today on Flock? Let's tell them the abuse thing, 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 a 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. And I'm like, okay. Man, what if you're right and I'm wrong? And so. And that might be the case. That might be the case for her. 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 it. So 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, anyone in a position of power, there's a higher likelihood of abuse. Look at CEOs, look at elected officials, look at police. When you're in power, abuse tends to follow not too far behind. And so when we met, you know, six or seven years ago, we had the audit log. And my assumption was like, this is good enough. This is what most police systems do is they have this audit log. But what I didn't realize is, you know, it's meeting with a large agency in Southern California, and they've got something like a thousand officers, a day that use Flock. And imagine they're doing five or six searches a day. And imagine on once a month, someone, one person is supposed to review that out along. Yeah. So they're going to spot check 10 or 20 searches, which is the best they can do and then move on. And so we built four months ago, we built this new tool called audit assistance because we solved a million crimes last year. So we have a pretty good sense for what normal usage looks like. And then we had about just under a dozen abuses over the last eight years that we had detected and said, well, we also kind of know what abuse looks like. Tell us, what does 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 1234. 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. That's very abnormal. If you were truly trying to find me because I 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 that 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 what's happening. And so that's 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 good is it? How much signal noise? And so you've seen the headlines over the last few weeks. We've caught a lot of bad cops and it's a ton. Yeah, it's a ton. It's more than I ever would have hoped. And 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 applaud because they're not hiding behind it. They're publicly saying, "I fired nine 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." And I think that's good. And 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?" 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 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. Some people might think it's 10%. 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 10,000, 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 cop 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, okay, you can run that search. And then a third person has to look at the sergeant's okays and they put a note on it. You could also build that into the search. Yeah. Which is, you know, I think like a double key system where two people have to say okay to this, which now you're a dirty cop. You got to find a dirty sergeant. Yeah. No, no. I think what you're describing, we have, 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 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 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 ton of 2000 people. So the audit log is very slim. Audit 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, okay, for big cities, these are rules. For medium cities, these are the rules. And for small towns, you have different rules. No different than in 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's just different expectations. So 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. And you look at California, there was 7,000 reported abuses of their state database last year. Seven thousand? A thousand of the state database. Yeah. Which means you should have some percentage of that in your system. And I saw the Washington Post did a story on this. And so the company's 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 lesson there is, even if you want to say, hey, we just sell a tool, the reality of running this company, since people have to give up some level of privacy to get that service, you have to give up some level of privacy to get that service. You have to give up some level of privacy to get that security. You actually have to own it. There's just 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 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 tase. It was an unjustified taser. But here we are. This is different. This is qualitatively different because America and Americans really value privacy. Sales tax rules are changing. 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And so I do think the responsibility 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, 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 that an individual's right, they were like, "Hey, we can find a lost dog." And then people lost their mind over that because they were like, "Hey, if you can find a lost dog, then you can have some somebody stalking," whatever people's valid concerns are. And they had to turn that feature off, is 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. I'd 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 maybe underestimating people's concerns with how technology could impact them, and needing to maybe go slower in some cases. Like, you know, 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." And we're going intentionally really slow. We understand that. What is the opportunity and the concern with AI? Give us the practical, you know. Yeah. You know, if we were in a police state, if it 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 see Flock on this end and Ring 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 gnarly. Yeah, it's very different. So tell us about the AI features, and then what the detective wants most, because the detective wants to close cases, reasonably, and then what you're saying, like, "Ooh, gosh, that would close the case, but maybe it's too much of a 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 book you on the 7:00 PM instead of the 4:00 PM, and you're like, "What just happened?" But it's fine. 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. And the risk is so high. And we have no idea how these things work. And there's no good way to control them. I think that's pretty well on staff. And so you see cities, due to budgetary reasons and due to staffing issues, kind of leaning in pretty aggressively. And there's been some bad cases where the AI has gotten it really, really wrong. And so I think there's a smarter way to do it. The smarter way to do it, it 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. That's not what's happening." There's a reckless way to do it, which is just flip a switch. Or maybe you start with just. Do you handle 911 systems? We don't. We don't do 911 calls. But I'm watching this unfold and I'm going, "Man, this is a huge risk." 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?" That would be what the detective would be like, "Hey, yeah, let's get precogs here, precognitions from Minority Report to predict a crime because somebody was casing the joint." Yeah. That I don't want to do. I think we've been really consistent that we never want to be a company that defines suspicion. That's really dangerous. People have asked that question, yeah. Oh, yeah. But it's an interesting happy hour topic of what does that world look like? 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. It's really important stuff. So we always want to have a human in the loop. But I think there is some products that we could build. But the difference is. Yeah. Looking at knowing the cost of getting it wrong, you have to deploy this with third party proper attestation 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 come in and say, "Well, guess what? It does actually. This is actually really good." And it's making the officers more effective. It's making officers more objective, less subjective. That should be our end goal, is that 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. 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." Take me through what's happening last year with those 60 or 70 cities, maybe out of 6,000, if I got the numbers correct. 1% have said, "Okay, this isn't for us." Yeah, it's tough, right? Because I want everyone to be safe. And 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 the time, they're making a decision off of 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, "Aleph, you're not the only one who has facial recognition." They went online and Googled, "ALPR facial recognition." They saw one of our competitors' website and said, "We're getting rid of this flock thing." 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, "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 one city in Washington. It's so sad. They turned 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 had flock cameras. Found the car, made the arrest. And look, the kid didn't live, which is horrible. But at least their family knows justice was served. And so I think we're making really consequential decisions on inaccurate information, and that's tough. Jason: Yeah. And I just 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. And 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? This feels like we have control as a city. We can set limits. We can set guardrails. I want to be safer than I feel today." I've never met somebody who's like, "I want to be less safe." I predict, as you explain this, you'll see a number of those cities, and you change the defaults and the audits get in place, and the dirty cops get taken out of this, that you'll see some number of those cities. And the city councils readdress this when things cool down a little bit. And 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 we. People have guns here. I have a gun. I carry a gun. Jason: 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 Manor Police Department did have flock. They picked it up, and 28 hours later, the three teens were arrested, and they were like juveniles, 15, 16, and 17 here, according to what I'm seeing. And that was the wake-up call here. Jason: 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. That's reasonable. Yeah. That's their. That's a reasonable stance. Okay. This is the privacy organizations, privacy organizations, civil liberties. We get it. Most cops probably want 30 days. Communities are gonna set it at seven 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. That's right. Because are they just saying, "Hey, we're just gonna sell you the technology, and we're just gonna keep our heads down, and we'll be the. " Do they go in and sell themselves as if we're flock without limits? So to your earlier point, yeah, we've had close to 20 cities already turn their cameras back on. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because they realize they are now less safe, and they have an obligation to their constituents to be safer. And it is tough as an entrepreneur, because you want to build as big of a business as possible. 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." So you have to make decisions that you're going to be comfortable with 10 years later. And I'd rather lose. I had a lot of concerns about requiring accountability for all of our customers, knowing very well that I'm going to upset a lot of customers, potentially. And I said to myself, "Look, if a customer doesn't want to be held accountable, they're not going to be held accountable. They're not going 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. It's just a business. It's a business that I think is serving a very important mission. But 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 going to catch up to them. It will catch up to them eventually. Yeah. I mean, as you are willing to lose customers who want the untethered system without 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. San Francisco, famously, with these ALPRs, automated license plate something. Automatic license plate reader. Yeah. So the ALPRs, as you said earlier, you're also keeping if there were dents in the car or the color of the car or the make and model of the car. Is that right? Yeah. So 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. "Oh, it had damage on the right side." I remember so vividly, 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. And so the detectives, they would go in and say, "Okay, show me all the cars in this 15-minute window that did not have a back right hubcap." And 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. And because of that great detective, he's like. I've got to know him pretty well, because he's very good at his job. He worked his butt off and found the person. But that was the start. And so yeah, so you think it was like San Francisco, and I love. I saw a tweet the other day, which was the flock effect. And it's like crime is down, stolen vehicles is down. And look, 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, a community that demands to be safe. But 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 basis, it is kind of the problem having lived there is that people are so open hearted from the summer and it literally comes from the summer of love and the fact that it was a mining town like they just have this uh you know live and let live attitude obviously you know a lot of the culture that's emerged there is hey let your freak flag fly do what you want to do even to the point of hey you know if people are stealing um why are they stealing like what happened in their childhood and people there have had enough the fact that san francisco um and i think this is the correlation do you have the ability and 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's it is you you have to be extremely aware of your own privilege that you don't have to deal with crime and man my brother was a cop during the stop ask and frisk era in new york the statistics during stop frisk and ask which was a violation of the fourth 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 were a lot of guns on the street my brother was a gunner that 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 frisk who knows they would stop and say hey what are you up to and uh hey you're hanging out in the corner what's going on and you know they just try to get a read on people which by the way if you ever go to israel or you go to some countries they ask you 20 questions why are you here hey uh you know where are you staying like they want to get a read on you and they're like oh we're just going to stop you and frisk you whether you're going into israel or tokyo they might ask you a couple 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 heights they don't need to worry about this man something goes down in pack heights there's 20 cops and 50 private security guards you know rallying around one homeless person one vagrant you know one person who's in a car that doesn't look like you belong there it's like they're gonna get informed in pack heights yep no i mean you hit the nail on 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 and for those who have a gate and have a guard and have cameras and have a security system and they have jamie's incredible doorbell camera right and they have all these products and these services they're like why does why does anyone need to feel any safer it's like because people don't have any of this stuff and they don't feel safe when they go to bed and yeah it's it's 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 decision 100 i 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 gated 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 gated community and you were to ask you know people with a family hey would you like to live in a gated community would you like to live with not in a gated community like 100 out of 100 people i i mean maybe it's 95 i think if you offered like the average joe or jane hey would you like to live in a would you like your community to be gated with three gates and there's a security guard they'd be like heck yes but i can't afford that how much is that going to cost so this is a really good question and i think it's a really good question i think this is where you know i think people with children people with homes they 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 and i care about my safety i care about my privacy my safety yeah and 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 yeah the license plates for two weeks for 30 days i don't want the government to do facial recognition i find that like a bridge too far i kind of feel okay with it i'm sorry if people are disappointed in me for that but uh as a parent and you know somebody in a community i'm okay with my community having license 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 i had this interesting conversation with um an elected official in illinois who was one of our largest antagonists very anti-flock and really sad really scary she was the victim of political violence um someone shot at her house and she was the victim of political violence and she was the person who shot at her house and the police used a flock camera to find that person and lo and behold to her credit she changed but she did change and she's now one of our largest advocates because she realizes 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 um and we don't let you necessarily allowed minority uh dictate you know us moving towards a less safe society 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 yeah and is this something flock can recover from or is this like you know company killing like oh my god we're screwed like to just be honest with us about like the pr disaster of the last year how that's affected you and how that's informed how you you know run the company and how damaging has it been you know i think the biggest damage is the internal morale right because because you go on to x or you go on to reddit and you go why are people so mad at us when we've been doing the same thing for nine years and and why are they so mad at us for things we don't do and we just we just want people to be safe and that's tough right it's really hard for your your your work to be challenged so miserably i think the the interesting part is it's brought us closer to our customers you know because we're because they they they have a job to do which is to keep their community safe and they see this as one of the the most if not 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 yeah in terms of fighting crime and i agree with them so that's something good stuff and i think you know the business is in good shape you know we raised we raised more money at the beginning of the year uh company's still growing we could be growing faster like we used to have zero churn now we have to your point one percent okay well i would like to be back at zero um and i'm gonna fight as hard as i can to get the right message out there to your point communicate better listen more um and i think if we do that we're gonna be just fine because at the end of 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 uh those are just these core needs it's as low as hard i give need safety is up there and it's high you know i think for your company like you're gonna just have to lead and you're gonna 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 uh x and twitter and had like political you know nonsense and like people trying to subvert democracy like all of these social networks had a serious downside that's now been quantified etc 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 gate 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 he was also identifying and trying to get ahead of it and 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 he was also identifying and trying to get ahead of it and i think he was also identifying and trying to get ahead of it and showing 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 for hey maybe that levels the 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 gotta just get ahead of it and anticipate these things and own them and just be frank about it tucker caulson demolished you last week have you have you reached out to tucker to go on his pod no i don't you know i don't know if if that's something that's in my my deck of cards but uh no i appreciate it i i like that uh you know i do like t-shirts i guess is what i'd say uh i wear t-shirts i gotta i put a polo on for you i thought a collar would be appropriate but i wear an apollo too in the hot yeah you look you look great yeah you look great but no i think look we we want to we were on the top of the list and we're on the top of the list and we're on the top of the list today show this morning we're on good morning america we want to go to places where the community listens and we want to have meaningful conversations and uh yeah we're not done we got a we had a long road ahead of us and i think you know we didn't get to drones oh yeah so how did they yeah let's wrap up on that how did the 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 um so it's a big part of our business but we've got drones we've got live video cameras we've really cool software. And I think the story I share with you about drones, which my favorite stories is these drones live in a HVAC control box, a dock per se, 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 this really interesting case not too far from you up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where a woman late at night at a gas station called 911 and said, "There's a man walking back and forth with a gun. I don't feel safe." Which obviously it's not illegal to garnish a weapon in the state of Texas, but she was scared, right? Well, you can wear one, but you can't be waving it around. Yeah. And he was. Fair enough, fair enough. And so she called 911, and normally what would happen is one cop would have heard that, flip on the blue lights, race down there, their heart's racing, he's got his gun ready, and someone's about to die. 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. Yeah. And 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." 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 demitigated, we mitigated what would have been a really bad situation for everyone. And we have thousands and thousands of stories like that where communities are safer now with our drones, they're safer with our cameras. And to your earlier point, we just got to do a better job of 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've got thousands and thousands of customers. We need their help too in telling the story. Yeah. I think 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 Ernst & Young or whatever to audit books. What's the equivalent here of a third-party auditor? I think 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 in real-time/whatever every drone flight." Because now you start sending drones, Tucker's going to look at that or ACLU's going to look at that and say, "Okay, so now you're peeking in my window. So there's got to be massive safeguards on the drone getting there." Yeah. Is it only deployed if there's a 911 call? Is that the. This is the next big chapter for law enforcement is doing a better job implementing drones than they've done with historical products. Because you're looking at something like body cameras, and I'm not sure how much you follow this, there was massive outrage on body cameras. And now it's like, "Wait a second, this is actually really good. It's a better tool." And same with non-lethal weapons. And so, no, there's still more work to do there. And to your point on the third-party auditors, one, you've got a city manager. Mm-hmm. That is a lot of work. That is effectively his or her job is to hold the police chief accountable. And they can see the audit logs. They can go in there themselves? 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, you don't want people racing and chasing to the crime scene. You don't want to break an active criminal investigation. 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. And we're going to push them. We're going to push them hard, but the community's also going to push them as hard. I mean, some of these things are 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 records. They don't have the radios encrypted. 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 911 calls that are with them? Are people doing that? Or does your software do 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, you know, city officials and command staff. But I think that your question's the 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 yet. What's the shortest state regulation or city regulation for the LPR? Yeah. So the short, so you've got, you've got New Hampshire at three minutes. Three minutes for license plate reading? Yeah. Okay. That's the equivalent of zero. That's New Hampshire though. For a live free or die. Okay. Got it. And then the next nearest 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, 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. 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 reasonable caps on this. And thank you to everybody for tuning in to the All In interview program. Bye-bye. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. © BF-WATCH TV 2021