What It Takes to Clear a Million Crimes a Year with Flock Safety's CEO
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Why does Garrett Langley say policing should focus on real‑time crime hotspots instead of historic crime data?
South American cartels. Fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on uh night vision. Look through houses to see if you can tell me. Then go break in. I was working with a town. In Tennessee, it's a good city. Their average response time to animal call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in sixty eight seconds. Just like a better quality of service. You don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You end up policing where crime is happening right now. Yeah. In real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. The majority of criminals, let's call it nine-nine percent criminals, are not evil people. They're not. Like evil is a random act of violence, and that is exceptionally rare.
It's most
opportunism. It's all opportunism. In 2017, someone stole a gun from a car in Garrett Langley's neighborhood. The Atlanta Police Department came. Shrugged and left. No fingerprints, no investigation. The crime would go unsolved. So Langley, an electrical engineer, built a camera to track every car entering the neighborhood. Two months later, another gun was stolen. This time, he handed police a single blade. The only car that didn't belong. Hours later, an arrest. That prototype became Flock Safety. Нау deployed in more than six thousand American cities. Last year, the company helped clear over a million crimes. The product has grown from license plate readers to drones. Nine one one integration and an AI layer that turns city safety into a real time operating system.
In this conversation, previously aired on Cheeky Pine. Garrett Langley talks with John Collison about building hardware for law enforcement. Why crime is down, but clearance rates matter more. And what it would take to make every city a safe city.
Cheers.
Yeah.
Good to see you. Likewise, thanks for having me.
Mm. Okay. So maybe start by describing how does The flat part.
Yeah. Maybe we go we rewind like all the way back. Um, 'cause it's evolved.
How did a stolen gun in Garrett’s Atlanta neighborhood lead to the first license‑plate camera prototype?
Uhhuh.
You know, so eight years ago, living in Atlanta. Um and there's a f fun fact is if you're in a place like Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town in the southeast. If you just pull 10 F-150 door handles, some let's call it three out of 10 will be unlocked. And like one out of 10 will have a firearm in the glove box. Which is like I regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it, it's like you should keep a firearm safe. And you should like keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. Like that's just like really bad. But that's what people do. And so if you're, you know, a gang member and you're trying to obtain a firearm, like the easiest way is just to just like drive into a neighborhood. six kids, because they're kids, like jump out, you start pulling door handles.
You don't even think breaking into the car, you're just pulling door handles. This happened in my neighborhood. Someone got a gun, someone posts on next door like, Oh my gosh, I forgot my gun in my car and it's now gone. And so the Atlanta Peace Department comes and the major was like fairly apathetic. Like, hey. Sorry. Good luck. Like we're not gonna to so to your Bosch thing, they're not gonna f they're not gonna fingerprint the vehicles. Like no one's been hurt. Yeah, yeah. And for most major cities There's no sake out happening for this. There's no sake out. There's no like, oh, we're gonna go do all this resources. So for most major cities If a human is not Physically hurt. The crime goes just to the bottom of the list.
And that I found that really frustrating. Um because like this should be like really easy. Like these people drove into our neighborhood. They stole a firearm. Like we should we should go after these people. And he was like, Well, well, we don't have any information. It's like, Okay, what do you need? He's like, We need all these Okay, great. Um, so I was an electrical engineer. So I called a buddy of mine who studied computer science with me at Georgia Tech and I was like, Well, we're gonna go build this camera. Scott just like track license bites, that's it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Garrett Langley say policing should focus on real‑time crime hotspots instead of historic crime data?
0:00–2:17
2
How did a stolen gun in Garrett’s Atlanta neighborhood lead to the first license‑plate camera prototype?
2:17–5:25
3
What are the latest capabilities of Flock Safety (real‑time 911 integration, AI layer, drones) and how many crimes did they help clear?
5:25–15:22
4
Is the expanded surveillance from Flock’s cameras and drones a privacy controversy or a necessary safety trade‑off?
15:22–54:01
5
How does Flock Safety’s fraud‑detection model adapt to new attack patterns?
54:01–56:07
6
What were the biggest challenges when scaling from a single hardware product to a multi‑product portfolio?
56:07–1:08:00
7
How are drones being used to augment police response and what operational hurdles do they present?
1:08:00–1:29:58
8
What future product directions is Flock exploring to prevent crime and support safer communities?
1:29:58–1:46:34
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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