Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley has a pitch for a country increasingly uneasy about its surveillance apparatus: stop choosing between privacy and safety, and start demanding both. “When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing,” Langley told Fox News. The challenge for Flock is that the backlash is no longer hypothetical. The Washington Post recently identified 46 cases where police officers allegedly misused Flock’s license plate readers and cameras — including stalking wives, girlfriends, and exes. That’s a specific, damning number for a company whose technology now blankets thousands of American neighborhoods.
Langley’s response to those cases has been a mix of contrition and deflection. He apologized to one alleged victim in a CBS News interview, saying, “It kills me that she went through that.” But he also insisted Flock didn’t create police abuse — the company simply built tools that exposed it. That framing hasn’t stopped politicians from both parties from lining up against the company. Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has attacked his Senate opponent over “mass proliferation of Flock cameras,” while Bernie Sanders posted a blunt directive: “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.” On the right, three House Republicans introduced a bill to ban federal purchases of automated surveillance systems, naming Flock cameras specifically.
Flock has responded with policy tweaks. Default data retention dropped from 30 days to seven, and officers now need a case code before accessing footage. But both safeguards can be overridden — Evidence Mode lets police save data indefinitely. The ACLU called the changes “a step in the right direction” while noting that whether it’s real reform or “just another Flock PR move” depends entirely on how that Evidence Mode operates in practice.
Langley’s broader argument is that the whole industry lacks guardrails. “Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation. There’s no accountability,” he said. What’s notable is that a surveillance company CEO is actively inviting state regulators to criminalize misuse of his own product. That’s either a genuine attempt to get ahead of a legislative wave or a calculated bet that self-directed regulation will be softer than what Congress eventually writes. Either way, the 46 documented abuse cases have turned Flock from an obscure public-safety vendor into a bipartisan political target — and the company’s CEO will have to answer for that on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in October.
