Flock CEO Wants Its Cameras in Every One of America’s 17,000 Cities

Flock cameras recently tracked me for a few days in Plymouth, MN, which resulted in my wife and me being surrounded by police who thought I had performed grand theft auto. I was innocent. Today there are only 18 Flock cameras in Plymouth, but what about tomorrow?

Flock Safety Founder and CEO Garrett Langley sat down in an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast to discuss Flock as a company today, as a company tomorrow, and what he thinks the future looks like. Will there be a Flock camera on every street corner and inside every school?

Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Langley talks about Flock’s future below.

Before answering the question outright of what his vision for Flock is and were are we going in the future, Garrett gave context as to his personal why behind his vision. “Just like you, I’m a father of three kids. My primary objective as a father is to keep them safe. They’ve got to be safe. Then I’ve got to make sure they’re educated, that they’re good people, productive members of society. But if they’re not safe, everything else starts to crumble. I think that’s true for a lot of kids. That lack of feeling safe starts to lead to these erosions of society.”

Garrett then addressed the question of where Flock is today by using San Francisco as an example. “What we’ve noticed is in certain places like San Francisco, four years ago, you could get away with almost any crime. Then two or three years ago, Mayor Breed and Mayor Lurie said, ‘Flock, we need help. It’s too easy to be a criminal, and our businesses are leaving, our people are leaving. This isn’t working for us.'”

The result of that situation, according to Garrett, “We deployed hundreds of license plate readers, we deployed our drones, we deployed our real-time crime center software to make officers more efficient. Now it’s one of the safest cities in America. Mayor Lurie has one of the highest approval ratings of any major city mayor—he might actually have the highest, last I checked.”

As for the future of society and Garrett’s vision of what part Flock plays? “For me, the future is a future where more cities look like San Francisco, where crime is incredibly hard to get away with—so hard that people just choose not to do it. That might seem like a distant future, but it’s happening in San Francisco. I think we’re going to do the same thing in Oakland. We’re in 7,000 cities today, and I’d like to get us to all 17,000 cities in America and create that future, because it’s quite doable. Whatever technology we need to build to help get there while maintaining our local societal norms is what we’re planning to do. That might sound crazy, but I said it 10 years ago, and now it’s really happening at scale. It’s a pretty exciting time.”

Whether that vision will play out or not is yet to be seen.

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