In brief
- Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley told Fox News that the country has to prioritize a compromise between privacy and safety.
- He compared calls for an outright ban to banning vehicles, pointing to drunk driving and seatbelt laws as the better model.
- Langley’s remarks followed a Washington Post investigation that found police departments were not auditing how officers used the cameras.
The CEO of Flock Safety has called for “compromise” amid a growing backlash against the company’s AI-powered license plate cameras, which have been vandalized across the country and have drawn bipartisan fire in Congress.
“What we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” Garrett Langley told Fox News in an interview broadcast Saturday, arguing that Americans who frame the argument as a choice between privacy and safety are “prioritizing the wrong thing.”
Flock has united lawmakers who agree on little else. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said this month he would introduce legislation to stop “AI mass surveillance,” and House Republicans led by Representative Tim Burchett have introduced a bill barring the federal government from buying Flock cameras. Missouri Republican Josh Hawley has opened a separate Senate inquiry.
An outright ban, Langley argued, would be “like banning vehicles”—a response the country rejected in favor of drunk driving statutes, seatbelts and airbags. He named two things regulators should fix instead: data retention, where Flock recently cut its own recommendation to seven days against a strictest-in-the-nation state limit of 21, and accountability for officers who abuse the system. “The person who wants a bad cop gone first is a good cop, and 99.9% of cops are good,” he said.
Flock faces scrutiny
A Washington Post investigation published on August 19 found at least 69 police officials accused, charged or convicted of misusing Flock or similar plate readers. In at least 15 of those cases, the person who spotted it first was outside the department: a victim, an activist or a journalist.
Reporters then identified three more officers by analyzing public search logs. One in Indianapolis had run 3,759 searches over ten months on vehicles used by his wife and two acquaintances, roughly twelve a day. All three departments said they did not regularly audit officer searches, and two of the officers have since been disciplined.
Six days before the Post published, Flock announced that it would require all law enforcement customers to switch on Audit Assistance, a tool that flags abnormal search patterns, by the end of the year. The feature had been optional since April, and Flock said about a third of the 7,000 agencies using its system had switched it on.
Langley also faced questions about a WIRED investigation published the same day as the Post‘s, which found Flock had built an AI tool that can identify drivers from their patterns of movement alone, with no plate or name needed to begin a search.
He did not dispute it, calling AI “incredibly powerful, but also a very dangerous tool” and saying deployment in public safety demands third-party attestation. “When you call 911, it has to work. There’s no space for hallucination.”
Flock says its technology supported over a million criminal investigations last year and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people. The figures come from the company’s own Impact Census, a survey of nearly 700 agencies that Flock describes as an early methodology open to critique. The number counts investigations the technology took part in; Flock separately estimates it contributed to about 20% of cleared cases in the jurisdictions where its cameras run.
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