Technology

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/45730883

With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools and a $7.5 billion business. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker DJI in his sights on the way to his noble (if Sisyphean) goal: Preventing all crime in the U.S.

In a windowless room inside Atlanta’s Dunwoody police department, Lieutenant Tim Fecht hits a button and an insectile DJI drone rises silently from the station rooftop. It already has its coordinates: a local mall where a 911 call has alerted the cops to a male shoplifter. From high above the complex, Fecht zooms in on a man checking his phone, then examines a group of people waiting for a train. They’re all hundreds of yards away, but crystal clear on the room-dominating display inside the department’s crime center, a classroom-sized space with walls covered in monitors flashing real- time crime data—surveillance and license plate reader camera feeds, gunshot detection reports, digital maps showing the location of cop cars across the city. As more 911 calls come in, AI transcribes them on another screen. Fecht can access any of it with a few clicks.

Twenty minutes down the road from Dunwoody, in an office where Flock Safety’s cameras and gunshot detectors are arrayed like museum pieces, 38-year-old CEO and cofoun­der Garrett Langley presides over the $300 million (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S. They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in Amer­ica” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they’ll add a new dimension to Flock’s business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI’s dominance.

Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve- everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.