Crime rates in the United States, as a matter of statistical fact, have fallen drastically over the past 30 years — but at the same time, due to a mix of sensational news reporting and irresponsible political rhetoric, the average American mistakenly believes they’re increasing.
And now, barreling into that reality is a 38-year-old tech bro who says his spying startup can solve it all for good.
Garrett Langley is the CEO and cofounder of a surveillance startup called Flock Safety. Valued at $7.5 billion, according to Forbes, Flock has amassed a matrix of over 80,000 “AI-powered” cameras throughout the US since its founding in 2017.
As Forbes adds, that intelligence web is now getting a boost in the form of “made in America” surveillance drones, which began rolling out to police departments in August.
Langley’s billion-dollar elevator pitch goes a little something like this: whether you’re a police department, private business, or individual homeowner, if you let Flock into your life — through a never ending subscription, of course — we can solve crime by 2035.
It’s a tall task, to put it gently, but evidently one that Langley really believes in. “I’ve talked to plenty of activists who think crime is just the cost of modern society. I disagree,” Langley told Forbes. “I think we can have a crime-free city and civil liberties… We can have it all.”
Part of Flock’s draw, compared to the many other surveillance companies on offer, is its ever-expanding network. Flock’s partner companies like FedEx and Lowe’s, along with schools and property management groups, can agree to grant local law enforcement the use of their surveillance webs.
In doing so on a mass scale, Flock effectively solves one of US law enforcement’s more irksome contradictions: the fact that, even though CCTV cameras are everywhere, the private and fragmented web of camera owners makes it really annoying to gather and comb through footage. Not so anymore.
The company currently boasts partnerships with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private businesses. On its website, Flock talks up a variety of applications, from well-to-do HOAs to sleepy one-light towns to million dollar companies struggling with organized crime, it seems there’s no social ill that can’t be solved with a Flock contract — at least on the surface.
While centralized surveillance schemes have had a positive effect on crime rates in China — efforts which coincided with arguably the largest poverty alleviation effort in history — critics maintain that, in the US at least, mass surveillance and the moral panic it encompasses mostly serves to target minority and immigrant communities.
Those groups, it should be noted, already make up the bulk of the American prison population, thanks in no small part to budding police technologies like Flock.
That said, Langley isn’t worried about a few bleeding heart critics.
“The consequence of building a product that actually changes people’s lives is that there will be a lot of people we piss off along the way,” the CEO told Forbes, “because what we’re doing actually matters.”
More on surveillance: Alarming New System Can Identify People Through Walls Using Wi-Fi Signal