Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn’t think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards.
“If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” Langley said, speaking on stage during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday.
During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces — which has since led to cancelled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people’s concerns.
In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society — that is, one with reduced crime — they would have to offer up their privacy in return.
A similar argument about the trade-offs and rewards could be made for AI, which is marketed to the public as vastly improving our lives, automating tedious tasks, and making things more convenient. The flip side is the cost of sharing everything about ourselves with the makers of the AI agents themselves — and the possibility of the destruction of humanity, according to some.
It’s no surprise that the AI backlash shares some overlap with Flock. Much like AI, Flock is a technology that some feel has been forced upon the public without their consent.
For Langley, this is just the nature of progress, he explained.
“Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It’s not doing things perfect,” he said. “Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there’s one accident, I don’t think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future’.”
But driverless car makers don’t shrug their shoulders at crashes; the companies pause their fleets and apply fixes. Flock, meanwhile, seems to wrestle as a company with understanding when it’s the company’s responsibility to intervene. From Langley’s answers, it’s clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others.
“We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he noted. “We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies,” he said.
CEO: ‘Flock is far from perfect’
Among the many rebuttals to his critics that Langley raised during the interview was the idea that misinformation about Flock had led to some of its customers’ cancellations. For instance, he referenced a time when a customer ended their contract because they believed the devices performed facial recognition. While Flock cameras do not have facial recognition, they do have the ability to detect and track people.
Langley also spent a fair amount of time admonishing those who think his technology, or any technology, should be perfect, attributing the quote to some unnamed community leader.
“He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect — I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” Langley said.
Another area of pushback was in positioning Flock as a more effective form of policing, and one that allowed police departments to do more with reduced staff.
“If you look at where policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, law enforcement employment is declining rapidly. I think about a place like San Francisco, and there’s hundreds of open positions. They will probably never be filled,” he said, positioning Flock as the tech that would fill in those gaps.
But pressed about abuse and the invasiveness of his company’s surveillance technology, Langley had no substantive answers.
“I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” Langley said, without spelling out what those ideas were.
For Langley, those seem to be matters of secondary importance, because his belief in Flock as a public good is so strong.
“I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay, and I think it’s worth it because there’s millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock,” he said. “And clearly we’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and there’s some folks who disagree with what we do, but it’s worth it because one day they might be a victim,” Langley added.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley said that his company has not ended any contracts with its customers over abuse of its products.
Speaking to TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos at the Disrupt 2026 conference in San Francisco, Langley responded to criticisms facing the company about the misuse of its license plate reader cameras by police departments. It comes after streams of reporting identifying dozens of police officers who have been arrested, fired, or told to resign after being caught abusing access to Flock’s nationwide database of license plate detections, oftentimes to stalk people without permission.
Langley told Loizos that the company would end a relationship with a customer where there was clear widespread abuse of its systems. But, the CEO said, it has not to date “fired” a customer, as he put it, such as a police department or law enforcement agency. Langley said Flock had the debate internally, but argued that the company should not take away its product from a community that might need it in its efforts to fight crime.
“If a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them immediately. That’s very easy,” Langley said.
“Most of the debate is nuanced into ‘what if two officers out of fifty were caught?’ Today, we haven’t fired any customers, but it’s not off the table in the case of some pretty drastic law-abiding issue,” added Langley.
The abuse of Flock’s systems and the data it collects is the latest in an array of controversies embroiling the Atlanta, Georgia-based maker of license plate reader cameras. Flock has more than 100,000 cameras around the United States, which allow local police departments and federal agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicle license plates and people as they pass by.
By allowing its law enforcement customers to track license plates outside of their jurisdictions, some police departments can track cars across the entire country through Flock’s national central database.
Protest outside Disrupt during Flock interview
Flock has become a flashpoint in the surveillance debate, prompting towns, cities, and communities to reject the company’s cameras by canceling their contracts or allowing them to expire, citing privacy fears.
There have been multiple reports of Flock reactivating cameras against their customers’ wishes, prompting local residents to tape trash bags over the cameras and other times destroying them.
While Langley spoke on the Disrupt stage, demonstrators gathered outside the venue to protest against Flock’s AI-powered surveillance, wearing costumes like the red robes from “The Handmaid’s Tale” and cardboard replicas of Flock cameras on their heads, while clips from the “1984” movie played on a loudspeaker behind them. Others carried signs declaring “Flock off,” or “Flock = ICE.”
Flock does not have a direct contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but the agency has reportedly accessed Flock data in the past by collaborating with local police departments that use Flock cameras.
Ashley Ortiz, an organizer with local progressive activist group The Wolves, told TechCrunch that she wants local lawmakers to take constituents’ concerns about Flock more seriously.
“I think Flock is going to be the start of a lot more community building, because we can come together around something as bipartisan as not enjoying mass surveillance,” said Ortiz. “We have Republicans who join us, conservatives who agree, we have sovereign citizens cutting down Flock cameras, so it’s not just the left who doesn’t want AI-powered mass surveillance.”
When asked what questions she has for Langley, Ortiz said, “What about AI-powered mass surveillance should be making us feel safe?”
In answer to that, Langley argued, onstage, that its license plate tracking system has been allowing police departments to solve more crimes and to solve them faster. He offered anecdotes, such as a stolen car with a baby in the back seat being found quickly thanks, he said, to Flock systems.
Still, Flock has also faced criticism for cybersecurity issues, and camera accuracy issues that have resulted in dozens of police stops and wrongful arrests, including a journalist who was driving a review vehicle.
Some communities have replaced their Flock contracts with rival surveillance companies, such as Axon, the maker of Taser weapons and police bodycams.
On a potential sale to Axon, Langley said the company was not considering a sale. “No, we’ve no desire to sell the company.”
Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company’s gunshot-detection microphones detect “just gunshots,” but Flock’s website paints a far broader picture of what other ambient audio also gets picked up.
Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the co-founder of the surveillance company defended Flock’s audio-collection product called Gunshot Detection, which listens for gunshots and other ambient audio across nearby neighborhoods to provide “earlier awareness” to potential public safety events.
Flock’s website says that the company’s audio systems can pinpoint gunfire instantly, while also being able to “detect street takeovers early to stop chaos before it escalates,” and “identify severe crashes in real time so help arrives faster.” It also says they can “expand awareness beyond gunfire with alerts for car crashes, fireworks, and sideshows.”
The company’s Gunshot Detection feature, announced last year, faced immediate pushback. In announcing the feature, Flock said the technology would listen out for sounds of “screaming.” Privacy groups condemned the company for listening for human voices, prompting the company to amend its website to instead say “sounds of human distress.” Flock later said it pulled the ability to detect “distress” altogether from its customers who tried it.
During the interview, Langley pushed back against what he described as misinformation about his product, arguing that many of its critics misunderstand how its products work. The comments come as public opinion continues to shift against Flock and other license plate reading companies amid growing unease about mass surveillance — sentiments that were visible in San Francisco, where protesters gathered to voice their opposition outside the venue as Langley took the stage.
“Most people don’t call 911 when they hear a gunshot, and so that’s why we built the product,” Langley told TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos onstage. “And then some of our customers said, ‘Oh, we have these in parking lots. It would be great if we could get alerted if someone was being abducted, if someone was being harmed.’”
Langley said that the idea seemed logical, so the company prototyped it and rolled it out to a couple of customers, but said that some people then had a lot of concerns. Langley conceded to making mistakes but that he was listening to his customers.
“There’s only a couple customers that were prototyping it with us, and we said, ‘OK, great, it’s just going to do gunshots, plain and simple.’ If a gun goes off, we’ll notify, and if not, that’s all it’s going to listen to,” said Langley.
When asked about the contradiction between his remarks and the company’s marketing materials that say the audio systems can detect more than gunshots, he responded, “It’s just gunshots.”
When reached by TechCrunch, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said: “Flock’s gunshot detection technology is primarily used to detect gunfire but is also capable of detecting fireworks, sideshows, and potential car crashes. CEO Garrett Langley’s remarks were intended to emphasize that Flock’s Audio Detection technology is not designed to monitor conversations or analyze speech and does not currently detect human screaming or distress.”
An FAQ section of the website notes that “in addition to gunshots, Flock Gunshot and Audio Detection can detect fireworks, sideshows, and other disruptive community events.” It goes on to state that the company’s “detection library is continually expanding to include emerging threats that are relevant” to customers’ specific needs.
Langley stated that the number of Flock’s microphones is comparable to ShotSpotter, which as of 2024 had about 25,000 microphones, per reporting by Wired.
Langley’s comments come amid mounting scrutiny of Flock from privacy advocates, including the ACLU, and members of the public who are concerned about the misuse of its technology, with some going so far as destroying the surveillance cameras. The remarks also come as Texas and Florida have moved to end their relationships with Flock, and Amazon’s Ring has ended its partnership with the company.
