Flock CEO Defends License-Plate Camera Push Amid Backlash

Flock Safety's CEO used a TechCrunch Disrupt stage in San Francisco this week to argue that the backlash against his AI license-plate camera network does not justify slowing the rollout, even after layoffs and cancelled customer contracts. "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," Garrett Langley said, TechCrunch reports.

The pitch came days after Flock disclosed it was cutting roughly 270 employees, about 18% of its workforce, through a voluntary buyout that closes at the end of October. The company, last valued at $8.4 billion with $1.2 billion raised since 2017, has drawn blowback over a Texas sheriff's office allegedly using its database to investigate a woman who had an abortion, a fired San Jose officer accused of sharing Flock data with a domestic-violence suspect's relative, and roughly 1.6 million out-of-state agency queries against San Francisco cameras surfaced in a 2025 investigation, per the SF Standard.

Asked how Flock would guard against misuse by its police customers, Langley pushed the obligation onto the buyers. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job. We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. On whether Flock itself has ever cut off a department, he said in a separate Disrupt session: "If a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them immediately."

Langley struck a conciliatory note on Flock's own record, saying "Clearly we've made our fair share of mistakes," while attributing much of the pressure to a "landscape where social media is so interwoven with politics and is so rife with misinformation." He offered no concrete new misuse-prevention commitments.