Flock CEO defends surveillance tech amid national backlash

Flock founder and CEO Garrett Langley told a TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 audience in San Francisco on Wednesday that he doesn’t believe the risks of deploying 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,” he said during a panel interview, as his company — maker of license-plate cameras and other recording devices used by police departments and cities — faces mounting criticism nationwide.

That criticism has already cost Flock business: the company has seen contracts cancelled and has laid off staff as scrutiny of its surveillance products intensified. Rather than address the specific concerns driving those cancellations, Langley largely responded with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States and accounts of crimes he said Flock’s technology had helped solve. He compared the backlash to the debate over driverless cars, arguing that a single accident is not a reason to shut down a technology that is definitively safer than human drivers overall — the right response, he said, is to discuss how to prevent future accidents, not to pause progress.

Langley pushed back on one specific strand of the criticism, saying some customers cancelled contracts in the mistaken belief that Flock’s cameras perform facial recognition; the cameras do not have facial recognition, though they can detect and track people. On the broader question of whether Flock lets police departments do more with fewer officers, he pointed to a decline in law-enforcement staffing since the pandemic and said a city like San Francisco has hundreds of open police positions that will probably never be filled — positioning Flock’s technology as filling that gap. Pressed on how the company prevents abuse of its surveillance systems, he said there is a way to curb abuse without disrupting the legal system or a department’s operations, without detailing what that would involve, and said Flock prefers to minimize the number of features, functions, and policies it mandates for customers rather than dictate how city leaders run their departments.

Langley acknowledged that Flock is far from perfect and that he has made mistakes, but said he considers the trade-off worth it, arguing that millions of people have better lives today because of Flock and that some who disagree with the company now could one day be crime victims themselves.

Why it matters

Flock’s defense mirrors the argument AI companies make about their own privacy trade-offs — that the benefits of a powerful new technology justify ceding more personal data, and that occasional harms are the cost of progress rather than a reason to pause deployment. How that argument plays out for a surveillance company facing cancelled government contracts could be an early signal of how much public tolerance AI firms can expect for similar trade-offs.