Mar 5, 2026 · 1h 44m · cheeky-pint
Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime
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Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, joins Stripe's John Collison to discuss building advanced vehicle recognition, computer vision, and autonomous drone networks that solve crime. Langley breaks down Flock's operational scaling, hardware engineering, civil liberty safeguards, and the overarching mission of leveraging crime clearance to reduce long-term incarceration.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. John holds 19.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
John as informed peer 5.5 Guest teaching 6.4 Guest disagreement 1.7 John pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is John, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:15 Rejecting blanket bans on facial recognition
Langley rejects the binary public debate surrounding facial recognition, arguing that banning the technology outright rather than calibrating it to severe crimes is irrational.
Hardest push from John ▶ 1:39:55 Challenging aerial drone search distinction from police cruiser patrolsCollison challenges Langley's constitutional distinction, questioning why an aerial drone on routine patrol is legally different from a standard squad car patrolling the streets.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:49 Revealing the 24-hour FBI NCIC database lagLangley educates Collison on the reality of national law enforcement databases, revealing that local stolen car reports take 24 hours to propagate across national FBI systems via FTP servers.
John holds their own ▶ 1:35:40 Applying John Boyd's fighter jet doctrine to procurement specsCollison draws directly from Robert Coram's biography of John Boyd to explain how excessive general staff focus on speed specs distorted military procurement, mirroring municipal policing demands.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | John as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | John pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Origins of Flock Safety and Early Growth | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | John Collison opens with a basic question on how Flock Safety works. Garrett Langley provides an extended narrative explaining gun theft mechanics in Atlanta and how local news fueled their initial 30-40M ARR growth without traditional marketing. | |
| Rethinking Security from Individuals to Neighborhoods | 4 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Langley clarifies that individual home security systems do not solve neighborhood crimes, breaking down how Flock cleared over a million crimes using automated 911 audio ingestion and drone dispatch. Collison asks clarifying questions about what clearing crime entails. | |
| Decentralized Policing and Inter-Agency Data Sharing | 6 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Collison draws on his knowledge of international policing structures like Ireland's Garda Síochána to contrast with US local municipality fragmentation. Langley explains the legal and technological barriers to inter-agency data sharing, like cloud bans lasting until 2022. | |
| Edge Computing and Vehicle Anomaly Detection | 5 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Collison questions the technical pipeline of stolen car databases and challenges the idea that cars are not stolen for sideshows. Langley educates him on cold plating, AI make/model cross-referencing, and the 24-hour sync lag between local and FBI NCIC databases. | |
| Privacy Norms and Public Roadway Surveillance | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Collison prompts a steelman argument regarding public privacy concerns on roadways. Langley defends public roadway surveillance by comparing it to commercial mobile location tracking and emphasizes audit trails and short retention windows. | |
| Technological Asymmetry and Criminal Drone Exploitation | 6 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Collison inquires about technological shifts in crime fighting. Langley details criminal drone exploitation for casing homes and smuggling contraband into prisons, noting the legal asymmetry where law enforcement cannot shoot down FAA-regulated drones. | |
| Technology Governance and Objective Data Policing | 5 | 7 | 3 | 2 | Langley pushes back against blanket bans on facial recognition, arguing for calibrated governance tied to crime severity. He contrasts historical biased policing with objective, real-time license plate detection in Oakland. | |
| Post-COVID Crime Trends and Clearance Deterrence | 6 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Collison asks about national crime statistics and criminal psychology. Langley explains the post-COVID homicide surge, the hyper-online recruitment culture among young offenders, and why clearance rate certainty deters crime better than severe penalties. | |
| Supply Chain Fraud and Organized Cargo Theft | 5 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Langley outlines the migration of organized theft from retail shoplifting to sophisticated freight broker takeovers at distribution facilities. Collison engages on liability structures between retailers and freight insurers. | |
| Enterprise Security and Workplace Asset Protection | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Langley shares how Flock expanded its corporate enterprise business to over 100M ARR, shifting from asset protection to employee safety and executive protection via physical anomaly detection. | |
| International Expansion Realities and Geopolitical Competition | 6 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Collison presses on international expansion opportunities. Langley recounts losing a major government deal in Mexico to state-subsidized Chinese camera maker Hikvision, warning about hardware sovereignty and data infrastructure risks. | |
| Stripe Radar Fraud Prevention Advertisement | 7 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Collison weaves in a Stripe Radar promotion before analyzing the market dynamics of public safety incumbents Motorola and Axon. Langley details the barriers to raising VC capital for hardware selling into government. | |
| AI Orchestration for Understaffed Police Departments | 6 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Langley explains how Flock acts as an orchestration layer using LLMs to analyze 911 calls and automatically flag suspicious vehicle convoys for understaffed police departments. | |
| Drone as First Responder and Emergency Triage | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Langley details the operational advantages of drone-as-first-responder systems, reducing 911 response times from seven minutes to 68 seconds and eliminating dangerous vehicular pursuits. | |
| Aviation Laser Strikes and Tactical Flight Tracking | 8 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Collison shares deep domain knowledge about aviation laser strikes and ADS-B tracking. Langley explains the severe hardware challenges of rapid multi-product expansion, demand forecasting, and supply chain volatility with memory components. | |
| Field Services Operations and High-Uptime Reliability | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Collison inquires about maintaining physical hardware reliability in the field. Langley reveals that driving logistics represent their highest operational cost and that the IR cut filter is the single moving part prone to wear. | |
| Legislative Standards and Civil Liberty Guardrails | 6 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Collison asks how to establish civil liberties guardrails as surveillance expands to public parks. Langley discusses Virginia's legislative model, arguing for clear data retention standards and mandatory audits over vague, unenforceable bans. | |
| Government Procurement Realities and Stripe Check Ingestion | 7 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Collison and Langley discuss municipal procurement inefficiencies. Collison highlights how Flock utilizes Stripe's physical check ingestion service to automate legacy payments from private enterprise clients. | |
| High-Speed Testing and Low-Power Radar Triggering | 5 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Langley recounts renting a racetrack to test license plate reading at 120+ mph and developing a low-power radar sensor that wakes the camera from sleep mode to conserve solar battery power. | |
| Drone Payload Architecture and Environmental Docking | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Langley outlines Flock's drone payload-first architecture, comparing it to the A-10 Warthog, and details the commercial HVAC engineering needed inside all-weather charging docks. | |
| Constitutional Precedents and Urban Drone Deployment | 7 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Collison cites John Boyd's procurement philosophy and questions whether continuous drone patrol differs legally from police cruisers. Langley counters by explaining the Fourth Amendment Carpenter precedent and why drones only launch upon active 911 calls. | |
| Long-Term Vision: Crime Prevention and Economic Opportunity | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Langley summarizes his ultimate vision: reducing prison populations by backing economic opportunity for youth and creating alternative intervention pathways for non-violent offenders. |
Statements from this episode (60)
Langley: Major City Police Deprioritize Crimes Where No One Is Hurt
“So for most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list.”
Langley: Flock Scaled First $20M–$40M ARR Solely Through Local TV News
“We might be the only company that for the first, let's call it, 20 or 30, forty million of ARR, strictly driven off of five o'clock news. That was our only growth channel.”
Langley: There are 400,000 legally organized neighborhood organizations in the US
“There's 400,000 neighborhoods in America, and there's no consolidation of, Providing safety for those communities. And when I say neighborhood, that is a, you know, legally binding organization that can sign a contract.”
Langley: Traditional home security alerts crimes but fails to solve them
“They do two things that actually are not helpful. They tell you a crime has happened. They don't actually help you solve it. And then what about your neighbor? And so what we'd realize is that every single security system was focused on the individual.”
Langley: Flock Safety focused exclusively on neighborhoods for its first four years
“So it was all neighborhoods for the first three or four years of the business.”
Langley: Flock Safety cleared over one million US crimes last year
“So we're, last year, we helped clear just north of a million crimes in America.”
Langley: Flock covers over 6,000 cities and 50% of US population
“Yeah, so it's just over 6000 cities. So it's like well north of 50% of America that's covered by Flock.”
Langley: Flock is deployed in every major US city except Manhattan
“So there's about 17,000 cities in the U.S., and we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point.”
Langley: Flock Safety reached $500M in ARR in seven years
“And then, you know, the business has gone from zero to, you know, about five hundred million in ARR in the last seven years, building cameras, drones, and selling it to the government, which is like three strikes are out.”
Langley: Florida and Maryland barred police cloud data until 2022 and 2023
“The cloud was only recently made legal in Florida as recently as twenty-twenty-two. So if you were a law enforcement agency, you could not host your data in the cloud until 2022. Maryland was 2023.”
Langley: Flock Safety helped clear over 1,000 Amber and Silver Alerts
“I think we did just over a thousand amber and silver alerts last year that we helped clear.”
Langley: Stolen vehicles take 24 hours to reach the FBI database
“They will immediately put it in the Bay Area Flock hotlist immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hotlist. And that's a, you know, CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the US.”
Langley: Physical surveillance faces unfairly higher privacy standards than digital tracking
“Because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion, what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world.”
Langley: Flock Safety stores all system audit logs forever and publicly
“Every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity, and it's publicly available.”
Langley: Year-old location data is largely irrelevant to criminal investigations
“There's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple days versus, like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation.”
Langley: Cartels fly night-vision drones to case Virginia homes
“In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in.”
Langley: Federal law prevents police from shooting down criminal drones
“And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down. It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace.”
Langley: Drones deliver up to 30-pound contraband payloads into prisons
“One of the leading problems for enforcement officers is, you've got these pretty incredible, actually, from an engineering perspective, drones that are carrying 10, 20, thirty-pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls. And like, they'll literally dangl…”
Langley: Tech sophistication for policing should scale with crime severity
“The framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology.”
Flock Safety avoids facial recognition due to controversy
“We don't do facial recognition for that reason, because it's too controversial, but that's, it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day.”
Langley: Body cameras exonerate officers in majority of foul play cases
“In the majority of cases that I see, where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse. Where a law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job, and on the other side, there was other mental health issue, there was something gone wrong, and it…”
Langley: US crime rate is down and will continue falling
“It is down. I think it'll continue to go down.”
Langley: Cobb County solves 100% of violent crimes
“Cobb County would be one which is like the second largest county... If you commit violence in Cobb County, you will get arrested.”
Langley: Flock's 'Safe City' package costs around $20 per citizen yearly
“We have this new concept that we've developed called, like, safe city, and we'll go into a town and say, look, this is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city. It's your choice. It tends to be like, what, 20 bucks a citizen a year?”
Langley: Oakland crime rose when San Francisco started adopting Flock Safety
“It's like when San Francisco started adopting Flock, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt Flock.”
Langley: Lowe's retail shrink dropped an order of magnitude with Flock
“But like, you look at some of our partners like a Lowe's, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not exactly, it's not really a problem anymore.”
Langley: Flock Safety has a $5B-$15B domestic US revenue opportunity
“When I look at the domestic opportunity, you know, we should be able to get to five, 10, fifteen billion of revenue. In America”
Langley: Flock lost a Mexican deal to Hikvision after pricing 10x higher
“So we pursued one really big deal last year in Mexico. We had support from one of our investors, like we should go after cigar and great. And they had connections to the Mexican government. And so we got all the way to the finish line, and it was us versus Hik…”
Langley: A third of Flock Safety employees dig holes for a living
“A third of our employees dig holes for a living.”
Langley: Motorola holds an estimated 80% global land mobile radio market share
“I think they have an 80% market share globally of landmass radio”
Langley: VC-backed public safety tech startups will fail or be consolidated
“I see a new VC backed company every day, and I'm like, there's just a, all these things are going out of business, so there's just going to be consolidation.”
Flock Built AI Agent to Flag Vehicles Following Armored Cars
“So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so, at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's our truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically.”
Flock Drones Reach Tennessee 911 Calls in 68 Seconds vs. 7.5 Minutes
“Their average response time to a nine-on-one call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds.”
Langley: Flock Safety drone system costs less than one police officer
“Like in the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer.”
Langley: Most towns using Flock drones eliminate vehicular police pursuits
“So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone.”
Langley: Majority of 911 calls do not require a human officer response
“Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up.”
Langley: Police helicopters increasingly disable ADS-B to evade criminal tracking
“We're seeing more and more police helicopters have to turn off ADS-B as well. Because like criminals have the same data that you have. And so most of the police officers actually fly without ADS, you know, which is like a whole challenge.”
Langley: Flock Safety will generate hundreds of millions in operating cashflow this year
“Like we'll generate free cashflow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cashflow this year.”
Langley: Hardware companies fail primarily due to poor 12-to-18-month demand forecasting
“The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock. And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. And if you look at the, like, hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where the…”
Langley: Unlike software, every major decision in hardware is an irreversible one-way door
“Every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal, and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of, like, everything's a two-way door. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door.”
Langley: Driving is the largest cost in replacing Flock's field hardware
“The largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving.”
Langley: The IR cut filter is the only camera part that breaks
“On the camera side there's one part, which is the IR cut filter... And it is the only part that breaks.”
Langley: Unsolved crimes mean there were not enough cameras deployed
“For every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras.”
Langley: Communities should deploy abundant cameras alongside strictly restrictive usage controls
“For me at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have an incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used.”
Langley: Flock stores live video for seven days and LPR data for 30 days
“There's a, there's data retention where we protect, you know, how long something is stored. So for live video, it's typically seven days. For LPR data, it's typically 30 days. You can go longer or shorter if a democratically elected body votes on it.”
Langley: Flock lobbies for legislation enforcing civil liberty guardrails on surveillance
“We have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say, like, there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties, and it needs to be legislated, though.”
Langley: Law enforcement customers do not regularly audit surveillance usage without mandates
“Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It was like, customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it.”
Langley: Surveillance laws banning specific use cases like marijuana are unenforceable bad policy
“To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill. So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for vile possession of marijuana. Like, how, who's gonna enforce it? How, how, and it's like, you might believe that, and that's great, but someo…”
Langley: Government RFPs are almost always tailored to a single vendor
“Everything goes to RFP, but the RFP is written for one vendor, so all it does is wind up taking an extra year, six months. That's like, that's, I get why RFPs exist, but they're not actually RFPs. I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor. I'm s…”
Langley: Selling to local government has more negatives than positives
“Like it's, I would not wish upon anyone Selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives, always.”
Langley: 80% to 90% of Flock Safety customers pay by check
“Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH to either check or credit card, and we do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90% are checks, maybe higher.”
Langley: Capturing 120–150 mph cars was a major blocker to Flock's sales
“Like, we, until we got to like, one, 21, 50, it was a major blocker to sales.”
Langley: Flock Safety's drone camera can read license plates nearly a mile away
“Like, we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like, crazy specs. Great thermal.”
Flock Drones Cross a 30-Square-Mile Radius in Under One Minute
“Our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute.”
Langley: Flock's most active deployed drone flies 90 hours weekly
“I think our busiest drone is being flown, you know, 90 hours a week.”
Langley: Legal privacy precedents collapse when surveillance tech becomes cheap
“The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, a historical precedent gets thrown away.”
Langley: Flock Safety's Thriving Cities Fund Achieved 21% IRR
“You know, last year, I think we were at, you know, 21%
IRR, so like, it's not a bad business.”
Langley: Most Crimes Solved by Flock Safety Are Non-Violent
“The majority of the crime we solve is not violent.
It's non-violent.”
Langley: The Whole Concept of Prison Will Never Work
“And the whole concept of prison will never work.
Like, and there are some incredibly well-run prisons with really well-intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is, like, by default flawe…”