Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is defending the company’s rapidly expanding surveillance network as cities, lawmakers and residents increasingly challenge how its license-plate cameras collect and share information.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, Langley said society shouldn’t pause progress if technology can increase the likelihood that people who commit crimes are held accountable.
The comments arrive during a difficult period for the $7.5 billion surveillance startup. Reuters reported last week that Flock was reducing its workforce by around 18%, affecting roughly 270 of its approximately 1,500 employees, following a voluntary separation program.
Flock has become surveillance infrastructure at national scale
Flock operates automatic license-plate recognition cameras that can identify vehicles passing through camera locations and make those detections searchable by authorized users.
Reuters reported that approximately 120,000 Flock cameras are deployed across 49 U.S. states, with more than 4,800 law-enforcement agencies and nearly 1,000 businesses using its products.
That scale is precisely what makes the privacy debate different from a traditional security-camera dispute.
A single camera watches one location. A connected network of license-plate readers can potentially reveal where a vehicle appeared across different jurisdictions and times.
TechCrunch reported that Langley said Flock has not ended relationships with police-department customers over misuse of its systems, while saying the company could terminate a relationship if it found clear widespread abuse.
Communities are testing where responsibility should sit
The backlash is increasingly moving from advocacy into local government decisions.
Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones recently ordered the shutdown of all 61 Flock cameras operated by her precinct, amid concerns over privacy and access to camera data.
In Cleveland, the metropolitan school district is meanwhile considering whether to renew a $603,000 Flock contract covering roughly 200 cameras across 62 school sites.
Langley argues that decisions about acceptable use should largely remain with public authorities rather than the technology vendor. At Disrupt, he said Flock would provide recommendations and defaults but sought to minimize mandated policies.
Surveillance products cannot separate engineering from governance
For technology builders, that position exposes a difficult question.
When a product makes surveillance possible at national scale, governance is not entirely external to product design. Access controls, retention periods, audit logs, geographic sharing and search permissions are technical features as much as policy decisions.
Flock’s growth demonstrates how quickly useful local infrastructure can become a connected national system.
The argument over its cameras therefore goes beyond whether license-plate recognition helps solve crimes.
It is becoming a test of whether companies that build surveillance infrastructure can treat misuse as somebody else’s policy problem once the technology itself determines how much surveillance is possible.
