VANCOUVER, B.C. — At TED2026, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley outlined how technology is reshaping policing, arguing that tools like license plate readers, cameras and drones are helping agencies move toward more objective, data-driven responses.
In a talk titled “Safety is a Fundamental Right,” Langley said traditional approaches to identifying suspicious activity often rely on individual interpretation, which can introduce inconsistency in policing. By contrast, he said technology enables officers to focus on specific vehicles and evidence tied to reported crimes.
“Suspicious activity is totally subjective,” Langley said. “It depends entirely on who’s looking, who they’re looking at and where they deem is being dangerous.”
Langley pointed to several examples to illustrate how integrated systems — including license plate readers, real-time alerts and drone deployment — can support faster, more informed decision-making. In one case, he described how license plate data helped investigators locate a missing child. In another case, real-time alerts and drone deployment enabled officers to quickly locate and arrest a robbery suspect.
“The greatest deterrent to crime is not the severity of the punishment,” Langley said. “It’s the certainty of being caught.”
Langley also addressed the broader conversation around privacy, noting that agencies typically control their own data, set retention policies and maintain audit logs to track system use. He emphasized the importance of transparency and clear policies in building community trust as technology adoption expands.
These conversations come as Flock launched a new Trust & Compliance suite on April 14, which includes an Audit Assistance tool aimed at helping agencies monitor system use and strengthen accountability.
The full TED Talk is expected to be released at a later date. A copy of Langley’s presentation, as prepared for delivery, is included below.
TED2026: Safety is a Fundamental Right
Garrett Langley at TED2026
Let me tell you a story. A grandmother in Tennessee woke up one morning to a quiet house.
Her 11-year-old granddaughter’s bedroom door was open. The bed was empty. She had vanished. When a detective arrived at the scene, they found no sign of forced entry. No evidence. No note. Nothing.
Imagine being in that position.
Fortunately, this detective knew there was a Flock camera not too far away. He went to the station, ran the search from that device, and found a single license plate that matched the query.
The worst possible result. The search came back matched to a registered child sex offender. Using Flock, the detective could see that the car was moving south, and the suspect was fleeing the state toward his home address. The detective raced to intercept, and managed to reach the very last intersection possible within his jurisdiction. He pulled over the vehicle.
There was a violent struggle. In the back of the car, the girl was there. Bound. Alive. When they visited the suspect’s house, they found what you’d expect in a nightmare. Everything needed to assault and dispose of the body.
The girl is alive today because that detective had the license plate, and direction of travel.
And that is just one of thousands of stories that happen across America every day.
My name is Garrett Langley. I’m the CEO of Flock.
Nine years ago, I was living in a neighborhood in Atlanta where crime was ticking up. Local criminals were breaking into cars and stealing firearms out of the glove box. I was frustrated that we couldn’t do anything to stop it.
The Major in our zone told me, “More than 70 percent of crime involves a vehicle, and they go unsolved because we need a license plate. We rarely have the plate.” So I did what engineers do, and built a system to find the plate. A few months later, the system worked, and such was the beginning of what we now call Flock.
So what about today? Flock has grown a lot, we manage a network of hardware and software technology, including license plate readers, video cameras, audio detection and drones. We partner with thousands of cities in America and help solve over a million crimes a year.
When a vehicle passes one of our cameras, it captures a vehicle signature: the plate, the make, the model, the color. Police use that image, along with real-time evidence, to close the case. It’s fairly simple in concept, but the impact is as big as “DNA” according to our customers. It’s truly a shift in policing.
I was talking to a customer recently, and he told me how his department actually worked before Flock. Officers drove through neighborhoods looking for suspicious activity. The problem is that suspicious activity is totally subjective. It depends entirely on who’s looking, who they’re looking at, and where they deem is being dangerous. This approach, one that we have seen unfold for decades, is plagued with bias — and it means that innocent people are pulled over or interrogated needlessly.
We want to remove any bias in policing. With Flock, it’s objective, factual, data driven and fast. It finds that actual car, and that’s the difference between subjective policing of the past and the objective policing of the future.
Let me give you an example.
There’s a 911 call in a suburban town in Colorado. A Levi’s store has just been robbed and the suspect fled in a white van. The van has been hand painted in black and blue, and it looks like…. a cow. I kid you not.
If you take one piece of advice from me today: do not commit a crime in a car that looks like a cow.
Flock live-streams that 911 call to local officers as well as the Real-Time Crime Center. While the call is still unfolding, the crime center is already moving. Two things happen simultaneously.
First: they create what we call a Freeform alert. They type in “white van, blue and black cow spray paint” and push it to the Flock cameras within a few miles of that store.
Second: they launch a drone. One click. It’s in the air and over the scene within a minute.
A few minutes later — the alert fires. The van is pulling into another strip mall, less than a mile away. The suspect is going for round 2.
The drone operator closes in from 400ft in the air. In a traditional response, officers would pull up blind. Is this person armed? Are the public at risk? They have no idea. It’s dangerous, and accidents happen.
With the drone overhead. Cop cars approach safely. Clean arrest, and no escalation.
Start to finish: twenty one minutes. That’s the power of a Safe City that uses Flock.
One more example, this time about a city wide impact.
Let’s look at San Francisco, who uses most of Flock’s technology.
In 2025, crime fell by 25 percent in a single year, and the number of homicides was the lowest it’s been in 70 years.
Mayor Daniel Lurie called Flock’s fusion of sensors “a turning point for public safety in San Francisco.” Speak to anyone from the city now and they will viscerally tell you how the city has changed for the better, in a short period of time.
We’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings, when a reputable tech publication described us in a headline as — and this is a direct quote — “snitching-ass startup raises $10 million bucks.”
What it embodies is the fact that not everyone has seen our impact so favorably.
There are three main questions we’ve had to answer ourselves, and publicly, as our business has grown.
1. Is it constitutional?
This is the easiest to answer. Yes. More than thirty courts across this country have looked at that argument in the last two years. Every single one reached the same conclusion.
License plate readers capture a single moment in time. They are not continuous tracking, or following you. They see a vehicle pass a fixed point - which is the same thing a police officer standing on the street would see. Thirty courts have now said the same thing — it is constitutional.
2. What about my privacy?
This is one the entire company obsesses over and something we thought about 9 years ago.
Let me lay out how the system works. Let’s hit on data ownership, data retention, and accountability, and sharing.
Firstly, local cities own every piece of data. Not Flock. Simple.
Data must have a retention period. It’s most commonly held for 30 days, then it’s permanently and automatically deleted.
Accountability. Every search in the system is permanently logged. If an officer runs a plate, there is an audit trail. Last year, three law enforcement officers were arrested for misusing our system, mainly tracking an ex-partner. That is horrible, and reflects poorly on the whole industry. But in each of those cases, our own audit logs found it, and now those officers are facing criminal charges because of the system we built.
Lastly, sharing. I hear concerns about agencies sharing data over county lines or state lines. Consider the UK, which has 45 police forces. Australia has 8. France has 2. America? We have 18,000. The debate about which agencies can share data with which is uniquely American, and the fact is without that capability, criminals easily cross state and county lines, and go free. To be clear, who and how the data is shared is up to the City or customer. But I think its critical to understand the unique problem we have created for ourselves.
3. It’s surveillance.
The term mass surveillance is scary, to all of us, including me.
Every person in this room can be tracked to a foot at this very moment with your phone. That’s a fact.
The question of what it means for a free society when the state can observe your movements — even with audit trails, even with 30-day deletion, and every guardrail we’ve built - that’s not a question we wave away. The tradeoff is clear to me. How many children — like the eleven-year-old girl from Tennessee — are we willing to see abducted, or worse, because we don’t want the government to take pictures of our license plates, in a public space? Human trafficking rings in Detroit, hate crimes in Los Angeles, domestic violence, mass shootings, hit and runs, sexual abuse of minors…preventing those bad things from happening is what opponents to this technology don’t talk about.
We trust local police departments with the power to use force. We trust them with firearms and tasers. If we’re not willing to trust them with cameras that capture license plates, I think we need to ask ourselves what we actually believe about the institutions we’ve built.
America is built on principles of freedom, and every city has a right to make that choice. When a community pulls back on public safety they achieve less surveillance, but the people who are made to suffer aren’t the affluent ones, it’s the people who live in neighborhoods where they can’t afford safety…
Let me show you what the two ends of this spectrum actually look like.
South Africa has over 600,000 private security guards. More than its police and military combined. The wealthy live behind nine-foot walls and electric fences. Safety exists, if you can afford it. If you can’t, crime is simply the cost of being alive.
Tokyo, on the other hand, is a city of 37 million people that sees a few dozen murders per year. If you walk through Shibuya at 2 am, you’ll see night workers walking home through dark alleys without a second thought. Everyone equally feels safe in Tokyo.
The United States sits somewhere between those two poles. We have law enforcement infrastructure. But we have never made a serious commitment to safety as a right.
Lets zoom back to the start of my story and ask a question…why do people commit crimes? How do we prevent it? This has been studied and the answer has been stress tested for fifty years since.
The greatest deterrent to crime is not the severity of the punishment. It’s the certainty of being caught.
When people believe they will be caught, they don’t make the attempt, and that is the equation we are changing.
So if we build this technology right — with accountability, with transparency, with a genuine commitment to freedom — we don’t have to choose between safety and liberty. We can build communities where both are in harmony with one another.
That is what we’re building. Not cameras or software, but an environment where crime is unsustainable.
And all of this is based on one premise. Safety is a fundamental right, for everyone.
And I believe that every community in America deserves to feel safe.
