Flock Safety

Flock Safety was founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd, all three Georgia Tech alumni — Langley as CEO, Feury as CTO, Todd as Chief People Officer, a split that has held for nearly a decade. Per a company profile piece, the trigger was a property crime at Langley’s own home in Atlanta — a break-in that left him with no usable evidence, and a conversation with detectives who told him a license plate was the single most useful piece of evidence in a neighborhood crime case, but that legacy automated license plate readers cost too much for most cities to deploy at scale. The three co-founders built their first prototype around an Android phone in a waterproof box, photographing passing vehicles and extracting plate numbers through a homebrew app. None of the three had any law-enforcement background before starting the company. Langley had previously helped sell live-events platform Experience to Cox Enterprises in 2014, in a deal reported at approximately $200 million.

The October 2024 acquisition of Aerodome, a Drone-as-First-Responder company, for a reported $300 million — brought Flock into the air for the first time, giving it a manufacturing roadmap for drones compliant with the National Defense Authorization Act and a public target of “100 drone cities” by the end of 2026. By October 2025 the company had launched its own Alpha drone for first responders and a private-sector Drone-as-Automated-Security product — expanding the company well beyond its original license-plate-camera business.

404 Media reporters Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox published data, obtained via a Danville, Illinois public-records request, showing more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal” favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus. Flock has no direct contract with ICE, but the agency obtained access by asking local police to run searches on its behalf — officers across the country entered “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO” (ICE’s deportation-focused Enforcement and Removal Operations), “illegal immigration,” and “ICE WARRANT” in the required search-reason field, and every lookup that explicitly listed “immigration” as its reason was made after the Trump administration’s January 2025 inauguration. Per a later profile, the reporting prompted two members of Congress to launch a formal investigation demanding Flock turn over ICE/CBP/abortion-related search details, and Flock responded by halting pilot projects with federal agencies (August 2025) and shipping an administrative toggle letting any law-enforcement customer disable federal data sharing entirely (January 2026). This is the same pattern of out-of-state/federal access documented independently, city by city, throughout this site — see El Cerrito’s, San Francisco’s, and Palo Alto’s own audit findings for the local versions of this same national story.

Forbes’ Thomas Brewster followed up nearly a year later, as Flock faced what the article called an “increasingly vitriolic public backlash” — ICE’s reported access to camera data, a Ring partnership that ended after public outcry over a Super Bowl ad, and reports of officers using the cameras to stalk romantic interests. Asked about the original remark, described DeFlock as a “terroristic organization.” But now, as Flock faces an increasingly vitriolic public backlash, Langley says he regrets that label. Langley: “My comments were a mistake and I apologize,” he said. “ There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

DeFlock founder Will Freeman told Forbes he found the apology “awesome.” The apology came roughly ten months after the original remark, and after months of the company doubling down rather than retracting it — the article frames the reversal as following business pressure (city contract cancellations and public backlash), not a change of heart that came unprompted.

Flock’s own announcement: “Flock is thrilled to announce our fundraise of $275 million, bringing our valuation to $7.5 billion.” The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital, Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participating — and came alongside the company surpassing $300 million in annual recurring revenue, a 70% year-over-year increase.

A Washington Post investigation reported that police officers were accused in 46 cases of improperly using access to Flock’s license plate camera network, in some instances allegedly stalking women — per CBS News’ reporting on the story. After listening to one of the women’s interviews, Langley responded directly: “I apologize,” Langley said in an interview with CBS News. “It kills me that she went through that.” Asked whether he’d taken responsibility soon enough, he called hindsight “a brutal tool.” He also defended the company’s role: “I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.” — and had a blunt message for any officer weighing whether to misuse the system: “You will get caught, plain and simple. If you try to use this tool illegally, you will get caught.” The same day, Flock announced concrete changes: reducing the default period of time data will be retained from 30 days to seven days, requiring a case code before every search (overridable only in an emergency), letting customers restrict which offense types outside agencies may search for, and mandating — by the end of 2026, for every customer — a tool that flags abnormal search behavior and locks the user out pending administrator review.

Eight days after Langley’s apology, National Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes issued a sharply worded press release responding to a separate Langley prediction: “You will see over the next six months a dramatic increase in officers being arrested or fired for abusing Flock.” Yoes objected to the framing, not to accountability itself: “The answer is not to broadly characterize the law enforcement profession as something from which the public needs protection,” Yoes said, continuing: “Flock built its business promoting its technology as an important tool to help police solve crimes and make communities safer. Now, facing intense public criticism of its technology, its CEO seems increasingly focused on portraying the officers who use it as the problem. So much for building trust.” The release cites one of Flock’s own admitted gaps — Langley had conceded of a specific safeguard, “We got this one wrong. We should make it a requirement.” — as evidence the criticism shouldn’t fall on line officers. Yoes closed by framing the relationship as one Flock is straining, not the police: “Flock and law enforcement should be partners in public safety,” Yoes said. “Partnership requires mutual trust and accountability. Flock should focus on strengthening its technology, supporting sound policies, and rebuilding public confidence, not diminishing the profession that helped build its company.” A national police union publicly breaking with Flock like this is a distinct escalation from the civil-liberties criticism documented elsewhere on this page — it’s law enforcement’s own largest representative body, not a privacy advocate, pushing back on how the company is handling its own customers.

Axios reported that Flock cameras are joining data centers as a top midterm boogeyman, with members of Congress and congressional candidates trying to harness a sudden groundswell of grassroots anger over the AI surveillance tool — an escalation beyond the local council fights and executive apologies documented elsewhere on this page into a national electoral issue, with Super PACs affiliated with AI companies having also spent tens of millions of dollars clashing with each other in congressional elections over the degree to which the federal government should regulate the technology. In Michigan’s Senate race, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed posted a video tying his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, to the cameras: “There’s been this mass proliferation of Flock cameras, any and everywhere, watching your every move to collect information without you even noticing”. El-Sayed cited a 2013 hearing where Rogers, then House Intelligence Committee chair, said: “You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?” The Rogers campaign did not respond to Axios’s request for comment. Axios put Flock’s network at “120,000 cameras” — notably higher than the “nearly 100,000 cameras” figure Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) cited the same week in a social-media post reading “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.” — a real discrepancy in the public figure being used for the network’s size, not resolved in the article itself. The company defended its record to Axios, saying it has been “listening to customers, communities, and civil liberties groups,” and that its cameras have aided roughly 1 million police investigations and helped find around 10,000 missing people. The issue reached down to House races too. Ohio Democrat Kristina Knickerbocker said her opponent, former House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio), pushed for more Flock cameras in downtown Dayton, adding that “Now those cameras have been caught running thousands of searches that broke our city’s rules”. Turner responded to Axios: “My yellow springs socialist opponent once again shows her ignorance, since the Local Congressman has nothing to do with the number of flock cameras in Dayton, OH”. Axios framed the opposition as one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill right now: a trio of House Republicans led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill last month to prohibit the federal government from purchasing Flock cameras or similar technology. Beyond the Michigan and Ohio races, Democratic nominee Chaz Molder (TN-5) called Flock cameras “big government overreach,” Michigan progressive House candidate William Lawrence said Politicians are cashing their checks while allowing their cameras to go up everywhere, and Minnesota House candidate Jake Johnson linked the Flock backlash to the same voter anger he’s already encountering over AI data centers on the campaign trail.