In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real
Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.
He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media opposition to Flock is driven mostly by Russian bots.
“Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company’s technology. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I’m the last person, my wife as well, she’s like ‘This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,’” he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity.
“It’s anonymous bots, and so it is not real,” he continued. “Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.” Langley’s comments echo another unsubstantiated theory that said opposition to Flock comes from a far-left network spreading propaganda at the behest of China.
Langley made the comments at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference, which is running Saturday to Tuesday in Orlando, Florida. Many law enforcement contractors exhibit at the conference, and speakers get to attend with more than 16,000 public safety officials.
Flock makes automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) and other surveillance cameras. Its ALPRs constantly scan the license plate, color, make, and model of every vehicle that drives past, creating a timestamped log of peoples’ movements. The embattled company has faced extensive media and public scrutiny as instances of police abuse, false arrests, and the use of the technology for immigration enforcement have come to light. Dozens of cities have canceled their contracts with Flock over the last 18 months.
As backlash to the company grew, Langley began doing damage control with the media, which included apologizing for calling DeFlock, a group that maps the location of Flock cameras, a “terroristic organization.” In the audio from the IACP conference, Langley suggested that he generally should not apologize for the company.
“I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”
The session itself was framed as a fireside chat between Langley and David Rausch, IACP’s president and director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The schedule said the session would “examine the opportunities, challenges, and public debate surrounding the technology [ALPRs], including issues related to privacy, transparency, governance, data use, and community trust.”
Flock makes the ALPR data available to its law enforcement customers, who can query it without a warrant. Flock differentiates itself from other ALPR providers, like Axon, by providing a national network of ALPRs. A cop in one part of the U.S. can search cameras not just in their own jurisdiction, or even state, but all over the country, if those other police departments have added their cameras to the network. A recent count put the national network at around 80,000 cameras.
That national network is a large part of why Flock has faced so much criticism. 404 Media revealed last year that local cops were doing lookups in Flock for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and a cop in Texas searched cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
Langley said he’d like to not do any more media interviews. “The media gets to say whatever they want to say about you,” he said.
“I’d like to never do media again if that's possible. I don’t know if any chiefs can tell me. I’m going to try to figure this out but I think for me, I wish we could do this more often and you know I’m excited about the work we’re doing together and think we have a lot of ideas to continue to make up,” Langley said.
404 Media’s investigations on Flock and others have triggered a nationwide conversation about whether individual communities want Flock cameras stationed on their roads or inside their children' s gymnastics class. Flock is basically a meme on TikTok and Instagram now, with many creators trying to tell others about what the cameras do and the issues they raise (with varying accuracy, and some people making videos purely for the grift). Some people have even taken to vandalizing, destroying, or reverse-engineering Flock cameras, with the government monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts. That nationwide conversation has now reached the Hill, with multiple lawmakers proposing legislation that would ban or otherwise dramatically rein in Flock.
Flock competitor Axon threw a party at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday night, according to the conference schedule.
Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”
