Policing Panopticon

With over 80,000 AI-powered cameras in the US, Flock Safety is a $7.5 billion business, and CEO Garrett Langley has a noble (if Sisyphean) goal: Eliminating crime in America

- By THOMAS BREWSTER

In a windowless room inside Atlanta's Dunwoody police department, Lieutenant Tim Fecht hits a button and an insectile DJI drone rises silently from the station rooftop. It already has its coordinates: A local mall where a 911 call has alerted the cops to a male shoplifter. From high above the complex, Fecht zooms in on a man checking his phone, then examines a group of people waiting for a train. They're all hundreds of yards away, but crystal clear on the room-dominating display inside the department's crime centre, a classroom-sized space with walls covered in monitors flashing real-time crime data—surveillance and license plate reader camera feeds, gunshot detection reports, digital maps showing the location of cop cars across the city. As more 911 calls come in, AI transcribes them on another screen. Fecht can access any of it with a few clicks.

Twenty minutes down the road from Dunwoody, in an office where Flock Safety's cameras and gunshot detectors are arrayed like museum pieces, 38-year-old CEO and co-founder Garrett Langley presides over the $300 million (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the US. They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they'll help solve even more. In August, Flock's cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in America” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they'll add a new dimension to Flock's business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI's dominance.