Flock CEO: 'We shouldn't pause progress' amid backlash

Flock Safety's founder and CEO Garrett Langley told a TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 audience in San Francisco on Wednesday that public backlash, cancelled contracts and layoffs will not slow his surveillance company down. "If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress," Langley said on stage during a panel.

The remark anchors a broader defense of a company whose license plate cameras and other recording devices have drawn national criticism. Langley deflected hard questions about that backlash — which has already cost Flock customers and forced job cuts — and answered instead with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, plus tales of crimes Flock has supposedly solved. What he did not offer: concrete solutions to the privacy and abuse concerns his critics keep raising.

That gap between rhetoric and substance is the story of the interview. Langley framed Flock as an essentially inevitable technological advance and argued that a lower-crime society requires citizens to give up privacy in return. The claim echoes the debate around artificial intelligence — technology marketed as life-improving while asking the public to surrender data without consent. Flock, like AI, is something many people feel has been imposed on them rather than chosen.

What did Langley actually concede?

More than his critics might expect, though less than they would want. "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future'."

The analogy does not fully hold up. Driverless car makers do not shrug at crashes; they pause their fleets and apply fixes. Flock, by Langley's own account, struggles to define when intervention is the company's responsibility, and he made clear he would rather leave the ethics of how Flock is used to others.

"We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies."

In plain words: Flock sells the cameras, sets defaults, and leaves the hard governance calls to its customers.

Are cancellations based on misinformation?

Langley claims some are. He said one customer ended a contract because it believed Flock's devices performed facial recognition. They do not — but the cameras can detect and track people, a capability that keeps the privacy question alive even where the facial-recognition charge fails.

He also leaned on a quote he attributed to an unnamed community leader, admonishing those who judge technology against perfection. "He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I'm far from perfect — I've made plenty of mistakes," Langley said.

The concession is notable but carefully framed: imperfection becomes an argument against criticism rather than a commitment to specific fixes.

Is Flock a substitute for police hiring?

Langley positioned it as exactly that. "If you look at where policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, law enforcement employment is declining rapidly. I think about a place like San Francisco, and there's hundreds of open positions. They will probably never be filled," he said, casting Flock's technology as the tool that fills staffing gaps.

That framing serves the sales pitch: fewer officers, more cameras. What it does not address is who watches the watchers when the cameras outnumber the police.

Pressed directly about abuse and the invasiveness of his company's technology, Langley had no substantive answers. "I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there's a way to do that that doesn't disrupt the legal system, that doesn't disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department," he said — without spelling out what those ways might be.

Why does Langley think the criticism is worth it?

He answered that plainly, in terms that reveal how deep his conviction runs. "I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay, and I think it's worth it because there's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said.

He added: "And clearly we've made our fair share of mistakes, and there's some folks who disagree with what we do, but it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."

That closing argument — that today's critics may tomorrow need the technology they oppose — is Langley's strongest rhetorical move and his least verifiable claim. No figures accompanied it. For a company already losing contracts and shedding staff, the bet is that public concern about mass surveillance fades before the customer base does.