a16z Podcast - The Crime Crisis In America and How Technology Fixes It

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

What if America tried to eliminate crime instead of just reacting to it? Not with slogans, but with staffing, technology, and strategy scaled to the problem. In this episode, Erik Torenberg speaks with Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, about what is happening in the cities that are trying. Flock now works with over 5,000 communities to detect crime, recover missing children, and close cases faster than ever. Ben has been closely involved in Las Vegas, where Flock technology, drones, and community policing have raised clearance rates while reducing use of force. They outline what a real national crime-reduction strategy could look like: solving the police staffing crisis, using intelligence to make policing safer, understanding why clearance rates have collapsed, and how public–private partnerships are filling gaps cities cannot. They also tackle the hard questions around privacy, criminal justice failures, and the hidden role of organized crime in everyday offenses. Timecodes: 0:00 — Introduction and the Cost of Crime1:09 — Technology, Privacy, and Trust in Policing1:22 — Eliminating Crime: A National Strategy2:54 — People: Staffing, Culture, and Recruitment8:45 — Products: Technology in Modern Policing9:41 — Policy: Accountability and Prosecution20:11 — Community Policing and Clearance Rates25:16 — Case Study: Las Vegas and Public-Private Partnerships32:00 — Criticisms, Privacy, and Trust35:23 — Economic Mobility, Safety, and Social Impact36:44 — Reform, Recidivism, and Alternative Approaches52:14 — Organized Crime and Policy Challenges54:32 — The Future of Policing: Intelligence and Precision57:24 — Success Stories and ConclusionResources: Follow Garrett on X: https://twitter.com/glangley Follow Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations. Yeah, if I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it's actually a double bad. Yeah. What we're throwing people away, right? Like, you know, that's the worst possible thing. So the best thing is to say, hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're going to get caught. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make, like, 10x what I can make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, you know, like, and then, you know, like, and then.

And then in my neighborhood, it's not even, like, there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like, you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy, and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation. Outside of Vegas, the international average is around 47% clearance rates. You have a coin flip-up? For murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

Clip-coin. Ironical part is when we do get criticisms, people that are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, do your eyes, if the federal government wanted to find you, a license plate reader, is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dumb. And I will know your exact location in real time at all time. By the way, which is what they do. Yes, but it's way more effective.

So I think for the privacy thing, it's quite false. The trust is real, though. And so if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department. Yeah. Imagine if a major American city actually set a goal to eliminate crime, not just manage it. What would that take in practice, and what would it feel like for the people who live there every day? In today's episode, we get as close to that question as you can in the real world. I'm joined by Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, and Ben Horowitz, co-founder of A16Z.

Garrett and his team are behind a lot of the new intelligent policing infrastructure you're starting to see in cities, from license play readers and gunshot detection to drones and real-time crime centers. Ben has been working with Las Vegas on a very public experiment in using that technology to drive crime down while actually improving trust in the police. We talk about what a serious national strategy to reduce crime would look like, from staffing and culture to products and policy. We get into the Teach for America idea for policing, why clearance rates are collapsing in most cities but rising in Vegas,

how to think about defund the police versus public safety, and whether intelligence can really beat both mass incarceration and doing nothing. We also talk honestly about the criticisms. Privacy, surveillance, who gets targeted, and who actually benefits, when crime is allowed to flourish. Garrett, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So this group here is heavily invested in eliminating crime.

Garrett, obviously, with flock safety and Ben, with your work in Las Vegas as well. Let's say that America declared a national goal to eliminate crime and was taking a multifaceted approach and asked you, Garrett, to sit on a committee to help identify what are the different levers, what's the strategy, the comprehensive strategy to eliminate crime? What would be some of your main advice? Let's break it down in terms of people, products, and policy. So people.

I saw a funny quote online that the way to solve our infertility issues is just to remove income tax once you have three kids. That's like, that's actually pretty novel. We have a massive student debt problem, right? Yeah. Why not create a teach for America for law enforcement? Yeah. Or you say, look, if you've got student debt and you go serve in your community for two years, four years as a patrol officer, crime analysts, like there's a ton of roles you can have in a police department, great will retire student debt. So instead of just giving away for free,

actually go work for your government for two to four years and you don't have to go overseas and fight an war, you can literally just stay at home. And that would dramatically fix one of the biggest issues in policing, which is a staffing crisis and a skill set issue. So that's like the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. I would go have like a national law enforcement act for staffing.

Right. And also raise the status of police stuff. So how much of the people issue is the fact that we kind of went from a very kind of pro-like police or heroes every new show? as a cop show to, like, complete vilification of the police, defund the police. Abolish a police. Abolished cop shows.

Like, they're all gone. They're all off the air. How much of it is cultural versus just a shortage of people? It's entirely cultural. Yeah. So, I mean, because you think about it, there's nothing has changed in the last 30 years that would indicate some percentage of people who were born and wanted to serve has changed.

Only thing has changed is the stigma attached to the job. And you can see that. Because if you look at the early retirement numbers, I mean, earlier retirement skyrocketed during both the social unrest and then COVID. Yeah. And like they've never bounced back. Worst possible time.

Yeah, it's worse possible time. So do you think Ben to your point, like, the only way I see to do a kind of culture reset is to just make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt to go help their communities? Yeah, I think that's an actually very important an underrated idea, because one of the things that we've seen is that because of the shortage,

many police departments have lowered their standards. So the kind of criticism of the police was, okay, you have, and it really, like, if you looked into it, there were some, like, psychos who joined the police force. They couldn't get them out for whatever reason, and then they do some heinous thing, and it taints the whole police. Well, now, because there aren't enough of it, people are lowering standards to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals. And then there was a famous incident where the criminals just went and murdered a guy. And it was funny because, or not funny, ha-ha, but like I was showing it to the Vegas police, the video of that incident. And the first thing they said was, oh, that's not police brutality.

They went to kill that guy. That was a homicide, yeah. And I was like, oh, boy. But then you look into the backgrounds and the guys who committed the homicide were, in fact, criminals who got hired to be police, which is also interestingly what happened. In the LAPD with the Rampart scandal, right after the Rodney King incident, they had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, et cetera, et cetera. They had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs.

And those gang members ended up, among other things, killing the notorious BIG and this kind of thing. But people don't realize what the reaction to criticism. I think we just have to be looking forward, careful about like, okay, what is the actual problem as opposed to police are bad? I think that puts us in a very different kind of world that we don't want to be in. Agreed. And I think you're right.

When you look across the board, I think in the last year, I've only been to one major city who seems to be like making a dent on staffing, but it's like they've gone to such extremes. Like they bought the house. Oh, wow. You get a take-home car. Amazing. I mean, it's the oldest person. I'm like, there's literally millions of people that could do this job.

I don't think it's a cultural issue. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, like a big thing in Vegas that we're doing is trying to kind of, with flak safety and with some of the other technology we bought and the cyber trucks and so forth is to try and improve the image for recruiting because that's such a big thing.

And we have the highest population in Las Vegas of veterans in like the whole country. So we have plenty of people who could be great police, but we have to kind of continue to improve the image. It's really funny you mentioned the cyber truck, because I know there was some, like, anything good in life criticism online. And it's funny because my parents' hometown,

where they still live, this is maybe, like, six years ago, bought for Tesla's for their fleet. Yeah. And the chief was like, every single 18-year-old wants to drive his car. This is why I'm doing this. Yeah.

And, like, he was heavily applauded in that community. Yeah. Because it's a very logical, like, marketing. Yeah. I mean, these are all emotionally 18-20-year-old men. They like shiny toys. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a cool. as cool-looking truck. Yeah, if you're just like driving a Toyota Camry or a cyber truck, like one makes it feel cool. Well, the cyber trucks, they have been great for recruiting despite the criticism that I got. Well, actually, TechCrunch portrayed me as the penguin that I'm like a crime boss in Las Vegas. And I make these donations in order to like to pay off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pay off the police to do my like evil bidding.

Your evil venture capital. Because, yeah, because Andres and Horowitz is not a good enough business. I need to be in whatever the crime ring in Vegas is. But interestingly, since we got the trucks, the number of requests for just like them appearing at community events is off the charts because they look so cool. And in fact, when we did paid in full, Dr. Dre, famous for the song, Fuck the Police, saw the cyber truck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of the cyber truck at his request.

Yeah, that's gross. So that's people. Yeah. Yeah. do them products. I think Vegas is a good, we can pick on Vegas, because they've got a pretty good technology stack. You've got to go crime by crime. So if you have a gun violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know the majority of gun violence does not go reported. If I shoot you, you are. Yeah. I'm not going to call that one of myself. And unfortunately

I have a good shot. So that's a problem. You have drones. Vegas has a great deployment of drones. San Francisco does as well. He's tall in the news. So you need drones. You need cameras. So you've got all these sensors, right? And then what's missing historically is now this AI layer, this orchestration layer on top to say, wow, I've gone from no data to an abundance of data. How do it make sense of it? So we've got that. And then this third piece that we care a lot about is, how do you also do this in a way that provides accountability and transparency? Because at the end of the day, the police department works for us, taxpaying citizens, and you want to know, how's your money being used to being done in a way that's kind of societally just and

forward. So that's the product side. And then policy is you have to hold people accountable. Yeah. I mean, we've seen the social experiment in participatory California. Right. You need to actually prosecute the crimes. You know, it's seemingly straightforward, but a lot of the times we decriminalize things that should be criminal and that causes a problem. So that's what I would do if I was in charge. Yeah. And I think like one of the things that people don't think through when they think about crime is you don't have that many choices. You have kind of a choice of lots of crime. Or if you're going to prevent crime, there's kind of the Singapore. model, which is very harsh capital punishment, you know, we'll hang you in the towns, where we'll hit you with a cane, we'll lock you in like an El Salvadorian prison, or intelligence. And what intelligence does is it basically makes everybody safer. It makes the suspect safer, it makes the police safer, because now everybody understands the crime situation, and then you're

also much likely, much more likely to get caught. And there's an old, Chinese saying that says certain punishment means no punishment. And that is the only way that you can actually achieve it in the U.S. reduction in crime is better intelligence. And, you know, people say, well, root cause, you know, like if we get rid of all poverty and this and that and third, well, yeah, sure, if you create a utopian society, which nobody's ever done. And like the people have tried, it's been much more brutal and many more people killed. than in societies that don't go for utopia. Yeah, but, like, in reality,

you just kind of have to deal with a situation as it is, I think. And by the way, nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals. Like, more than anybody. They know exactly what the policies are, what the technology is, when police change shifts, all that kind of thing. And so if you do have great law enforcement, then you're very likely to discourage crime. What was that quote that you mentioned just before the...

Oh, yeah, well, the game had a song where he said, you know, real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts. Which is, yeah, like, of course. But, I mean, to your point on that, like, I'll never forget, maybe in 2022, there was a rap song released in Southern California with reference to flock in that. I always had got flock, so stay away. Yeah, I was like, we've made it.

Yeah, that's really important culturally. Yeah, that's a key KPI to keep tracking. I think that's right. And then, you know, like, it's if you grow up, it's very important. Like, if you think about it, like, if you're growing up outside of the system and the most viable way to make a living is crime, then, you know, that is a career path. And so by reducing law enforcement, you create a crime per career path, and it kind of lets us avoid creating real career path. for people in that situation. And so it's a cascading effect of just badness.

Well, I think to your point, too, the, when, if I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it's actually like double bad, because now prison's already very expensive. Right. There's an economic cost of now that person's no longer productive in society.

Like, yeah. Well, we're throwing people away, right? Like, you know, you with the minimum sentencing and everything, you know, it's very hard to go to prison and come out. then you have this black mark on your life where you can't get an apartment, you know, you can't get a gun, you can't vote, you can't get a job. And, you know, that's the worst possible thing.

So the best thing is to say, hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're going to get caught. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. Are we doing sort of the wrong thing by making it not clear that you're going to get caught or saying that, sort of making it not, the deterrence not 100%, you know, as clear as it should be, well, sort of arbitrarily doing long prison sentences instead? Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, if you have great technology, if you've got a kind of comprehensive flock deployment, then what happens is, like, you don't have to advertise that.

No. Because, like, the streets are watching. They know what's it to quote, Jay. See, like, that's going to happen. But, yeah, if you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations because you, like, it's a pretty, I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make, like, 10x

what I can work, make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, you know, like, and then in my neighborhood, it's not even, like, there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like, you're looked up upon. if you're a criminal. It's just too easy, and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation. Well, on that note, what do you say to people who say, hey, we weren't advocating for defunded the police? We were saying redirect that money to, you know, group therapy, sort of, you know,

mental health, you know, or other services that are more preventive. What would you say to that, argue it's just like a misunderstanding of incentives I think right like incentives drive culture if you get rid of law enforcement then look we don't have a strong enough consistent of we're a heterogeneous society ethical kind of structure to make people go okay like you know robbing somebody is bad or or for sure like selling drugs is bad or bookmaking or whatever the crime is, like, a lot of people don't even know that's a crime, you know, until they're much older and so forth. So, like, it's not viable to, you know, stop crime with a big incentive. Like, yeah, you can go talk to somebody as a social worker and say, hey, you shouldn't do that.

But, like, if they go, well, look, I have a very strong cash incentive to do it, then, like, how is that going to work? So you have to have, I'm not against social work, but you can't do it the expense of crime enforcement, you know, law enforcement. And we saw that. I mean, like, we ran the experiment and it didn't work. You know, and I think people would say, well, we didn't hire enough social workers, but, you know, like social workers can't deal with, like, a robbery or murder or rape

or, like, a, you know, violent crime and progress. And these are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. No, I was going to say, to this point, there is a, in some parts of the country, cities, whole cities, there isn't a stigma in doing something like stealing a car. Yeah. And you don't just change that.

overnight with more social work. And I think like I've seen programs at least where, you know, their phrase is more, you know, at promise versus at risk programs where it's like if you don't want to get in this cycle, create that path. But you still actually have to fix the root problem, which is you should be held accountable if you steal someone's car. It was interesting. You brought up the sort of Dr. Dre, you know, fuck the police now taking a photo with

with police because some people say, hey, hip hop at times is glorified a certain, you know, crime lifestyle. Are other people sort of evolving like Dr. Rehas? Or how is sort of the community, you know, over time, you know, thought about sort of this? Well, look, I think that there, so fuck the police had a real basis in it, in that there was, like, if you look at the LAPD in that era, they, you know, and this was the drug war era, they were like very, very, very aggressive. and it was, you know, brutalized first, like ask questions, second, you know, kind of culture of that police force. So he was making a real comment on a real thing, you know, in Ice Cube and so forth. But the answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing, right?

Like, that's the right way to police. You need – and I give you an example. So what the Vegas police said, you know, kind of if you look at it before the drone program, before a flock, okay, so if you don't have flock, what happens? You get a call. There's a, you know, 1988 Toyota Corolla that was stolen and, you know, it's blue and it's driving, you know, this way. Okay. So then a guy gets pulled over it, not the right. guy. I'm getting pulled over for the police. They're highly suspicious. They're nervous. And I'm like, whatever, I'm a black man, so I'm already, like, trained to be wary of this. And so now you can have an incident. Whereas, and if it's a flock camera, you know that's the guy. That is the guy. And so now you're not sending in one police officer because you know it's the guy. You're sending in a team You're going to apprehend them safely, you know, at – you're going to take your time because you know, like, you don't have to move on to the next one.

It's a totally different situation. And then you can start to build relationships in the community because you're not, like, falsely arresting people and that kind of thing. And so if you look at, you know, Vegas has the highest murder clearance rate in the country well over 90 percent. Why is that? You talk to them. It's because any time a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. And in most cities, they don't talk to the police. And so by doing community policing, they're able to get that information.

They're able to clear the murders. They're able to make the community safer. And mostly, by the way, people should understand this. The victims of crime are poor people, by and large, you know. And so when you go, defund the police, we're not going to enforce law. You're basically terrorizing the poor community. And this is what's called the Ferguson effect, right? Like crime actually went up.

Yeah, no, of course. Of course it did. And it's, you know, people just don't think these systematic problems all the way through. They just go to the very first thing, like, police are bad. Yeah. Well, like, the system hasn't been working, so let's fix the system as opposed to vilify any individual. Yeah. Gary, can you see more about why sort of the, I don't know if the clearance rate or just the sort of rate at which we catch, you know, murders or solve crimes has been dropping and, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I'll provide one positive reason why clearance rates are down and the rest is very negative. On a positive side, our expectations of a society to arrest someone have gone up, which is good, right? I think the number of people who you hear about getting released 10 years later because now we have DNA or 10 years later because now we have video events, like, that's actually a good thing, right? It should be harder to put someone in jail for life. Yeah. That's one reason, right? Like, that's a good thing. Some of that's from TV, you know, you watch NCIS and you're just like, there's cameras everywhere, kind of. So that's the one.

The second is, and Ben mentioned this, witness cooperation is gone. I mean, what's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk? Yeah. So no one shows up, which is a huge problem. Societyally, we've given up on pretending that we're going to help you. So that's the second issue. Third issue is a pretty big mix shift in crime. So if you think about the 60s, 70s, the majority of crime was domestic.

You would kill a partner, you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend, so it was not randomized crime. Now the majority of homicides are random. It is a drug deal gone wrong. It is a gang rivalry over territory. That is the predominant type of crime. That is way harder to solve. Because if it was a traditional type, you go, okay, let's check the family. Great.

We're done. Case closed. Fourth one, the amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way, but faster than both skill set and technology is kept pace. So even though, let's pick on Vegas, Vegas has hundreds, probably thousands, tens of thousands of cameras. You're going to go search them. You've got to go put it together.

Like, that doesn't just, you know, like, AI's catching up. Nobody's watching the camera. No one's watching them, right? And, like, we can look at recent events where, you know, there have been these, you know, shootings on college campuses, and they're like, why don't they find them faster? There's thousands of cameras. I'm like, the technology is not there yet.

Now, Flock has some tools to help with that, but we're not deployed everywhere. And the last one, which we hit on, was just staffing. We talked about early retirement. Yeah. So even though, let's pick on Atlanta, Atlanta is, was at a low, was that 60% staffed?

They're now up to 7580. That gap is all 21-year-olds. Yeah. They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years. But so your seasoned, experienced detectives, have all retired. And so it's this compounding effect

where it doesn't look pretty good. And that's why, you know, outside of Vegas, the international average is around 47% clearance rates. You have a coin flip. For murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder. Flip a coin. And you've got to imagine if you're,

if you're, you know, upper quartile, you shouldn't get away with it forever. Wow. Yep. Sorry to bring the moods down. Yeah. The, I do love your sort of Teach for America, but for policing idea, for people who are listening who are inspired?

Like, what would it take for that to get off the ground? Like, well, if you remove the, like, debt grievance part, actually not that, that much. I think the biggest change is if you look at today, and I don't, you can debate whether this is important or not. You typically are looking at almost 52 weeks of training before you get out in the field. That's too slow. Yeah. You know, I think Teach for America does probably, what, like a four or eight week program? I don't actually know, but it's probably pretty quick.

Yeah. I mean, your college educated, you're going to figure it out. Yeah. policing has a different expectation. So I would continue to see more either civilian jobs, which some agencies are doing, where they're just creating different entire departments for civilians. And then in that case, there's no academy. You also don't have a gun, which is fine. Right. But I think that's actually like, it's actually not much to pull it off. I think it just takes a major city, most likely needs to be a major city to say, I'm going to create 200 entry-level jobs or requires a college degrees to your commitment. and, you know, I think it's pretty doable. I'll talk to a mayor about it. Yeah, and I do think that as police forces get much higher tech, I think it gets much more interesting, too,

for college graduates and people with higher education and so forth because it just changes the nature of what policing is. You know, when you have full intelligence, then I can't over-emphasize how much safer everybody is. Like police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped like 75% when we first put the cameras and the drones in place just because you're not in this weird unknown situation where you don't know if they have a gun, you have a gun,

there's not enough police around, all that kind of thing just makes for an extremely dangerous situation. And this is how you end up with this like militarized police situation which, you know, is not a very sustainable idea. Let's go deeper on Vegas as a case study, Ben. What does most surprise you in your work, Vegas, or what do you think other cities can learn from the work that you guys are doing? I think that the most surprising thing is, to me,

it's just like how much the actual community likes it. Like, we've got criticism in the press and whatnot, of course, you know, surveillance, big brother, like Ben's a penguin, all that kind of thing. But the community, you know, everybody who's, who lives there in Vegas is kind of a unique city in that, like, it's got crime tourism. Yeah. People fly in.

Yeah, let's do some crime and then fly out and all that kind of thing. And then there's, like, a lot of people go bananas in Vegas. So it's way beyond any criminal motivation that's like mental health and that kind of thing or mental health combined with like hard drugs combined with, you know, Vegas. So there's a lot of that. But for the people who live there, you know, the all, the hospitality workers, you know, the people who are working up for tips and all that kind of thing,

the fact that, you know, and we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right, you know, the right culture, you know, adding the technology to that has kind of made the community go, wow, like I am proud to be here, I feel safe, I know that if a crime gets committed, and we always say, like, you can commit a crime in Vegas, you can't get away with it. And people really, really appreciate that. I've gotten, you know, so many people come up to me from all over the city saying, hey, thank you. We really see the difference and appreciate what you're doing and so forth. So I didn't think it would be that visible that fast. I think the other thing, too, and I don't know if you actually know this, but the model of what

Vegas is doing is caught on more nationally where this public and private partnership is picking up speed because the pace of government innovation is quite slow. Yeah. And private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, has mutual incentives to be safer. So I think about, like, who's the largest supporter of the Mooresville Police Department? Lowe's. Because Lowe's is based there.

Yeah. And they have thousands of employees that live there. And so for Lowe's to spend a million dollars, it's very small for them, but can transform that police department. And, like, more cities are waking up to, like, there's a better way to run a city. So this is so important because you feel like, at the Vegas PD. It's like, well, they've got like, I don't know, thousands of officers. They've got, you know, a huge budget and this and that and the other. But can they make the marginal

investment in technology? Absolutely not. It's very, very difficult. It's extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. You know, they don't want to have to lay off people to do it. And it's mostly headcount, right? Yeah. And it's my, yeah, it's mostly, it's almost all headcount. And so by just, like, adding, like, less than a percent to the police budget, you can completely transform the police force. It's pretty amazing. And, you know, it's very rewarding work. I mean, just like little things. So we had a tremendous attrition problem in the 911.

9-1-1 is a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. It's all this kind of thing. And, you know, everybody was quitting. Five-minute call waits for 911. Imagine waiting on hold for five minutes on 911. And, you know, I was like, well, what's the problem? And they were like, well, you know, like the work conditions are hard.

Like, there's no ice machine. Like, that was literally. So I was like, fuck that. I'll buy that. So I bought an ice machine, an espresso machine. We put in a gym. And now the call weights are less than 30 seconds. And so, you know, just like that tiny investment can change everything.

But I think to your point, in Atlanta, I'm on the Police Foundation Board, I think we contribute about $30 million a year to the police department. Yeah. And I'll never forget, this is a couple months ago, the head of the SWAT team came in. It was like, I would like new equipment. I'm thinking, how bad can it be? And he walks in, it's like, I mean, you would be embarrassed. Yeah.

And it's like, your job is actually to go into fire. Like, line of fire. It's like, I would like a million dollars to get all new equipment for our SWAT team. It's like, yeah. This is, like, very logical, but it is hard. When you're a city, you have no flexibility in your budget. You have no ability to react.

It's just, it's a, it's a, it's a. Yeah, and cities in general, right, are under tremendous budget. You know, most of them have run programs for years, barring from the future. They're highly in debt. You know, they've got big pensions to pay off. So it's really hard to change the city budget. It seems like relatively small amounts of money for these companies or individuals can make a massive difference.

Is this repeatable in city, you know, beyond Vegas and like in San Francisco, how many companies would pay money to make it safer for their employees to come into the office every day? I hope a lot. Yeah, as soon as people see it, they want to do it. Like, people just don't know that's possible. they're like, what, I can give money to the police? So if you look at all of the latest innovations at San Francisco, 100% private funded. Really?

100%. Now, they're choosing to stay, you know, as quiet as they can. But I know, look, you don't want to repeat a penguin bin. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, let's get a coalition. If I was donating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well. Yeah, people will hate you. It is interesting.

I mean, for anyone listening. You should go tour the San Francisco Police Department's Real Time Crime Center. It's powered my flock. And I guarantee you will walk away and you will say, where do I sign a check to give? Yeah. Because you want a drone in your neighborhood. You want more cameras in your neighborhood. Like, this is the way to do it.

How much do we have to pay for the G-Homeless program when he comes? It's a million dollars. Yeah, right, right. They literally raise taxes. This is such a tiny amount of money compared to those sorts of things. I agree. Wow. And then just to close a loop on it,

what we typically see, too, and this is the same in Vegas, is the expectation is like the first year, two years are covered. And then the city has to decide, do you want to keep it? And you roll it into a budget. Because with enough notice, they can afford all these products. It's just hard to get started. Yeah. As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished,

and Flock hasn't been, you know, exempt from that because of all the great work that you've done, you know, solving a huge percent. Is it like 20 percent of crimes? Yeah, we'll do about a million arrests this year. Oh. So what are the criticism that you get? And I just want to point out, arrest of the right person. Yeah.

Like, this is such a big thing in America. Like, the number of people who, you know, particularly if you live in the wrong neighborhood, if you look the wrong way and so forth and get, like, arrested for the wrong crime or arrested or totally innocent has been just like a massive problem. Because just one of those is a complete tragedy. So the fact that they've arrested a million of the correct people with, like, a person. perfect AI match is really, really significant. It is a cultural shock to a police department when you go from subjective base policing

to objective base policing like that's describing. So, look, I think we get predominantly criticized for privacy, which I find falsely focused. I don't think there's any privacy erosion in flock. I think flock puts a spotlight on trust issues. And so I'll give you a good example. And by the way, the flat cameras are all in public spaces. Yeah, yeah. And it's clear.

So whatever you're doing in public road, somebody probably has a phone and is really invading your privacy. If you, is to say, the ironic part is when we do get criticisms, people that are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, do your eyes, if the federal government wanted to find you, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dumb. Yeah. And I will know your exact location in real time at all times. By the way, which is what they do. Yes, but it's way more effective. That's so, you know, there's not only how we're going to solve that.

So I think for the privacy thing, it's quite false. The trust is real, though. And so if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department. And that's what this highlights, because if you don't trust your police department, you don't want them to have guns. You don't want them to have technology. You want them to go away. And so there are some communities where that trust is just deeply fissured. And we're not going to fix it.

Like, I don't think that's our job. We're not, we're just highlighting it. Typically, when we see critics, you know, they call it privacy, but that's just a cover for, I don't trust the police to do their job effectively. And so what we try to do, at least in our tools, is build those levers so that if you're in, you know, Piedmont, California, and you can go to their transparency page and see why are they using flock, how are they using it, what are they doing?

Like, that's actually, I think that's good in building more and more trust. Yeah, it seems like some people are scared about a world in which there's so little trust and the police that basically everyone is getting private security, you know, all this neighborhood. Well, that's the irony of defund the police. It's defund the police for poor people. It's privatized the police for rich people. Yeah, which, you know, has failed in many countries.

Yeah. And that's not a good idea, by the way. No, no. Yeah, and say more about why that is. The crimes are committed, like, 98% against poor people. Like, that is who are the victims of crime. And so you take away the public. funding of police for poor people, then you basically end up with a completely degenerate society.

You basically turn whole neighbors into the third world, which we, by the way, have in the United States in a really major way. And, you know, you just have to put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to raise kids in that environment. It is crazy that that happens in this country. It's just absolutely insane. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the core premise of America, it's economic mobility. I want to do better than my parents. I want my kids to do better than me. You have to have three things to do that. You have to have food, right? And to Ben's point on privatizing, like, you look at one of the biggest issues in poor communities, it's a lack of, you know, sourced food. Second is, you have to have a shelter, okay? Third is, you have to be safe. If you don't have a bedrock

of safety in your life, nothing else can be done. Everything will, in your entire mind becomes occupied by, can I actually walk to school? Yeah. Well, I make it to 18 years old, 21. And so if you look at that, you go, by privatizing, you remove a core tenet of economic mobility, which is what you see politically where we start to say, I don't believe in the American dream anymore, because it didn't work for me. And that's, I think, the fundamental risk is actually like that we have a generation of kids who don't think America will work for them. Yeah. And I think that's actually a huge problem. It's also, you mentioned, you know, 98% is against poor people. It's also done by a very small. percentage of people who commit all the crimes right yep and so what do we do with that percentage of people maybe you know people talk about criminal justice reform sometimes they talk about basically not putting you know criminals in prison um and and then three um i guess what is the steel man of like how do we solve for this what do we do to address this

well look i i think that one if you're getting the so there's a the separate conversation of prison reform. And like, the way the prison system works and the incentives in it in the United States has a lot of issues. You know, principally that it's not, we've gone completely away from rehabilitation. And some of this comes from time-based sentencing and other things. And so our recidivism rate is over 70% in the United States and countries that do like a better job. but can be, you know, much below 40%. So we are throwing away, like there's certain people who are psychopaths and we're never going to reform them.

But there's a big, most people in prison, I've had this conversation with my friend Chakas and Gora was in prison for 20 years. Most people in prison are actually betas. So there are people whose idiot friend had the idea to go rob the local drug dealer or whatever and then they get caught up, and then they're in prison. Now, the problem is those people who could be productive citizens

once they get to prison become trained to be much harder criminals. And so, you know, that's something that we definitely, one, it would be a huge cost savings for the country, two, it would be much better for society and much better for people who get arrested. But like that, I would just say that's an independent problem of law enforcement. And I think the problem with mixing those two is, you know, I guess the prison system needs reform and needs to be improved. And, you know, but we still have to keep people safe.

And so I think you have to address those a bit independently. you can't, you're not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, like, I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do. You basically then create an incentive for nobody to be productive for, you know, incentive for murder, incentive for robbery, incentive for rape, all that kind of thing. Yeah. Garrett, why do you see more on the, on the policy side in terms of, Are there certain cities where certain policies are much more effective that others should learn from? Yeah, well, I mean, I think on the, to Ben's point, just to close that up, too, I mean, there's evil in the world.

And flock, nor any of us are going to fix that. And so we will always need some place to deal with them. Then the question is to the 99% of criminals today who are not evil and they're more capitalistic or opportunistic criminals. So I think to your point, like, there are some interesting. activities, particularly around non-violent, either juvenile or young adults, where putting them in prison is the worst thing to do. They will go from non-violet to violent in months. They will get stuck in it for their entire life. And so we're seeing more and more cities say, there's a better way to do this. You know, you can go to two places, three places, right? You can go to work, you can go to

school, you can go home. It's way better than jail. It's cheaper for the city. It's actually now teaching them to become a productive member of society. And so I think for us, like, that's probably the most important kind of policy change we're starting to see is less of a mindset that, oh, we should those people in jail. I think the other thing we're looking at and we actually, we had a great conversation

with the DA here in San Francisco. Jenkins, of just like, there also needs to be some technology and either flocks in a builder or someone should to make that part of the process go faster. So I was in Shelby County in Tennessee, to Memphis, and there's thousands of people waiting for their trial, what do you think is happening in that place?

I mean, they're becoming criminals. And so there's also an effort of, like, we actually need to speed up the judicial system, and I don't think more humans is the answer. So also seeing more and more cities adopt technology to speed that up. Yeah, actually, so in Vegas they have, just to show you how, like, fixable this problem is, they have this, so there's an anti-recidivism program,

called Hope for Prisoners, which basically, you know, teaches prisoners coming out of jail how to get back into society and then it helps them get jobs. The Vegas prosecutor will, if you're like an 18-year-old kid and you commit a first-time offense and it's not violent, they'll send you, they won't prosecute you. They'll send you to Hope for Prisoners and you go through the rehab. They are close to 0% recidivism on that program. just because, you know, a lot of the times it's like, well, how do I get, people become criminals sometimes because that's, that is a career path. Yeah.

And so if you create an alternative career path, nobody wants to go to jail. Nobody, you know, like, unless you're insane or like a real psycho, that's not the path people want to be on. It's just a path they end up on. And so, you know, creating other avenues is really good. but, like, you have to also disincentivize the criminal career path. Yeah. Like, those go together. I, um, DeLancy Street Restaurant, also another example.

Is that a successful example? Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Where it's, yeah, it's restaurant and they take people who've previously been in prison and give them sort of, you know. Yeah, no, like, I think that businesses, you know, hiring people, particularly out of, uh, and I think DeLancy Street hires a lot of people out of juvenile, juvenile, juvenile hall. you know, taking kids out of the system early is very, very productive. It's like, once you've been in prison 10 years or 20 years,

it's really hard to adapt back into society. It's a very, it's, you're going into a whole different world. And it gives them a lot of dignity. You know, they tell the story to people who said it's very moving, moving place. What's interesting because there's, there's sometimes, I'd call it a form of gaslighting where they say, what are you complaining about? Crime is down. Like, look at all the numbers.

Why do you feel unsafe? that's just a, you know, a clip you saw on Twitter by some right-wing person, you know? Why are you feeling unsafe, walking the streets of San Francisco? What do you say to, what's the right way of thinking about that? It's funny mentioned that there's an elected official, the state representative of a certain state, and I will disclose information.

And they were a very loud antagonist to flock. And sadly, she was like a lot of political figures are, she was the victim of a targeted attack. shot her house was shot at. She's a massive fan of flaknown because that person was arrested within minutes. Wow. Because there's a flock camera on her street. She called number one.

They're like, yeah, we got the guy he's in jail. And he had been posting online about, you know, she's this, she's that. And so there is a bit of like, oh, we want to defund the police just not in our city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's the main mantra. Well, and then a lot of the politicians who want to defund the police have massive private security.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you've got three guys walk around with you all the time, you'd feel fine. Yeah. Yeah. But I also think, like, for me, at least, our expectations of safety should only go up. Yeah. Like, just like we expect information under fingertips, why shouldn't we feel safe everywhere we go?

They say, like, hey, living in a city is dangerous. You know, that's what you signed up for. That's the only, I've only gotten into one argument with an antagonist who I said, you know, I just don't think crime should exist. And he was like, I think it's just a part of living in a big city. And I was like, that seems horrible. Like, it's like trash, too. Like, I don't think like clean streets.

Like, these are not unreasonable things to ask for. Yeah, it seems like a very odd perspective. But I, you know, I, like, particularly if you're a young person, I could see. Well, they worry about overly, you know, and, you know, putting people, too many people in prison or for the wrong crimes. Or they worry about militarized police. All those seem like reasonable concerns. Yeah, that's a steal man.

I guess, I guess the thing for me is, you know, who's going to decide how many homicides is okay? Right. Yeah. And is it okay if it happens to, like, you or your family or your friends, you know, is that okay with you? And then most people would say, no, that. It's just like fine. It's like a fine thing for the other guy.

Yeah. And what I think to bend to your point, too, the number of times we've been in debates where you've got a privileged person in a community articulating a desire for less policing, yet the person who actually needs it is sitting there saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, time out. I actually want more. Yeah, all the town halls look like that. And that's what every town hall looks like.

You're thinking like, you shouldn't be making decisions for other people. Yeah, yeah. I'm so empathetic, I want you murdered. Yeah. That's the... It's the safest thing for you. Yeah, it's so crazy. Well, the other thing on crime statistics is, you know,

like I think it's pretty widely known that like a lot of crime stats have been faked underreported, et cetera. And then if you're not prosecuting crimes, particularly in San Francisco, we had this where they don't get called in. Like if your car got broken into in San Francisco and you called the police, they would be like, what do you want us to do? Like, we're not going to prosecute it, so people just stopped calling. And the real measure of this is the surveys that they've done in almost every city on have you been a victim of a crime and versus the actual official crime statistics go in the opposite direction. And so, you know, over, you know, longitudinal data. So I just think, like, it's a narrative that's supported by, like, fake numbers.

Right. And it's also, the stuff that's also unreported is just, do you feel safe walking, you know, in your city? Do you feel that safe with your kids, you know, walking at night? And anyways. And by the way, the reporting on that did change after 2020. So, like, literally the practices of how crimes are. recorded, how crimes are prosecuted, changed. And so people go, well, like the trend line is correct, even if the numbers, no, it's not. It's not correct. Yeah. And what I live about what you guys

are doing at flock is that you're giving the technology so that, you know, cities and states can choose where they want to be on the spectrum. Basically, talk more a little bit about that, because different places have different values. Yeah, I mean, so there's probably two, there's two big levers that a city can pull. Yeah. So one is retention. So we were, Before Flock was started, there were other companies in this space, and they would historically store location data in perpetuity. And my philosophy started the company was like, that seems more of a risk than an asset, because it's just a lot of data.

And so we store it for 30 days, but you can flex that up and down. So in New Jersey, they store it for five years. That's the state law. That's not our choice. That's just the law. California, there's a max of 90 days. We have some agencies in California that store it for seven days. You can store it for a day. Now, the efficacy is probably linearly correlated by the retention. period because, like, how often do you call a crime the same day it happens?

And actually, not every time. You're away, your car stolen, whatever it could be. So one is data retention. And the second is data sharing. Like, what other police departments do you want to work with? Criminals don't really care where cities start and stop, but cities do by design. And so you can control where you share. So in some states, like California, the data can never leave the state.

In Virginia recently adopted a similar bill, Illinois, Colorado. More states were saying, hey, you know, we trust our state. I think that's an okay approach. I worry about, you know, Ben, maybe, you know, do criminals ever leave California to Nevada? Like, I think they do. So, like, it's, it's crazy.

By the way, so this is one of the things we ran into on the Tupac case, by the way, was the LAPD did so much stuff to foul the case in Vegas, which is why that murder went on Saul for whatever it was, like, almost 30 years. And why they do that? Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt, and there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac, and, you know, thankfully we kind of reopened the cold case and we caught the guy. But it's, you know, like when you think about it in terms of the actual victim.

Yeah. And how bad it was that, like, one of the great artists in the half century ended up being portrayed as, like, this weird criminal victim of a crime because we never solved it. Like, that's what happens when you don't share information. Like, that's the, that's a real issue. Yeah. But, yeah, so, I mean, for us, you know, we've got some agencies, you know, some of the most liberal cities in the country, huge fans of flock, they tweak. it to their likings. And I think we just get back to, it's not our job as a company to write the law, decide what laws are enforced. Immigration is unenforced in California.

I don't care. That's up to California. And I live in Georgia. And we have different expectations of what's criminal, what's not criminal. And, you know, there is a difference between local, state, and federal. And we just try to stay out of it and say, good luck, everyone. We're here to support. Yeah. I'll have been opine on personal. Yeah. I think I have bigger fish to fry, you know, if you're certainly Garrett. I think sometimes as a society, it's really hard. Like, this is one of the challenges with democracy is some of these problems are very complex. And, you know, like crime and punishment is a systemic, like, complicated issue.

And it's hard for people who are really digging into the problem to design the right system. And then once you throw it into politics, you know, anybody says anything. and it gets all convoluted and this and that and the other. So it is, like, really tough to deal with that. And I think that's why we, you know, that's why we don't have a much better system than we have. But I think the other thing, too, Ben, to your point is when it happens, though,

that complication becomes very simple when you have strong leadership with a backbone, normally in a mayor and a DA, the city council, and the sheriff, where they're like, I'm going to arrest you if you've committed a crime in my city. Yep. You have to say that out loud.

You have to say it and do it. Well, but then the problem is you're going to get arrested and the prosecutor is going to prosecute you and the judge is going to be like enforced the law. Yeah. Which is, it's a much harder combination than you might think. You know, and there have been, like there's a huge push to not criminalize crime essentially in this country.

And like it's still going on and it's, you know, there are still these, you know, prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not convicting people. Yeah. And is that for ideological reasons or do we have a big organized crime problem in this country or what is, you mentioned earlier? A big disorganized crime problem. Well, I will say, though, the sheer sophistication of some criminal groups is actually

astonishing. There is definitely low-level crime, but you've got, there's, it's become somewhat politicized, but they are truly a large number of Eastern European and South American gangs operating large-scale businesses. And I call them businesses. Because while they commit crime, they don't run sloppy. And so I'll give you an example, like in logistics space. So Ben and I are two buddies from Eastern Europe. We go buy a freight forer, a legitimate company. We start receiving semis full of product. And guess what? They just disappear. And then after about a month, we shut the company down and disappear

and we've taken tens of millions of dollars of goods and then we flip it on Facebook Marketplace and all secondary places and it's clean no one gets shot and everything looks clean on paper and like this is obviously not easy to, you have to be sophisticated but like this is a large, large scale

and it works. And by the way so this is what happened you know I have when the crime went really crazy in San Francisco I had a long conversation with Mayor Breed about it And one of the things that, so in San Francisco, right, like the whole political movement was people are hungry, you can't arrest them for shoplifting and so forth. So as soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores.

They ended up, right, shutting down the big mall, like there's no shopping in San Francisco whatsoever anymore. And so all the citizens got punished. But, like, it wasn't hungry people. It was like organized crime, systematically selling the goods. kids, second aunt, it was that kind of thing. And so you get, now, the people that they deployed were low-level criminals, right? Like, you can just pick, have a kid go rob the thing for you and you pay them. Right.

But that's not what's going on. It's not that the kid is hungry. It's that the kid is now a career criminal working for an organized gang, probably from South America. So, you know, like the side effects of these office. the cuff nobody thought it through crazy ideas are like highly consequential yeah Garrett talk about what the world looks like in a world where flock achieves its goal like what's the future of policing you know a flock camera on every block like talk talk about yeah I think the word been used was intelligence yeah and so much of that shift is

starting to happen I would add to the intelligence precision yeah and like I'll paint for you a picture of a recent success story that to me is the future and it just hasn't happened in every city yet Yeah. So there's an individual who leaves a hospital mentally unwell and shoots someone in a drive-by, just driving my and start shooting people. This is a real story. Because all the police departments in the city worked, like in the neighboring cities work together, they put out a hot list entry for, hey, we're looking for this vehicle, armed, dangerous, mentally unwell.

That vehicle pulls into the largest commercial center for one of the cities. It's a big mall. The mall is also a flock customer. So the police farmer gets a ding on that camera and says, hey, we found this guy. Now, let's pause. traditional response is you deploy SWAT and it's going to take about 15 minutes

to get everyone ready they're going to come in hot and someone's going to die it's not clear who either a citizen an officer or the suspect's going to die but let's assume someone's going to die and then just as not as important

but just as a matter of fact that mall is also going to see a dramatic decline in attendance and it could bleed to probably the end of the mall which is not good too for that sitting there okay that's unpause what happened

sitting at a comfortable desk like we are here a real-time crime center operator, clicks a button that says launch drone. The drone is at the mall in about 40 seconds. From about a half mile away, we can zoom in, find that the individual has a tattoo.

We pulled that, because we have a product called Nova, that when an LPR hit comes through, we can say, oh, wow, this person's been arrested six times. Is there any of your... Oh, there is interesting information. This person has a very distinguishable forearm tattoo.

So we spot the tattoo. Half my way. This guy has no idea we're following him. We don't see it. done. Two plainclothes officers walk up. The whole time they know, they've got overhead protection. They're being helped, just like you were in the army. They take them down. No one has any idea. And they present us to City Council, and City Council was like, we need drones everywhere. We need drones everywhere. It's safer. It's more precise. There's a level of intelligence.

And so when I look at this police department, they've got all their data integrated, they have all their sensors integrated. It's just happening. And I think for us, when we think about, a kind of agentic layer on top of that where now you can start to reduce some of your staffing problems but some of these jobs no one wants to work the night shift and wants to like that some jobs are just like not fun there's a way to do with software yeah so i think that kind of intelligent precise policing is where we want i think the net effect of that to ben's earlier point is officers spend more time with their community yeah less time filling out paperwork less time writing reports more time engaged just a quick last one story do you have a couple stories of if you're

actually saving like a baby oh i mean we we helped return over 450 missing children this year oh my god and that's the the no it's not funny even that's like aha where it's like people are like oh we should you know band fly and i'm like until your child was stolen yeah because i've got three kids and i want to know that anything goes happens wrong with them flock is there yeah and this like you get carjacked and your baby's in the back seat and they take the baby I mean like that kind of thing

I mean there was a case down in San Diego this year where it depends point it was at a mall hops in the kid in the back like obviously wasn't that wasn't a part of the plan

became a part of the plan and like thankfully you know they've got a lot of flock cameras in San Diego and and we were able to get the individual but that happens doesn't happen every day in your city but it happens every day in the country

well Garrett you're you're doing heroic work And one of the most inspiring things about organization Z is is working with you. So thank you for the work that you do. Yes, thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Thank you.

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