TED Talks Daily - Can a camera on every corner make us safer? | Garrett Langley

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Garrett Langley founded Flock because he believed it was too easy to get away with crime in the US. His solution? A network of license plate readers, cameras, drones and audio sensors that has changed how police departments investigate crime — and raised urgent questions about safety, surveillance and privacy. In this talk, Langley explains why he thinks this tech makes the world safer, and addresses the controversy around it. (Followed by a Q&A with TED Chairman Chris Anderson and a note from TED guest curator Bilawal Sidhu) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. A network of license plate readers, cameras, drones, and audio sensors is already changing how some police departments in the U.S. investigate crime. And if you live here, there's a good chance you've passed one of Flock's cameras without realizing it. Garrett Langley found it Flock, and he says the technology helps bring safety to communities every. But the technology his company has built also raises urgent questions about privacy, policing, and surveillance. Whether this is a constitutional violation, what does this mean to my privacy, and are you building mass surveillance? That's your pretty good questions.

In his talk, he says the old model of policing, officers driving around looking for suspicious activity was slow and riddled with bias, while data-driven technology can get to the truth faster. A national network of cameras and sensors isn't a simple idea, and it's a controversial one. Garrett takes on the hardest questions about his company's technology. The biases that exist in training models, who owns this data, how long it's stored, who gets access, and what happens when these tools are abused? With everything that's powerful should come heightened responsibility. Stick around after the talk for a brief Q&A between Garrett and Ted Chairman Chris Amher. We'll then hear from Ted's tech curator, Belavl Sidu, about why he brought Garrett to the TED stage and why he thinks the conversation around safety, privacy, and surveillance can't be avoided.

It's all coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. I'm going to start with a story and speaking to a grandmother in rural Tennessee. And she was taking care of her 11-year-old granddaughter. So she wakes up, she walks into a room, the bed's empty. She looks around, there's no note, there's nothing. If your heart's not racing right now, it should be. She calls 911.

Detective arrives, no sign of force, there's nothing. Except one thing that he remembered. There's a flock camera just down the street. She pulls out his phone and runs a search for the night and finds one car. He runs that tag, and it's his worst nightmare. It's a registered sex offender. So he logs in a flock, and he's looking for this car,

and he sees the car is traveling down I-75, and if you're not familiar with Tennessee and Georgia, that's the connecting state. It's the highway. The person's on the highway. The detective doesn't know what to do, so he does whatever hero does is he moves into action. He jumps in his car and races down I-75.

As he approaches the interstate line, he sees the vehicle. The violent struggles pursues, and at the end, he hears crying. And the girl's in the back. She's bound, but she's alive. They went on to go search the suspect's house, and the nightmare got scarier. Everything one would need to not only assault but dispose of the body was there. Now that girl's alive today because the detective had two things. He had a license plate and he had direction to travel.

This for me is one of thousands of stories I sadly hear about every day in America. I started flock nine years ago because of this exact type of problem. See, I live in a city called Atlanta and I was frustrated. Crime felt too easy to get away with. It didn't make sense to me that you could steal someone's car and have an 80% chance of getting away with it. Or you could kill someone and have a 50% chance of getting away with it. So I kept pushing.

I kept pushing, and eventually I found a major in the Atlanta Police Department who told me, Mr. Langley, it's not apathy, it's not effort, it's evidence. If all we had was a license plate, we could catch these people. So I did what engineers did. I built a license plate reading camera. It sounds simple. But I called two of my best friends from Georgia,

and we built this camera. He said, you have to have the license plate. So we did that, put it up in my neighborhood, and about two months later, we solved our first crime. And that was the beginning of the flock. And now, as you've heard, the company has grown quite a bit since then. We do more than cameras. We build cameras now. We build drones. We build audio detection devices. We built software that connects it altogether. And the concept is actually still this simple nine years later. Car drives by. We do what we call a vehicle signature. We'd look for the make, the model, the color, anything a detective would notice. And then you catch the bad guy.

And that's what I thought we were doing, right? And then I was speaking to a police chief, not too far from here in Washington, and he said, no, no, Mr. Langley, this is more than about fighting crime. This is as transformational as DNA. And candidly, I was confused. It's a camera. What's the rub? And he said, well, look, let me explain to you how policing used to work.

historically policing is a subjective exercise. You drive around suspicious neighborhoods looking for suspicious activity, and ah, there is the root of the bias. What's suspicious to me is different than her and different than him. That doesn't seem very good. And so the chief has explained to me

that now with flock, it's objective. That is a stolen car. That is a car that has a child on the back of it. That is the car that has an amber alert or a silver alert. So we've moved the way policing. works. It's pretty incredible. But let me give you a real-life example. So now we're going to go all the way to Colorado. So it's a 911 call. It's a Levi's outlet. And this might be the most important thing I say all day. The 911 is describing the getaway car as a white van spray-painted black and

blue. Here's a pro tip. If you're going to commit a crime, do not spray paint your vehicle. Do it in a Camry or Corolla, something simple. Right, so the 911 call comes in. They have this van, so they go into our product and search for a vehicle. They can type in anything they want, white van, spray paint, anything that makes sense. Now, what's cool is it turns every single camera into a detective. Now, every camera in the city is looking for this white van. The second thing they do is they launch a drone. So just like Adam, launch the drone up in the air.

The drone's flying at 400 feet, 65 miles per hour trying to find this white van. Now, a camera eventually finds them, drone goes over. Now, in a normal reaction, as a law enforcement officer, you have to assume the worst-case scenario. Is this person armed? Probably. Is the public at risk? Probably. So you come in hot. But with a drone overhead, flying at four-hundred feet, the suspect has no idea. Officers can respond with precision and with calmness. So from start to finish in 21 minutes, from a 911 call at a Levi's outlet, tracking the car all the way to a second outlet, there was an arrest. Now, if you zoom this all the way out, some of the biggest cities in America,

some of the biggest companies in America rely on flock to keep them and their employees and their citizens safe. Two years ago, San Francisco was in a crisis, as many as you probably know. They deployed everything flock has, license heart reading cameras, drones, video cameras, our software that ties it all together. And Mayor Lurie described this fusion of sensors as a transformation in public safety. and if any of you live in the city, you know that it feels safe all of a sudden.

Crime is down 25%. Homicide is the lowest rate it's been in 70 years. So this all seems really good, right? Well, while the company's scale has grown and a lot of things have changed for me, one thing's been very consistent. There is inevitably some part of this audience today who's saying, I don't know.

This snitching-ass startup kind of doesn't make sense to me. And this was our first ever press coverage, and I was so proud. I framed this, and my poor mother was like, why are you framing this? And I'm like, because it's a reminder that when you work on important things, some people will disagree, and that's okay. It means you should work harder. And so when I talk to these opponents, and I've got to know that many of them over the years now, they tend to have three big issues with flock. Whether this is constitutional violation, what does this mean to?

to my privacy, and are you building mass surveillance? That's your pretty good questions. Let's hit the easy one, constitutional. 30 court cases over the last two years. Every single one of them is unanimously said. This does not violate the Constitution. Why? We're not tracking a persons in real time.

We are tracking a fixed location. Not a lawyer, but I'm going to go with the courts. So I'm going to check the box on Constitution. Second one is privacy. This is actually a really good question, because nine years ago, I did not have a degree in criminal justice. I had no experience. I was an engineer that just wanted to build a product to help fight crime.

But when we sat there and said, what if we are really successful? What could go wrong? So we started looking at what the industry did. So the first thing we asked was, what about data ownership? Who should own this data? This is a lot of data. Historically, companies, my competitors, own the data.

And then they resell that data for other use cases. In flocks model, the customer always own the data. So if you live in San Francisco, it's San Francisco's data, not flocks. The second was retention. Well, how long should this data? data exist. Historically, companies in this industry stored the data in perpetuity. That seems to me more like a liability, not an asset. So we delete the data at 30 days. If cities and states have laws that say it should store longer, we do that, shorter, we do that. The third is around

accountability. With everything that's powerful should come heightened responsibility. Every action inside a flock is audited and stored in perpetuity. So every action an officer takes. And sadly, three officers were arrested last year for abusing this system. Now, I think if anything that speaks very poorly on the law enforcement industry, but it is a reminder that when you build tools to hold people accountable, it starts to work. And the last one, and this is the most interesting to me, if you go to a place like the UK, there's 45 police departments.

You go to Australia, there's eight. France, there's two. And does anyone want to guess how many police departments are in America? You're way off. 18,000. Okay, this is the problem. You literally can commit a crime in City A and drive a City B, and they're like, oh, who are you?

You leave State A to State B, they're like, oh, who are you? You leave State A to State B, they're like, oh, we have no record of you. This entire problem is a data problem. These cities have not historically worked together. They moved to the cloud less than 10 years ago, five years ago. And so one of the biggest criticisms of flock is that we create this national network of data that allows local law enforcement to work together.

It's a uniquely American problem. Third question that I talk about you get, right? So we covered the Constitution, we covered privacy, now the big one, surveillance state. Is this a creation of a new surveillance state? You know, look, I think everyone in this room probably has a cell phone. And what if I told you that someone with mediocre computer software skills could build a product that tracks your exact location in real time down to a few feet? Because all of you use Google Maps and Uber and any device that has access to your location.

And so I think about the tooling that we ask our local. law enforcement to use, and we give them a weapon, a gun, a taser, yet we're afraid to give them a camera that reads a license plane on a public road. I'm not saying that it's not a choice. I'm just saying that for me, the trade-off is, I don't know how many more 11-year-old girls need to be kidnapped, or human trafficking rings, or silver alerts, or amber alerts. We have to go through before we say enough is enough. Now, the beauty of America, though, is that every city, county gets to pick. It's not my choice. I live in Atlanta. I vote. You should vote. The challenge is that when you decrease surveillance and in effect decrease safety,

it impacts certain parts of the community more than others. If you are affluent in South Africa, you have nine foot walls, you have private security guards. There are 600,000 private security yards in South Africa more than the military and police combined. So if you are affluent in South Africa, it is a beautiful place to live, you are crime-free. And if you are not affluent, crime is simply the cost of being alive. Now, if you transpose that to a place like Tokyo, beautiful city, there's a few dozen homicides a year.

Whether you go to work at 2 a.m. or 8 a.m., you feel safe. It just doesn't matter. And so America is this very interesting conundrum in the middle. We have the law enforcement infrastructure. We need to be safe, yet we haven't made, to me, the most important decision as a society, which is that safety should not be a privilege. Safety should just be a right. It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.

Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe. Thank you very much. It's so interesting, persuasively argued. But when you sell these systems to law enforcement, how... strongly do you feel you have the right to limit what they can do? Because you've made a powerful case for these things used the right way, but everyone here can also imagine them use the wrong way. Here's a protest.

You know, cameras do do things that someone's cell phone doesn't do. You can detect in the end, we're in the world where you can detect individuals, etc. Are you able to restrict what they do, or is it just you sell the system and then it's over to you, act within the law, my friends? Yeah, so actually I want to answer your question in two parts. The first is, I was having this debate with our team because people were asking, why does Google dislike flock, but not these other things?

I said, you can see flock. I guarantee you, if you go to our website and look at what our camera looks like, and you go back home if you live in America, you will see our cameras everywhere. They're easy to spot. But your cell phone, you're oblivious to all the tracking that exists online,

so you forget about it. But to answer your question, we do have restrictions. Now, obviously, there's this thing called the Constitution, which we care a lot about. There's state law, there's local law, but then there's things that we just don't feel comfortable with. And so we do set in kind of our own policy framework. And then just like most technology companies, we have a full team of attorneys who actually think about this stuff full time because our customers are just not that far the Dosh and Kirk. I mean, how often do you or someone on your team hear of something

that is being done with your technology that makes you uncomfortable? Three times last year. Like to me, it is horrible. that in the case was I'll pick on my own home state because I live in Georgia. There was a police chief in northern Georgia that used Flock to track an ex-partner. It's horrible. But then I'm reminded that the GBI

used Flock's audit log to investigate that chief, and he's now in jail. And so the other thing I think about to your question is like, if Flock did not exist, he was probably a bad person. He was going to do this one way or another.

And so I look at the one million plus cases and go, okay, this is a tradeoff that I can make, but that's my choice. You've got such a powerful technology, and it's very cool to hear you open to having these discussions. Garrett, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was Garrett Langley speaking at TED 2026.

And now here's Ted's tech curator, Belavl Sidu, on why the technology he's talking about isn't hypothetical, but already being used across the United States. He shares his own thoughts around the questions, we all may have. That was a heavy one, right? Like, we're all facing this question with ubiquitous surveillance.

And look, think about it, it's totally legal to film in public places, but now we have these AI-enabled cameras that are tracking every single person or vehicle that drives by. And then when something goes down, you have a drone that from really high altitude can zoom in and track a suspect.

Like, this is insane technology that exists today. This is obviously a controversial topic, and people are on different sides of this. But at TED, we want to hear arguments on both sides. Most people want to live in a world that is free from crime. At the same time, nobody wants to live in a perpetual panopticon where every move that you do is surveilled.

And a lot of the double-edged nature of this technology comes down to the people that are using the tools, right? Like who gets the keys to the castle and how are they deploying this technology? The best thing we can do is draw awareness to these issues and have a conversation around it. Because the technology is one thing, but the question about how we utilize it

in day-to-day society is a collective conversation. So regardless of where you fall on the issue, We want to hear from you. So let us know your thoughts. I hope you enjoyed. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.

Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team. Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Senglarnivang.

Additional support from Daniela Ballerazo, Christopher Faisie Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban-Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lot. Learn more at podcasts.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.