Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now, let's go inside the ICE House.
Trinity Chavez:
Law enforcement technology is advancing, revolutionizing how agencies prevent and respond to crime. Tools like license plate recognition cameras, gunshot detection systems, and drone as first responder programs are giving officers real-time intelligence like never before. Flock Safety is working to aid law enforcement professionals by providing cutting-edge technology. Through acquisitions, partnerships, and organic product development Flock Safety is helping make communities more secure. Our guest today, Garrett Langley, co-founded the company in 2017 and currently serves as its CEO. With an entrepreneurial spirit and experience in growing two previous successful companies, Garrett leads Flock Safety with the goal of eliminating crime and shaping future safety. Garrett, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Garrett Langley:
Thanks for having me.
Trinity Chavez:
Absolutely. So I do want to talk to you first about Flock Safety's website. So when visitors land on the website, they're immediately met with a bold statement, right? "Eliminate crime in your community." That mission has been at the heart of your company's mission since its inception, right? So talk to me more about why you chose this mission, and for our viewers who might not know, tell us more about Flock Safety.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah, so I'm a unique character. I've never had a real job before, never had a resume, never applied to an interview. I've only ever started companies. And the first two were pretty successful. They were good businesses. And I was thinking about what to do next in my life, my closest mentor in life, my uncle said, "You should build a business that isn't dopey." And what he meant by that was, a lot of businesses go in and out of fashion, they get started, they fail, they succeed, and it doesn't really matter. It doesn't actually change anything in how we live our lives. And his challenge to me was like, "Go build a great business that does both," [inaudible 00:02:44] successful, cash flow generating business, but also changes people's lives. And so we looked at all the different problems that we felt.
I live in Atlanta, crime was a pretty big problem. It still is a problem, but it's gotten a lot better. And out of all those ideas we had, this idea of safety and crime. And when you really zoom out, there's this concept that if you look at other countries, when things start to fall apart, and typically, it's eventually realized by a lack of economy, if you go to when things started to fall apart, it actually starts with crime. And so if you look at the bedrock of a society, it is a critical need to feel safe. If you don't feel safe, you won't start a family. So your population will decline. If you don't feel safe, you won't start a business, so your economy declines. If you don't feel safe, everything starts to fall apart. And so we realized there was this opportunity to build a company whose mission was to guarantee safety, to go community to community and say, "You deserve to be safe." Whether you are in Atlanta where I live, or in New York where you are, or in Memphis, or in Wisconsin, Minnesota, pick your city, you deserve to be safe.
Trinity Chavez:
And I do want to dive into the launch of Flock Nova. This is an all-in-one data intelligence platform designed to accelerate investigations. So can you take us behind the scenes of this platform and what inspired the creation of Nova in the first place?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. So I have the fortunate benefit of knowing a lot of police chiefs and a lot of mayors. We've got about 5,000 or so cities and counties that we work with. And one of the problems that Flock has created for our customers is an abundance of data. So we deploy sensors in the field. These are cameras, audio devices. And this new problem is created then, which has never been a problem for local government, which is like, "What do we do with all this data?" And so what Flock Nova is able to do is to take all of these disparate data systems, smash them together in a simple common data model.
And the example I'll give you is, we were working with one of our healthcare partners, and this is one of the largest healthcare systems in the country. They have almost 30,000 security incidents a year across their network, and they manage and log those across 18 different systems. So system-wide they actually have no idea what's going on. It takes them weeks to run reports. And now with Nova, all of those systems get merged together in one database, in our database, and they can understand how is crime evolving, how are incidents changing? They can run more sophisticated investigations. And so whether you're a city like Manhattan or a healthcare provider, you have this problem where data is just spread across too many systems. And with Nova, we can bring them together in a single pane of glass.
Trinity Chavez:
And I do want to turn to some stats here. The Police Executive Research Forum reports that staffing at US departments declined by 5% from 2020 to 2023 with an even steeper drop in new recruits during that same time period. Now with departments facing ongoing shortages, how can Flock Nova ease this pain point and the burden that's overwhelming officers?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah, I mean, look, if you think about... And I'll make an assumption that we are a comparable age range, you and I. When we were kids, being in law enforcement was a noble profession. You think about our grandparents when they were kids, it was definitively an honorable job to be a police chief, to be a sheriff. And unfortunately, the profession has lost some of its allure. And you see that in the employment data. And the problem is, as our population grows, that means we have less people working to protect us, which is a problem. And generally speaking, when you really look at law enforcement or business, technology tends to be one of the only ways that you can get more efficiencies out of a smaller number of people. So when we look at our law enforcement partners, we look at it and say, "Well, do you ever think recruiting is ever going to change?" And I would argue 99 out of 100 police chiefs will say no. They're pretty convinced that in the next decade their employment size will be down, but populations will be up. Crime will be maybe down to flat, but the needs are there.
So when we look at whether it's Nova or Flock OS or our cameras, it's really a force multiplier. And I think the earliest example that I'd give you is, our first ever government contract was in a small town called Jersey Village. It's a suburb of Houston in Texas. It's about four or 5,000 people, maybe 6,000 now. The chief went to city council and said, "I want to get 50 cameras from Flock." And they're like, "Wow, that feels like a lot. That's almost one for every corner." And he said, "Yeah, but that's almost the same cost as one officer. And what do we think will be more effective for our city? One more officer or 50 cameras that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, rain and shine, they don't take a pension?" And so he actually went into his budget and removed that from salary and in technology expense. And so we're seeing more and more police chiefs and city managers realize that they have to invest in technology. And there's been very little innovation in this market. We're really the only innovative company in the last decade, maybe two decades. And that creates a lot of opportunity for us.
Trinity Chavez:
And you equip Flock Nova with the capabilities and the resources for law enforcement to act and work more efficiently and effectively, saving them time. But how do you go about scaling the products? How do you go about working with departments near Flock Safety headquarters in Atlanta, as you mentioned, and across the country to implement these sort of technologies that are already existing?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah, so it's an interesting problem. In the business community, we moved to the cloud quite a while ago and pretty quickly, and while it's still happening for maybe the Fortune 50, the cloud's pretty common. In local government majority of systems are still on-prem and siloed, and the issue is quite dramatic, because that means that while criminals don't really care where cities start and stop, the data does. And so you might have a suburb or a town like Atlanta, and there's no information sharing before Flock across Atlanta to Dunwoody, to Alpharetta, to Marietta, to South Fulton, to East Point, to Hapeville. You go to these places and they're not working together. They want to work together, but the technology is holding them back.
And so, one of the fundamental beliefs of Flock, if you just look at the name, is that individual pursuit of safety isn't good enough. The concept of Flock was we have to work together as a group of people, as a group of cities. And so when you look at something like Flock Nova or you look at something like our LPR network, all that data is shared both for free and seamlessly. And so if I'm in Dunwoody... Or actually, I'll give you a real-life example. There was this heinous, heinous case in Chamblee, Georgia. And random acts of violence are pretty rare, but this was one that was pretty bad. A young mom was walking her three-year-old son, walking down the street, car pulls up, guy jumps out, steals the baby, drives off. Now historically, this is going to go to cold case. An Amber alert's going to get released and we're going to look for this kid, but the odds are it's going to be pretty tough. But because Flock breaks down those data silos, what we're able to realize is that we can find this kid much faster.
And so in the case of Chamblee, they go to the Flock system, they look for the car, they find the license plate, they create a statewide alert. They actually intentionally choose not to issue an Amber alert. They don't want the suspect to know they know who they are. And by the time they get home, GBI is waiting there, the local police are there, and from start to finish, in about an hour, the kid is safely returned home. And so when you look at the impact, it's one thing to talk about the benefit of data and AI, it's a very, very much different story when you talk about returning a stolen kid to a mother.
Trinity Chavez:
And Flock Safety started by producing license plate readers for law enforcement. But over time, over the past eight years, the company has significantly expanded its technology offerings. So how would you describe Flock Safety's evolution over the last decade, and where do you see it going?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. It's pretty crazy, right? So we started with a very small idea, to your point, seven or eight years ago, just putting cameras in my neighborhood. And that caught fire, got to a couple thousand neighborhoods, then cities started buying our product. And what's interesting today is that if you look at our business, our top customers by revenue are actually private enterprise. Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Flock to keep their customers and employees safe. And if you had asked me four or five years ago, "Would the majority of the Fortune 50 be using our product?" I said, "No, I don't think so. That's not on our roadmap." But now, whether it is the expansive number of products we have across cameras and drones and software or the expansive side of the market where we have neighborhoods, we have cities, and now we have some of the biggest companies in the world, it seems like the sky is the limit for us.
Trinity Chavez:
And most people would agree that creating safer environments for communities and solving more crimes is of the utmost importance. While several companies, including Flock Safety develop technology to support this mission, how would you say you differentiate yourself from other companies that are working toward the same mission, especially when it comes to the crime prevention technology space?
Garrett Langley:
There's a few things I think that make us quite special. The first would be our vertical integration. So we are the only company that I know of globally that both designs hardware, software, and AI, manufactures it, ships it services it, installs it, sells it. There isn't a part of the flow from idea to equipment in the field functioning that we do in-house. So we do the whole thing. So that's the first one.
The second is there are very few companies, particularly looking at local government and public safety, that are able to do both hardware, AI, and software. There are some that might do one, maybe they do two. We are one of the rarest that do three.
And then the last piece that I'd say is pretty important to us is, there's an American way to be safe. And if you look at our constitution, there are certain rights and civil liberties that we hold dearly and we think it's important to uphold those. And so while we might get criticism from some of our friends on extremist groups, we believe that there's an American way to be safe. And so when you look at the way we've built our system, from the way we manage data retention, to the way we manage auditing, to the way we manage transparency, we just believe there is a better way to be safe, and we want to be at the tip of that spear.
Trinity Chavez:
And innovation often arises from the need to solve real problems that society is facing today. How does Flock Safety and your team collaborate with local law enforcement officials there on the ground to spearhead this mission and help identify key challenges that communities are facing in today's society?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. I mean, one of the funnest parts of being an engineer at Flock is getting out in the field. And so our engineers love to do ride alongs. And so they'll go to their hometown police department and they'll spend a day as a patrol officer. They'll spend a day as a detective. Because what you look at is, the majority of our employees have never had a gun, they've never carried a badge, they've never arrested someone. And that's great. If you look at one of the macro theses of the business is that... I went to Georgia Tech here in Atlanta, the majority of my friends sell ads for a living. They might not want to admit that, but they work at companies like Meta and Alphabet, and they sell ads for a living. What a horrible waste of engineering talent. When they come to Flock, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm solving real world problems, physical problems. I want to go touch that. I want to physically go touch that experience." And so for us, nothing is better than getting in the field with our customers. And whether that is a retailer or a healthcare system or a police chief, and saying, "Show me the problems that you have. I've never done your job, but I'm quite good at building technology. Let me see what I can do."
Trinity Chavez:
And it's impressive because you yourself, you got into this sector without actually having any law enforcement experience yourself when this company was founded back in 2017. So talk to me about that story, about your motivation behind spearheading this mission with you and your co-founder.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. So as I said, when we were thinking about what to do next after selling our last company, Paige and Matt and I knew we would start a company together. We knew we wanted it to have an impact. And while we liked public safety, we were also passionate about healthcare, we were passionate about sanitation. There were a lot of problems we thought we could solve. And so what we did is what most entrepreneurs do is we put up a website, started cold calling people and charging for a product that barely worked. And what was different about Flock is that it hit everyone at a level that I'd never seen building a business, where whether you talked to a grandmother or a high schooler or you talked to someone in business or someone that's in the medical field, they all feel this pain of wanting to be safe. And so it felt like we had product market fit for the whole country overnight.
And when you combine that with my personal experience where my neighborhood was the victim of organized crime, and the local police department was incapable of solving it, not out of effort, but out of evidence... There was no evidence to solve the crime... It just became really clear we could build a very, very big business in the process. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through a 12, 18, 24 month journey trying to find product market fit, trying to find, "Are you solving a problem for customers?" And we were really lucky that it happened almost overnight.
Trinity Chavez:
And I'm sure AI is playing a huge role in tackling a lot of these challenges, providing that real-time data. As we see recently, this AI boom is really transforming industries across sectors. How has the widespread adoption of this advanced technology enhanced or enabled Flock Safety's ability to further innovate and tackle these challenges, but also expand its product line and capabilities when it comes to addressing the challenges that communities are facing?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. We just launched a new product last week called Freeform, which is one of maybe the coolest AI products we've launched in the last few years. And so let me explain to you how it works. Historically, our cameras operate very, very much in a deterministic way. A car is either black or blue. It is not both colors. It is either made by Ford or Honda. You're either right or wrong. And the same on people side. There's either a person there or there isn't. And what FreeForm looks to do is switch that from a deterministic to a probabilistic. And in doing so, it allows the end user to search for things that a human understands, but is traditionally not black or white.
An example I like to point out is a landscaping truck. What is a landscaping truck? You can't buy a landscaping truck. You can't go down to your Ford dealer and say, "I want my landscaping truck." No. The system actually has to understand what it means to be a landscaping truck, which would be things like, does it say the word lawn care on it? Does it have a lawnmower in the back of a trailer bed? Does it have grass in it? And this might seem like a cute feature, but...
I'll give you a recent example. There was a city that's been using the product, and unfortunately, there was a homicide. And all they had from a grainy surveillance camera was a white truck with an orange cone in the back. Now, in this city's example, we've got thousands of cameras deployed in the city. They go in and they run one search. "White trucks with orange cones in the trunk bed," And they find the guy. And look, to be clear in a historical context, they could have spent hours and hours, which they would have, trying to find that truck. But now, with this AI feature, FreeForm, it was seconds.
I've got another example where there was a large scale propane illegal dumping, and this might not sound like a problem, but illegal dumping is really, really expensive for cities. And so they were to go in and run a search, "Show me trucks with propane in the back. Show me a truck with rust on it." We solved a homicide recently where the vehicle was heavily rusted. That's something that was never possible before. And now, we can search across tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of cameras in plain English, and it is completely changing the way our customers use our products.
Trinity Chavez:
Wow, that's incredible. Obviously, this wouldn't have been possible from your company's inception back in 2017.
Garrett Langley:
No. No, I mean, this is cutting edge technology that would've been impossible seven years ago and is only possible in the last year or so.
Trinity Chavez:
And I do want to continue on the topic of moving the needle forward. In October 2023, Flock Safety acquired Aerodome, a pioneer in drone as a first responder technology. Talk to me about the strategic rationale behind this decision and why this acquisition was so important. How is it helping you enhance Flock Safety's core mission, and again, tackle the challenges that communities are facing most?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. I mean, I think drones will be one of the bigger changes in local government over the next decade. There is obviously drones being used today in a lot of use cases, but by and large, most police departments are not using drones today. And it's going to have a pretty radical change to how we see policing operate.
I'll give you a great example. Today, one of the number one problems facing cities is high speed pursuits. I steal your car and I drive really, really fast. And historically, I would get in a chase. The problem is that in those chases, typically innocent bystanders are the ones that get injured and often killed, and so many cities have stopped pursuing. So what do criminals do? They just drive really fast then and they know they can get away. That's a problem. With our drone technology now, our cities are pursuing those vehicles with drones, and now we can safely apprehend individuals.
So if your car gets stolen, you call 911, we have 911 software that allows us to listen to that call. So you call 911, our real-time crime center hears that. We click a button that says launch drone. Drone starts flying exactly to your location. Now that drone is equipped with FreeForm, which we were talking about earlier. It knows how to find your car. So that drone is finding your car. It finds it. It's now 400 feet up in the air chasing the vehicle that has been stolen. The person inside the car has no idea they're being followed. They think they're safe.
Trinity Chavez:
So this has revolutionized how law enforcement goes about following and tracking potentially those criminals, as we used to see back a few decades ago or even a few years ago. We still see it today that the helicopter is the one that is tracking the potential criminal just to try to locate them. But now, it's real time that you're dispatching these drones and allowing law enforcement to act more efficiently and effectively.
Garrett Langley:
That's spot on. Historically, helicopters were an incredible tool, but really expensive. You're five, 10 million dollars to buy the helicopter, millions of dollars in annual operating costs, so only the biggest cities in America could use them. And they're really, really good tools. They're just too expensive. A drone is an order of magnitude cheaper, an order of magnitude safer, an order of magnitude quieter, and all those things matter a lot to quality of life. And so yeah, when we look at our customers today, if the average response time to a 911 call is historically measured in minutes, the average response time is not measured in seconds.
Trinity Chavez:
And this acquisition has also helped speed up your plan, your suite of American-made NDAA-compliant drones too. Talk to me more about that.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. So we are building a portfolio of drones here in America. We actually have a manufacturing facility right outside of Atlanta. It's just over 100,000 square feet. We're really excited about that. We have a manufacturing facility and a few other states as well that we're excited to announce. But yeah, I mean, we've been passionate about drones for a number of years. With the Aerodrome acquisition, it accelerated both our piloting software in our ability to manufacture these drones. And so we will take to market a portfolio or a fleet of drones, smaller drones that are a bit more tactical, medium-sized drones for your average city, and then to our discussion, drones that are really equipped to be helicopter replacements.
Trinity Chavez:
And in 2021, Flock Safety also announced an official distributional partnership with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children. Then in August 2024, you also expanded that partnership to help improve child safety across the United States and aid in locating and recovering missing children. Walk us through how Flock Safety is collaborating with organizations to reach this crucial goal.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. I mean, look, we could debate the merits of stealing someone's car. I think it's pretty bad. I guess candidly, no one got hurt. Stealing children seems to be maybe one of the most evil things one could do. And when we had the opportunity... We had been unofficially working with the National Center for Endangered and Missing Children for a number of years. And as our business grew, it became clear that we were a pretty critical part to their mission. And so I had the chance to spend some time with the director and her staff, and realized our missions are quite the same. They want to help children. We want to help all of society.
And now, with that integration, we are a step ahead when a child is reported as missing. Now they have access through an investigation relationship to use our equipment and use our software. And just for me, as a father of three, that's the scariest thing that could happen, if something happens to your kids. And so as we look across the country at organizations like this group, we're always looking for more to say, "Hey, we have this incredible technology. How do we find nonprofits that have an aligned mission to help them be more successful?"
Trinity Chavez:
And speaking about critical missions, law enforcement goes far beyond just keeping communities safe. In fact, they also play a key role when it comes to educating the public on the best safety practices. And through Flock Safety's own podcast, Real-Time Policing: When Moments Matter, you're also contributing to this effort. How can a podcast platform like yours provide valuable insights for people to get that knowledge they need? And also, not only for everyday law enforcement professionals, but just the everyday consumer.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. It's funny, the idea of a podcast might be obvious for everyone, but it's even more relevant for law enforcement because these men and women spend all day in their cars. So they're not able to read. Hopefully, they're not reading while they're driving, pt they're not looking at their phone while they're driving. But a podcast winds up being a really effective communication channel to get information out. And one of the things that we love doing is bringing our customers on to share their success stories, to share the things they're doing. Because one of the unique things about local government is there's no competition. There's no secrets. If you're the police chief in New York, you want everyone to know what you're doing if it's working, because it only helps the greater good. And so getting those stories a bigger platform to get out... We've got tens of thousands of listeners on that, and that just really, really changes how fast they can learn from their partners.
Trinity Chavez:
It's really a collaborative effort. Now, I do want to switch gears a little bit on this. In Texas, $1.7 million worth of fraudulent gift cards were recovered, thanks to Flock's camera alert. And in Rhode Island, Flock technology also helped arrest two suspects involved in a shooting. And in Colorado, two murder suspects that were apprehended after Flock cameras identified their vehicle. Talk to me more about how prevalent it is the work that Flock Safety is doing, and also the critical role it plays in helping law enforcement identify these crimes and so many others.
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. What I've noticed is... And you can look at the public records, it's not a high paying job to be in local government or to be a police officer. And that typically means people are doing this because they want to make an impact in their community. They want to help. But if we don't give them tools, if we don't give them modern technology, we're setting them up for failure and asking unrealistic expectations. And so I think one of my favorite quotes was... There was a chief in Washington, I think it was Yakima, Washington, who said something to the effect of, "Flock is the most important tool since DNA. And that's very nice of him to say. I'd like to think that's true. He seems to think so too.
But what I think is compelling is, there's been zero innovation in public safety. If you think about it in y'all's world, the last company to go public... Which isn't obviously the only indicator of success, but let's consider it a good one, right? That was 30 years ago. The last company that services local government for public safety was 30 years ago. That means that there's zero innovation happening, and that's a problem. That's a really big problem, because I would argue that being safe is a pretty important problem. And so for us, we look at it as a partnership with cities where we go in and we want to meet with the mayor, we want to meet the city manager, meet with the police chief and say, "How important is crime to you?" And for a lot of our cities, they might only be spending three, four, five dollars a citizen, effectively on Flock. And so we think there's quite a bit more work we can do with them.
Trinity Chavez:
And you don't do this for the recognition, but how does it feel to know that you and your team are playing such a pivotal role, not only to law enforcement, but also to the public, bridging this gap?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah. It's one of my favorite interview questions, actually. We're hiring a lot. I think we've got something like three or 400 open positions right now at the company. And I like to talk to candidates and [inaudible 00:31:03] ask the same question of, "If saving kids and getting paid well at the same time doesn't get you fired up, I don't know what's wrong with you." Because we don't get shot at. We don't have to carry a gun. We don't work the night shifts. We're not going into danger situations. I sit behind a computer all day and I get to build really cool technology that saves lives every single day. And that's pretty freaking awesome. I can't imagine a better job. Maybe one exists. But I get the question from our employees all the time, "Hey, I sold the last two companies I started. Are we going to sell this one? What's the exit plan?" And I'm like, "Why would I want to exit? This is the coolest job in the world." People love us. And most technology you build either helps other people make more money or helps other companies save money. When that's cool, God, this is way more impactful.
And so, one of our cultural norms is that every single Friday when we have an all hands meeting with the company, we start the meeting with a solve story to reground the employee base that what we're doing matters. What we're doing makes an impact. And it might not be your city today, but it's going to be your city tomorrow or the next week. And you hear these stories, and we will often bring on individuals that were impacted positively by Flock, and they're just so grateful, and it's a really, really rewarding position to be in.
Trinity Chavez:
And speaking of Flock Safety's growth, I do want to ask you, what are your future plans? What's next for Flock Safety? One day maybe transforming the New York City?
Garrett Langley:
Yeah, that sounds great. We have a good relationship with NYPD, and so we'll keep chugging along on that one. But yeah, if you look at the business today, in the last seven years, we've gone from me and Matt and Paige sitting at my dining room table to north of 1200 employees spread across all US continental states with customers [inaudible 00:33:00]. And we think we're really just getting started. We're building new products every single day. We're expanding into new markets. And so for us, the sky is the limit for how big we think we can make this company and how much impact we can deliver to the US government.
Trinity Chavez:
Well, Garrett, thank you so much for speaking with me and for your time and for joining us inside the ICE House.
Garrett Langley:
Thank you for having me. Have a great morning.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen, and follow us on X at ICE House Podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week inside the ICE House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
