Flock Say Their Surveillance Tech Would've Solved the Nancy Guthrie Case

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“We would have solved that case,” Garrett Langley says with the confidence of John Carpenter answering the final question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

The cofounder and head honcho at Flock Safety, the increasingly infamous license plate reader company, is sitting across a small conference room table dressed like a country club attendant with a blue polo neatly tucked into brown pants. We’re a bit off-track discussing the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie who has been missing for more than six months. Langley insists that Flock’s intervention would have made all the difference.

“One hundred percent,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Flock makes AI-enabled cameras that capture car license plates and characteristics, like dents and makes. That data is then assembled for law enforcement officers to use in investigations. They started out contracting with homeowners’ associations and moved on to working with local governments. Unfortunately for the Guthrie family, Flock had no contract with Pima County in Arizona, where Nancy disappeared from her home. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Pima County PD and Savannah Guthrie for comment.) It’s impossible to know how things might have gone had there been more poles set up in the area with bulky cameras attached and solar panels to power them. But after a particularly bad press run for Flock—nearly on par with the scandals surrounding Uber in the late 2010s—it’s not a given that local officials there would want to purchase their equipment today.

“Monsters,” jokes Langley, 39, reflecting on how his company has been portrayed recently. Many Americans would quite seriously say the same, despite Flock’s track record aiding criminal investigations. The company claims its cameras assist in solving around 20 percent of cleared cases in jurisdictions where it’s been deployed, but the firm is now weathering a surge of public outrage over privacy concerns. Flock has been pilloried at city council meetings and its equipment has been physically attacked on the street.

On Tuesday, I flew to Atlanta to visit the new Flock HQ, which feels like a CB2 showroom met a high-end health-membership club. It has the open-floor, reserve-a-desk hallmarks of a Silicon Valley office. There were just a few dozen employees around. The remote-first firm moved to this space at the end of June, and they want the two-story office to be customer-forward: About a fifth of the space is taken up by classrooms with Apple Store-type screens meant to teach clients about Flock products. On the second floor, I saw a disconnected Flock camera, painted in gold, bearing a dozen or so signatures. “Every million dollars of revenue, we would do a camera,” Langley says, referring to the memento. “Now we do more like a million a day.”

It’s a few minutes past 10 a.m., and he’s fresh off of a Fox & Friends appearance when he arrives to join his cofounder and Flock’s chief people officer, Paige Todd, 41, in the conference room between their two offices. It’s their first-ever joint interview with a publication.

“I think the mistake we’ve made over the last nine years is not banging the table of every success story,” Langley, the son of two salespeople, tells me. Across our hour-plus conversation, he peppered in stories illustrating the virtue of Flock cameras. These examples end on good notes, but they’re also, well, horribly dark: One case concerned parents fleeing a welfare check in Arkansas with their children only to be caught by Flock cameras in Texas.

Langley has a Flock-savior complex of sorts, and the cofounders’ superpowers become clear just a few minutes in. They each possess an unrelenting, high-school-debate-champion eagerness to go mano a mano on criticism, but it’s mixed with the Southern charm of two Georgia natives.

One story driving Flock’s villain era is a series of news reports on how police officers have used the technology to stalk their past romantic partners. But “I think it’s very rare that someone just wakes up and becomes a stalker because of Flock,” says Todd. “I think they probably were before, but now our tool is actually making it very clear that that’s happening.”

In most cases, Flock launches aren’t put to a direct vote in local communities. But “the way the system is designed, the last 250 years, is that the person who’s democratically elected makes decisions on your behalf,” Langley told me. “So I would argue people do have a choice, and if you don’t like the decisions that a certain mayor or city council makes, you vote differently four years later.”

Langley and Todd cofounded Flock around a decade ago with a third partner, Matt Feury, who no longer works at the firm. Langley previously cofounded a live events software company where Todd worked, and he sold it to Cox Enterprises for $200 million. After that, the two tinkered with a few start-up concepts, including one meant to help people surprise their friends with gifts—like wine at a restaurant.

“We worked on a smaller idea for a little while that was around making it easier to be nice," Todd says, "which is kind of ironic now because people think we’re terrible people.”

I first discovered Flock in December when its cameras helped solve the Brown University shooter case, a bona fide success story. Since then, Flock has become a political piñata on both sides of the aisle, not unlike AI data centers. In fact, Langley believes the company’s reputation is now linked to that industry. “If you look at the negative sentiment on Flock, it’s linearly correlated to negative sentiment on AI and data centers,” he says. “Literally, it’s like step and step.”

There may be a strain of Ludditism at work, but Flock has drawn ire all over, from billionaire playgrounds like East Hampton to major cities like Los Angeles—where Mayor Karen Bass pushed the city’s police department to cut ties with the company. (Last month the Los Angeles Police Department suspended the use of Flock after their agreement expired. A Flock spokesperson said they are in discussions with the LAPD about a renewal.) Many critics are concerned about warrantless searches, and beyond the reports of law enforcement stalking, there’s risk that third-party assailants could hack into live camera feeds and stored data.

Others just contend that Flock’s tech is a threat to a free society. The cameras’ live feeds can be shared between law enforcement agencies in certain cases, but when I ask the duo whether their network constitutes America’s version of the Chinese mass surveillance state, Langley touts the United States Constitution. “We have this thing. We have the Constitution,” he says, “and it protects the decisions and guides the decisions that Paige and I make on behalf of the company.” When I ask whether their tech is a problem for the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches, Langley has an answer for that too: “The courts have all agreed this isn’t a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” He is gently incredulous at the insinuation that Flock’s 120,000-camera network could possibly violate privacy laws. “If that ever changed,” he explains, “we would simply require a warrant in our system.”

But many neighborhoods are cutting ties with Flock, and the backlash has taken a violent turn after several Flock cameras were destroyed across the US. In July, a Tennessee man was accused of shooting four cameras—at least one of which was Flock’s—with a shotgun. (He was charged with four counts of felony vandalism and has not entered a formal legal plea.) In Colorado, another man was arrested after he told police that he shot at multiple Flock security cameras. At the time of publication, there is no more public information on his case.

This turn in the barrel has unsurprisingly influenced morale at the nearly 1,700-person company. “I would be lying if I said this isn’t having an impact on our employees,” Todd admits. She’s less worried about employee attrition—she says workers are “largely with us”—though the impact on the bottom line is less clear. (The cofounders insist they’re seeing seven times more signups than cancellations.) Todd says she’s more concerned about what employees’ family and friends believe. So during their Friday all-hands meetings, she and Langley have suggested ways to address uncomfortable questions.

When I walked into Flock headquarters, I half-expected a scene out of The Truman Show, but the only eyes watching the watchers, it appeared, were those of a peacock. Just a few yards outside Flock’s arched glass doors is a decorative bird used to point visitors to their nondescript entrance. Once in the reception area, I sat about ten yards away from what I assumed were two suit-clad clients. It was only when one of them popped up to open the swipe-access door for me and I clocked their earpieces that I realized they were security.

Langley and Todd have raised over $1 billion at Flock, and they’ve had to pour some of those dollars into workplace safety over the last year. Todd says people have shown up at the office to stick phones in employees’ faces, and both cofounders receive threats. Other companies are also dealing with hazards to employees’ physical well-being, and some of them, including FedEx, turn to Flock. “If you look at violence in corporate environments, it’s typically former employees,” Langley tells me. “For some of our customers who employ hundreds of thousands of people and maybe have higher turnover, it’s a real, real issue.”

Despite all the attention on Flock’s license plate readers, it makes up less than half of their revenue these days. Langley says the fastest-growing part of Flock is its drone business, which sells American-made aerial devices to law enforcement agencies for $150,000 per year. When I arrived at reception, I soon realized that what I thought was a light fixture overhead was actually a drone. “It flies off 60 miles an hour at 400 feet, and then, boom, you can see what’s happening,” Langley says. “It’s going to get there much faster than an officer.”

He adds that drones could also fill the gaps in a shrinking police workforce. A human should always be “in the loop,” Langley says, but “there’s a staffing crisis in law enforcement where there just aren’t enough people that want to be cops. We’ll launch some products later this year that look at how do we not only create more efficient police departments, but more objective and more accountable.”

They’ve begun by introducing new requirements with their license plate readers, like an audit assistance tool, which will flag abnormal behavior and force an administrator to determine its legality. “You will see over the next six months a dramatic increase in officers being arrested or fired for abusing Flock, because we are forcing our customers to do it now,” said Langley. “We know because we solved a million crimes last year what it looks like in Flock to solve a crime, and we know based off of reported abuse what abuse looks like.”

In theory, it will mean safer, more efficient surveillance. But how much more surveillance does Langley want?

“I think there is a societal right to a level of safety,” he says, though there is no such right enumerated in the US Constitution. (There is no explicit right to privacy, either, though it’s been established via Supreme Court precedent.) “I think for me today, if there’s a coin flip chance of getting away with homicide, we haven’t found the upper limits yet.”

Soon, it was time for me to leave Flock HQ, and I took an Uber to the Atlanta airport. I needed to get past security quickly in order to grab my much-desired Chick-fil-A lunch before boarding. When I got to the checkpoint, I didn’t interact with a TSA agent to show my ID. Instead, a camera from Clear, the facial recognition company, scanned my face and the gate opened. I waltzed in. It was a trade-off I was willing to make—I just hadn’t considered it before.

Flock Say Their Surveillance Tech Would've Solved the Nancy Guthrie Case

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