The tech firm that helped police find the Brown shooting suspect has sparked privacy concerns. Its CEO responds

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — On Thursday afternoon in New York City, I sat down with Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley. We met to discuss the company’s expansion from making cameras for reading license plates to building drones for law enforcement, and his response to recent privacy concerns surrounding Flock’s technology.

Just hours later, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez credited Flock’s cameras and technology for helping to locate the Brown University shooting suspect.

To Langley, the situation underscored the value and importance of Flock’s technology, despite mounting privacy concerns that have prompted some jurisdictions to cancel contracts with the company.

“America cannot tolerate tragedies like what we saw at Brown and MIT this past week,” Langley said in an X post following the news. “We intend to continue using technology to make sure our law enforcement are empowered to do their jobs.”

Langley told me on Thursday that he was motivated to start Flock to keep Americans safer. His goal is to deter crime by convincing would-be criminals they’ll be caught.

“I think we run a risk today as a country that a generation of people will not believe America works for them because they don’t feel safe, because in some communities … you don’t feel safe,” Langley said. “It’s too easy to get away with crime in America.”

Finding the Brown shooting suspect

Flock is a safety technology company that works with local law enforcement agencies and private companies. The Atlanta-based company, founded in 2017, announced in March that it was valued at $7.5 billion after its latest $275 million funding round from major Silicon Valley investors, who include Andreessen Horowitz and the Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund.

Its flagship product is an outdoor camera, referred to as “LPR” cameras, that can read license plates and identify other details about vehicles as they drive by. Flock’s AI system allows police to search its network of footage for a specific car. Around 6,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States use its LPRs.

That’s how Providence Police tracked down 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, who police say was responsible for both the Brown shooting and the killing of an MIT professor days later.

Perez described plugging a description of Valente’s vehicle into Flock’s system. One of Flock’s cameras had recently spotted the car, helping police pinpoint Valente’s location.

Flock turned on additional AI capabilities that were not part of Providence Police’s contract with the company to assist in the hunt, a company spokesperson told CNN, including a feature that can identify the same vehicle based on its description even if its license plates have been changed.

Responding to privacy concerns

The company has faced criticism from some privacy advocates and community groups who worry that its networks of cameras are collecting too much personal information from private citizens and could be misused. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have urged communities not to work with Flock.

“State legislatures and local governments around the nation need to enact strong, meaningful protections of our privacy and way of life against this kind of AI surveillance machinery,” ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley wrote in an August blog post.

Flock also drew scrutiny in October when it announced a partnership with Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera system that lets public safety agencies request video footage from Ring customers. Ring has previously faced criticism for how it works with law enforcement, although its video sharing with police has been walked back in recent years.

Even as Flock’s business grows, a number of cities have stopped working with the company. Police in Redmond, Washington, suspended operation of their city’s Flock cameras earlier this year after a report that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had used data from the cameras for deportation efforts. And the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where the MIT professor was killed, ended its contract with Flock earlier this month, following community privacy concerns.

Flock says it can’t control local law enforcement sharing data from their Flock cameras with federal agencies. When asked about the broader surveillance concerns, Langley told me it was up to police to reassure communities that the cameras would be used responsibly.

“If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he said. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.”

Langley added that Flock has built some guardrails into its technology, including audit trails that show when data was accessed. He pointed to a case in Georgia where that audit found a police chief using data from LPR cameras to stalk and harass people. The chief resigned and was arrested and charged in November.

“We have to give law enforcement tools to do their job, and we should also hold them accountable to not break the law,” Langley said.

More recently, the company rolled out a “drone as first responder” service — where law enforcement officers can dispatch a drone equipped with a camera, whose footage is similarly searchable via AI, to evaluate the scene of an emergency call before human officers arrive. Flock’s drone systems completed 10,000 flights in the third quarter of 2025 alone, according to the company.

Drones could help law enforcement and public safety agencies already struggling with understaffing respond more quickly and effectively to calls for service, Langley said.

I asked what he’d tell communities already worried about surveillance from LPRs who might be wary of camera-equipped drones also flying overhead. He said cities can set their own limitations on drone usage, such as only using drones to respond to 911 calls or positioning the drones’ cameras on the horizon while flying until they reach the scene. He added that the drones fly at an elevation of 400 feet.

“My whole philosophy as the CEO of Flock is: No one elected me president, no one elected me to be police chief of America,” Langley said. “It’s my job to build the tools and give the guardrails for how to implement them in different cities.”

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