Flock’s CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

Flock Safety, edited by the author The biggest car news and reviews, no BS Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday. Millions of people have seen the story of Flock cameras tracking me in a $155,000 Range Rover and subsequently four police officers surrounding my wife and me in a parking lot. Human error was involved, but Flock cameras working off the company’s AI tech compounded everything at an exponential rate. Now on the latest episode of The Drivecast, Flock Safety Founder and CEO Garrett Langley sat down with me for a candid discussion about what happened to me and countless others in the last few years, the future vision for Flock amid the public backlash over privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns, the growing calls for regulation, and his previous comment that people who destroy or vandalize Flock equipment are “domestic terrorists.” On a daily basis there’s reporting of cops misusing Flock’s tech to stalk people, which in turn ends up getting them arrested and sent to jail, misread situations taking place, arguments at city council meetings, and people targeting the automatic license plate readers and cutting them down, shooting them, covering them with trash bags and more. You might call this a hot topic, and somehow, I landed right in the middle of it. New here? The Drivecast is The Drive‘s weekly podcast that takes you behind-the-scenes on the largest controversies, stories, and characters shaping the automotive industry along with the way our roads look today. Powered by The Drive‘s inside access, original reporting, exclusives, and insights, The Drivecast aims to make everyone an insider. Listen to The Drivecast via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music. Love it? Like it? Want to help? Leave a five-star review on your platform of choice to help get The Drivecast in front of more people. Have a suggestion, tip, request, or feedback? Drop us a line at feedback@thedrive.com. I promise, we read every single email. Full Transcript Joel: Garrett, thank you for agreeing to come on the podcast. I know you’re extremely busy and there’s a lot of controversy at the moment surrounding Flock. You’re living your life on an airplane, even though you’re a family man. Just to get it out of the way and start, aside from a thank you, typically every executive we’ve had on this podcast, I kind of know them. I’ve worked in the industry for 15 years, so I usually know them, we’ve had a relationship. This is the first time I’ve ever met you. Given the podcast and everything, I have to ask: Are you a car enthusiast? Do you like cars? Do you care about driving? I’m genuinely curious. Garrett: I hate to spoil it for your fans. I am not a car guy. Now, I have a deep appreciation for F1, and that’s more from an athletic standpoint. You look at the sheer engineering behind it—they’re optimizing every single millisecond, every single millimeter of the engine and of the design. But funny enough, up until two or three years ago, I was driving the same Toyota Prius that I’ve been driving since college. Everyone was like, “Why don’t you drive another car?” It works. It works really well. Gets me from A to B. It’s a great car. I wound up upgrading the dash to have Apple CarPlay, because the Toyota didn’t have it, so I retrofit that myself. But no, I get a hard time from some of my friends who love cars, saying that I should be more into cars. Between three kids, a wife, and a business, I’m trying to find time for the simpler things in life. Joel: I can appreciate that. I didn’t really know what you were going to answer, because the reality is that you’re not a car company, you’re not a supplier of car parts or any of that stuff, so I think it was just context. By the way, a Prius, a Corolla, a Camry—there’s nothing really wrong with them. They’re not enthusiast cars, but to your point, if you’re looking for fuel-efficient, safe, reliable, get you from point A to point B, it’s hard to beat, specifically a Prius. The most recent one looks awesome. Obviously, I have 99 million questions. There is zero chance we could ever cover all the topics today in the short period of time that you and I have together. I have to start with my situation, because that’s how we got here. There’s no way we could not discuss this. I don’t want to sit and belabor anything. You’ve read the stories, I’m sure you’re up to speed on what happened. I’ve written the stories, I’m well-versed with what happened. I’ve spent countless hours on the phone with your Chief Communications Officer, Josh—super nice guy. As a recap, if you’re one of the millions of people that did not read the story or hear the podcast, a human error led to a police officer entering incorrectly an incomplete plate number into the National Crime Information Center database. That is managed by the FBI; that’s what all the police from across the nation pull from. That is also what gets fed into automatic license plate readers. Whether it’s Flock, Leonardo, or Axon, Garrett’s team doesn’t have its own database; they’re pulling from the FBI Criminal National Information Center database. They were fed bad, partial, incorrect information. The system was told, “Go look for a license plate of 34DTM.” It was told to do that. It found it, but the problem was that the one it found—the one on my press car that week, a $155,000 Range Rover—also had a ’10’ in there. Flock saw it, the system saw it. It wasn’t asked about a ’10’, it wasn’t programmed to care about a ’10’, it was programmed to find the bone that it was asked to find. It did, and basically it fed it to the police. The local police then didn’t do the back-end loop, and they did not cross-check the actual plate. There was a photo of the plate, I saw it, they showed it to me, it had ’10’ on it. They either didn’t know what to do with it, they disregarded it, they didn’t enter it into the system. They looked at my plate, they didn’t understand the ’10’, and then they looked at my plate and thought I performed Grand Theft Auto, which I did not. Basically, we had human error that led into Flock as a technology exponentially increasing the rate at which that error spread, but it wasn’t the source of the error. Then human error on the back end of that loop, not cross-referencing it. A compounding amount of issues at hand. You can’t change human error; that’s not your job. What I am curious about is, I know Josh mentioned you guys talked to the FBI who manages NCIC, and he tried to talk to the LA police that entered the incorrect information. I’m curious from this situation: What will Flock as a company take away, what have they learned, and what changes will we learn from my edge case? We learn from edge cases. Garrett: One, I appreciate you sharing and hitting on the facts, which is that there were a lot of things that went wrong. It’s easy to potentially try to aggregate that down to “Flock did this,” and a lot of mistakes happened to create this edge case. Sadly, you weren’t the first person who’s had an edge case, and to your point, Joel, the biggest issue remains this national database at the FBI called NCIC, and how archaic its structure is. There’s no feedback loop mechanisms; it’s really just a static comma-separated file. We’ve tried to build around it. We have this concept called “suppression.” A local agency—let’s take Atlanta, where I live—might see that there’s a stolen plate out of California, but it’s already been resolved because it’s a rental car or a dealer car. They can, in Flock, suppress that: “Never alert us on that for the next year.” That’s to get around the fact that they can’t force another agency to remove it from NCIC. Ideally, the way it would work is if enough agencies—let’s call it one, two, or three—flag a tag as no longer valid or a bad entry, it should just get removed. Or at least it should get pushed more aggressively by the FBI. For us, we maintain a productive relationship with the FBI. They obviously play a critical role in broader public safety, and I’m hopeful that they’ll see there’s an opportunity to make something like NCIC, which is an important tool not just for companies like Flock, but for police departments to work together, start to make some enhancements to modernize what’s a central part of our policing system. Joel: I’m curious because you said something I hadn’t heard yet, whether talking to the chief of police or Josh. When my situation occurred, one of the things I learned from my local police that this all went down with is they asked me where I was going to drive the car, if I was going to drive to other suburbs. I said yes. They warned me that other police officers might be trained differently—Minneapolis might be more aggressive, they might show up with guns drawn, which mine didn’t. They warned me that I have the case number and my police officer’s name that went through everything with me, and they’re like, “In Plymouth, you have a safety net now; you’re not going to get flagged. But if you go into another suburb with Flock, it’s going to flag you again because it’s pulling from the NCIC.” If Plymouth had done the suppression thing you just mentioned, that doesn’t translate to the Minneapolis Police Department. Garrett: No, it only impacts Plymouth, because we don’t necessarily want to make a decision on behalf of Minneapolis or Los Angeles. We very much have this structural viewpoint that local decisions should stay local. Plymouth made a decision to suppress that, that’s their right to do that, but that doesn’t impact Minneapolis’s setup. Joel: Do you believe that in this situation, Plymouth police quickly realized—”quickly” is a relative term in the scheme of life—in the scheme of that day, my wife will tell you so, but do you think that, to your point about the NCIC database, Plymouth police told me the only ones in the situation that could have updated that partial plate in the system would be the officer’s unit? In this