Yet another Hacker News

In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

117 points Frieren 2 hours ago 62 comments

everdrive 2 hours ago | parent

Better not prosecute people who cut down the cameras then, since that's part of the non-real backlash.

adjejmxbdjdn 55 minutes ago | parent

True. Such people clearly don’t exist and it’s obviously a company product failure and the company should be paying fines and penalties.

CGMthrowaway 1 hour ago | parent

As with most antistate issues today, there is a mix of bots/institutional interference (both foreign and domestic), and real people. Both can be true.

CodingJeebus 1 hour ago | parent

The concern with this is that it gives any company/government/etc. latitude to plant paid protestors or bot traffic in order to undermine opposition with greater efficacy in the AI era. Intelligence agencies have understood this tactic for many years.

slowin 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.

bko 49 minutes ago | parent

I am a pro-flock real person. I'll get down-voted and likely flagged for saying this so you may believe I don't exist but I do.

Crime has gone down considerably in the last two years.

> The declines were reflected in several of the FBI’s long-term measures. The 2025 robbery rate of 49.4 per 100,000 was the lowest in 20 years, while the rape rate of 36.1 was the lowest since 2012. The murder rate was the lowest in the past 20 years.

I imagine giving police the ability to apprehend violent criminals through technology is driving this reduction in crime. Not a stretch. You can think that this is not worth the tradeoff, but if you think giving police a tool like Flock will not have an impact of apprehension of criminals you have your head in the sand.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-hist...

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flock-mass-surveillance-and...

arjie 46 minutes ago | parent

Supervisor Matt Dorsey in San Francisco is pro-camera-enforcement and I was glad to be able to meet him and thank him for his efforts both for speed cameras and for ALPR in San Francisco. For my part, I'm not wedded to Flock so if people get upset about the brand name, I'm happy if the government uses Axon instead to provide the same outcome. The use of drone policing, ALPR, and speed cameras has substantially improved safety in San Francisco.

rconti 42 minutes ago | parent

Have you tried zooming out on the stats at all, or analyzing any other variables? You realize there was a crazy spike in crime in the wake of the pandemic, right? Certainly a reversion to the mean might happen alongside the implementation of cameras.

My own city's police (Redwood City, CA) credited Flock cameras with an increase in the clearance rate from 12% to 13%. Pardon me if I don't go out and celebrate.

felixgallo 33 minutes ago | parent

You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.

nemomarx 25 minutes ago | parent

Take flock out of some cities and see if their crime trend continues. I expect you'll find the cameras really don't move the needle much.

slowin 13 minutes ago | parent

The police (and larger state apparatus) turning antagonistic toward the public will certainly increase crime, not decrease it. When cops go to war with literally everyone, the "law" will cease to apply in any meaningful way. A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.

bko 7 minutes ago | parent

> A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.

You can't destroy public property because you disagree with a policy. Let me give you an example.

Suppose I am against abortion. Firebombing an abortion clinic is a "crime" that wouldn't exist had these places that kill unborn children not been constructed in the first place.

Do you get it now?

zer0x4d 46 minutes ago | parent

Because the rest of the people just don't care about it and understand the technology has been a thing for a long time. You know 100 people that want to take them down but you probably also know 1000 people who don't care and aren't even speaking about it. People just became obsessed with one company, then some agitators sprinkled in a healthy dose of antisemitism plus conspiracies, now you got the public lynching of a company. It's unfortunate.

Don't get me wrong, Flock did have and still has some issues, just like any other company. They've been trying to fix the issues. But, as far as I'm concerned, the positives heavily outweigh the negatives, even though there are rare cases of abuse.

wyre 43 minutes ago | parent

I think its more likely that people don't know about Flock, not that they don't care.

slowin 37 minutes ago | parent

Antisemitism? Public lynching? We're talking about a fascist spy company not a human being.

rootusrootus 36 minutes ago | parent

> healthy dose of antisemitism

Uh, what?

felixgallo 34 minutes ago | parent

I ran an in depth study of Flock for my city. It's been deployed here for several years. What I found is that there is no statistically significant correlation between Flock being installed and any reduction in any kind of crime. I suspect my city is not unique in this regard.

Flock rode a post-COVID wave of general crime reduction and claimed responsibility for it, but it appears that the only meaningfully effective use of Flock is for stalking, terrorizing immigrants, assembling opposition dossiers, and parallel construction.

chasd00 5 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't seem to me like Flock would reduce crime but increase the rate at which crime's are solved. Maybe a better stat would be median age of a criminal case involving a vehicle before and after Flock was deployed.

mh- 44 minutes ago | parent

Unless you've been very careful to only surround yourself with people who share your exact views, you probably do know some. They just don't speak up, because: what's the point debating it with you?

slowin 36 minutes ago | parent

The vast majority of people are not pro-techno fascism and mass surveillance. I think you'd have to work very hard to find that kind of person. People on the left and the right are very united in their hatred of spy cams.

xboxnolifes 15 minutes ago | parent

I find it very easy to find people who support systems marketed as empowering police to better catch criminals.

nkrisc 24 minutes ago | parent

Data centers and Flock are the two things uniting left and right protesters.

Freedom2 15 minutes ago | parent

I think this point is most accurate. I know a few pro-Flock people - most are either working for a YC company or are in the process of their application.

rexpop 1 hour ago | parent

I'm attending in-person local political organizing meetings and we're all just locals concerned about, among other things, Flock.

I would like to personally register my own homegrown, organic, hard-working American backlash.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

If they installed flock at county board meetings and gov rep town halls, they would know what real people think about their company

BoxwoodSeed 1 hour ago | parent

Historically it was an easy step going from "these people are not real" to "these people are now dead".

bko 56 minutes ago | parent

What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?

nilamo 55 minutes ago | parent

More like another reason for cops to mow down protesters. True Citizens would never protest something so obviously beneficial to everyone /s

alterom 41 minutes ago | parent

>What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?

No, he'll merely facilitate that, at scale.

IBM technically didn't kill any Jews too in WW2[1].

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...

atmavatar 54 minutes ago | parent

That's why the dehumanizing title "illegals" exists for immigrants.

arjie 48 minutes ago | parent

That's just some kind of language bifurcation by political affiliation in the US. The right-wing term for immigrants who didn't enter the US through ports with documentation is indeed "illegals", though it seems the word "immigrants" is as pejorative among that crowd. The left-wing term for immigrants, both domestic and international and irrespective of arrival method is "transplant" and is fairly pejorative as well. I don't think "transplant" is any more specifically humanizing.

It's just that documentation-status matters to one, and does not matter to the other.

TFNA 38 minutes ago | parent

"Transplant" is certainly not any kind of mainstream left term in the USA, and this is the first time I have ever heard the claim. The left counterpart of the right's "illegal immigrant" is instead "undocumented immigrant" vel sim.

It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.

nemomarx 27 minutes ago | parent

Transplant means anyone who moves into your city, in my experience. It has a kind of NIMBY ish or anti gentrification tone, like "NJ transplants don't understand like real new yorkers" but I don't think it refers to immigration specifically.

Georgelemental 39 minutes ago | parent

"Illegal alien" is a term used throughout federal immigration law, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366

kadoban 34 minutes ago | parent

You are implying that the law cannot be dehumanizing?

ribosometronome 28 minutes ago | parent

"Illegals" != "Illegal alien"

atmavatar 7 minutes ago | parent

"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.

It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.

Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1 hour ago | parent

"Paid protesters"

Every accusation is a confession. Flock pays for support. They have a marketing department and they tell cops what to tell elected officials to think.

boringg 1 hour ago | parent

It would be funnier if it was paid protesters that they had paid so that they could say that.

axus 18 minutes ago | parent

Those are FBI agents, not Flock contractors

dylan604 47 minutes ago | parent

Can you remind me where I can submit my invoices to get paid for my protests? I must have misplaced my memo

derbOac 1 hour ago | parent

Clearly a company denying that the public comprises real people with real autonomy should be entrusted with privacy issues.

alexjplant 1 hour ago | parent

> “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”

So this guy admits he did things that he shouldn't have then contends that he shouldn't have to say sorry for them? Am I reading this right? Isn't the point of an apology to acknowledge the bad outcome and signal to aggrieved parties that the offender will try avoid repeating the negative behavior? If yes and this guy is refusing to do it then what does that say about his world view?

applebottomjean 51 minutes ago | parent

I mean, it works for the president of the US. I think this attitude is a lot more common than people would like to admit.

toomuchtodo 35 minutes ago | parent

The president is unlikely to feel consequences for the attitude, but Langley likely will as Flock enterprise value trends towards zero.

Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835 - September 2026 (45 comments)

Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate... - August 28th, 2026

datsci_est_2015 13 minutes ago | parent

Only due to the cultural shift over the past 10 years, I would say. You also see it coming out of “streamer” culture, as well as evangelical “prosperity gospel” culture, where any means justify the ends of acquiring wealth - and no shame need be felt.

ryandvm 49 minutes ago | parent

Well, at least he won't have to apologize to his wife for throwing her under the bus.

pessimizer 1 hour ago | parent

You can't blame Flock. They're making the very safe bet that cops are very, very stupid and have a lot of xenophobic, conspiratorial theories about crime.

Meanwhile, Flock is in and of itself a conspiracy. The only way to fight (imagined, arbitrary) conspiracies is (of course) to conspire. They won't fight fair, so you can't either.

It's important to mention that mainstream liberals and European radical NATO centrists believe exactly the same thing, just aimed at the people who they're afraid of. Neither side, the social liberal centrists or the anti-social liberal centrists, is going to slow the adoption of Flock at all. Eventually somebody is going to drag out Obama (at significant cost) to defend it in some commencement speech, and he will also blame the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs, and youthful idealism. To "No Kings" liberals, this will be completely different.

It's a false equivalence, they'll say. Somebody taught them that a few years ago. Then they'll say something about "whataboutism," and finish up by explaining how two things can be true at the same time.

adjejmxbdjdn 50 minutes ago | parent

At least come up with conspiracy theories that cannot be disproved by one of the first 3 links on a simple google search.

https://apnews.com/article/flock-cameras-campaigns-midterms-...

If Josh Shapiro is in favor of a ban in his state it’s pretty clear centrists are not the issue.

slowin 28 minutes ago | parent

> If Josh Shapiro is in favor of a ban in his state it’s pretty clear centrists are not the issue.

Yes, but will he actually ban them if elected? It's easy to say, let's see some action.

rconti 44 minutes ago | parent

> Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”

So every other law enforcement tool has also been subjected to russian troll farms and eventually the fake furor dies down?

Or is he admitting that those of us who don't stand to make billions off of a private surveillance network are actually the real humans here?

Zigurd 38 minutes ago | parent

The Flock CEO is another example of investor blindness to founder weirdness. It used to be a positive signal if a founder was a bit odd. But compared to current tech industry leaders, what's odd?

Garrett Langley scares the normies. That's fine if your audience is just cops. But it doesn't go over well with the public at large. By many accounts Steve Jobs could be a raging asshole, but he never showed that face to the public. But if the people advising you are accelerationists with a thing for the antichrist, you're going to be clueless about what normal people think of you.

api 8 minutes ago | parent

Why you shouldn't hang out in echo chambers, at least not exclusively. I'm sure in this guy's echo chambers it's all great.

tehlike 7 minutes ago | parent

The anti-Americanness Langley exhibits boggles my mind.