Flock Safety is best known for its license plate-scanning technology.
But during an interview on the “All-In” podcast released Monday, CEO Garrett Langley said that business now represents just under half of the company’s “forward-looking revenue.”
The company is increasingly betting on drones that can be dispatched to emergencies before police officers arrive. Flock calls the technology Drone as First Responder, or DFR.
“Drones is probably our fastest growing business right now,” Langley said. “When a 9-1-1 call happens, instead of sending an officer first, you can send a drone.”
The growing use of police drones has raised privacy concerns. Civil liberties advocates have warned that drones can capture footage from places officers ordinarily couldn’t easily observe.
“Drones can watch us — sometimes closely enough to see the pores on our skin,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote in a March white paper. “But when a drone is overhead, those of us on the ground have little way of knowing what information it’s collecting.”
Langley offered a story about a woman in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who called police after she thought she saw a man brandishing a gun. The police, Langley said, sent a drone to capture video of the man from the sky, and determined he was just using a large lighter.
“Normally, what would happen, right, is like one cop would have heard that, flip on the blue lights, race down there, their hearts racing, he’s got his gun ready, and someone’s about to die,” he said. “Instead, they launched a drone.”
A Flock spokesperson told Business Insider that the company has secured more than 200 DFR customers, including police departments and private companies. Flock is also ramping production of its US-designed drones, which will be built in Georgia.
The expansion comes as Flock’s core license plate-reader business faces growing scrutiny.
The company — recently valued at $8.4 billion — has deployed cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the US. The cameras can catalog vehicle characteristics, including license plates, models, bumper stickers, and dents.
Business Insider has reported on cases in which Flock’s automated license plate readers misread plates and officers failed to verify the alerts, resulting in innocent people being stopped at gunpoint or detained in jail. In Roseville, California, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts we reviewed.
In early August, The Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officials had been accused or charged with misusing license plate-reading tech in the US. Flock cameras were used in 46 of those cases, the paper reported.
On Thursday, Flock updated its privacy and security protocols, reducing the default retention period for license plate data from one month to one week. The company said existing customers can keep their “current, democratically approved retention periods.”
In a video Flock sent to Business Insider in response to a request for comment about the company’s updated privacy and security protocols, Langley said Flock is “finding bad cops and holding them accountable.” He also said he hoped for broader regulatory changes.
Several communities have canceled, paused, or reconsidered Flock contracts as the backlash has mounted.
Flock maintains that those departures remain small relative to its expansion: A spokesperson said that the company’s growth rate is seven times its current churn rate.
