If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations. Yeah. If I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison. It's actually double bad. Yeah. Well, we're throwing people away, right? Like, you know, that's the worst possible thing. So, the best thing is to say, hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're going to get caught. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make like 10x what I can make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, you know, like and then then in my neighborhood, it's not even like there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy. Um, and it's just too much. It's a societal failure uh for everybody who's in that situation.

Outside of Vegas, the national average is around 47% clearance rate. So, you have a coin flip for murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder. Flip a coin. Flip a coin. Irony part is when we do get criticisms from people that are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, do your eyes. If the federal government wanted to find you, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dump. Yeah. And I will know your exact location in real time. By the way, which is what they do. Yes. Because it's way more effective. So, I think for the privacy thing, it's it's quite it's quite false. The trust is real though. And so, if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department. Yeah,

Garrett, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. So, this group here is both is heavily invested in eliminating crime. Garrett, obviously you with Flock Safety and Ben, with your work in Las Vegas as well. Let's say that America declared a national goal to eliminate crime and we was taking a multiaceted approach and asked you Garrett to sit on a committee to help identify what are the different levers or what's what's the strategy the comprehensive strategy to eliminate crime. What would be some of your your main advice? Uh let's break it down in terms of uh people products and policy. Yeah. to people. Um, I saw a funny quote online that the way to solve uh our infertility issues is just to remove income tax once you have three kids. I was like, that's actually pretty novel. We have a massive student debt problem, right? Yeah. Why not create a Teach for America for law enforcement where you say, "Look, if you've got student debt and you go serve in your community for two years, four years as a patrol officer, crime analysts, like there's a ton of roles you can have in a police department, great. We'll retire student debt." So instead of just giving away for free, actually go work for your government. Wow. For two years and you don't have to go overseas and fight in a war. You can literally just stay at home and like that would dramatically fix the one of the biggest issues in policing which is a staffing crisis. Yeah. And and a skill set issue. So that's like the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. Um I'd go have like a national law enforcement act for staffing. Right. And also raise the status of police out there.

So how much how much of the people issue is the fact that we kind of went from a very kind of pro like police are heroes. every new show as a cop show to like complete vilification of the police, defund the police, abolish the police, abolish abolish cop shows. Yeah. Like they're all gone. They're all off the air. Um how much of it is cultural versus uh just a shortage of people that it's it's entirely cultural. Yeah. So, I mean, because you think about it, there's nothing has changed in the last 30 years that would indicate some percentage of people who were born and wanted to serve has changed. Only thing that's changed is the stigma attached to the job. And you can see that because if you look at the early retirement numbers, I mean, early retirement skyrocketed during both the social unrest and then co Yeah. And like they've never bounced back. Worst possible time. Yes. Worst possible time. So do you think Ben to your point like the only way I see to do a kind of cultural reset is to just make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt. Yeah. to go help their communities. Yeah, I think it's a that's an actually very important and underrated idea because one of the things that we've seen is that uh because of the shortage um many police departments have lowered their standards. So the the kind of criticism of the police was okay you have and and it really like if you looked into it there were some like psychos who joined the police force they couldn't get them out for whatever reason and then they do some heinous thing and it taints the whole police. Well, now because there aren't enough avail people are lowering standards to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals. Yes. And then there was a famous incident where the criminals just went and murdered a guy. Um, you know, and it was funny because or not funny, haha. But like I was showing it to the Vegas police, the the video of that incident and the first thing they said was, "Oh, that's not police brutality. They target they wanted they went to kill that guy like that. That that was a homicide." Yeah. And I was like, "Oh boy." But then you look into the backgrounds and the guys who committed the homicide were in fact criminals who got hired to be police. Which is also interestingly um what happened in the LAPD with the Rampart scandal right after the uh Rodney King incident. Um they they had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, etc., etc. They had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs. Um and those gang members ended up, you know, among other things, uh killing the notorious B.I. and this kind of thing. But, you know, people don't realize what the reaction to criticism. I think we just have to be, you know, looking forward careful about like, okay, what is the actual problem as opposed to police are bad. I think that gets that puts us in a very different kind of world that we don't want to be in.

Agree. And I think you're you're right when you look across the board. I think in the last year I've only been to one major city who seems to be like making a dent on staffing. Mhm. But it's like they've gone to such extremes. Like they b they'll buy you a house. Oh wow. You get a take-home car. Amazing. Like I mean it's always person like there's literally millions of people that could do this job. Just I don't think it's a cultural issue. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean like a big thing in Vegas that we're doing is trying to kind of uh you know with flax safety and with some of the other technology we bought and the cyber trucks and so forth is to try and improve the image for recruiting because that's such a big thing and and we have the highest population in Las Vegas of uh veterans in like the whole country. Um, but we got so we have plenty of people who could be great police, but uh, you know, we have to kind of continue to improve the image. It's really funny you mentioned the Cybertruck because I know there was some like anything good in life criticism online. And it's funny because my uh, parents hometown where they still live uh, Mrs. Maybe like six years ago bought four Teslas for their fleet. Yeah. Yeah. And the chief was like, "Every single 18-year-old wants to drive his car. This is why I'm doing this." And like he was heavily applauded in that community cuz he's a very logical like marketing boy like get I mean these are a bunch of 18 and 20-y old men. Like they like shiny toys like a cool ass cool looking truck. Yeah. If your choice is like driving, you know, Toyota Camry or fire truck like what makes it feel cool?

Well, the Cybert trucks they have been great for recruiting despite the the criticism that I got. Um, so they the uh well actually Techrunch um portrayed me as uh the penguin that I'm like a crime boss in Las Vegas and I'm making these donations in order to like to pay off Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. to pay off the police to do my you know like evil evil bidding your evil because Yeah. Because like Andrea Horitz is not a good enough business. I need to be in whatever the the crime ring in Vegas is. Uh, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but they do like and people love them. And interestingly since we got the trucks um the number of requests for just like them appearing at community events is off the charts because they look so cool. And in fact when we did Paid in Full, uh Dr. Dre, you know, famous for, you know, the song [ __ ] the Police saw the Cybertruck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of the cyber truck at his request. Yeah. Yeah. That's gross. So, so that's people.

Yeah. Then products. I think Vegas is a good We can pick on Vegas because they've got a pretty good technology stack. Um, you got to go crime by crime. So, gun if you have a gun violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know, you know, majority of gun violence does not build a report. Like, if I shoot you, yeah, I'm not going to call 911 myself. Unfortunately, I have a good shot. So, you're not call 911 either. So, that's a problem. Um, you have drones like Vegas has a great deployment of drones. San Francisco does as well as you saw in the news. So, you need drones. uh you need cameras. So you've got all these sensors, right? And then what's missing historically is now this AI layer and this orchestration layer on top to say, "Wow, I've gone from no data to an abundance of data. How do I make sense of it?" Um so we've got that. And then this third piece that we care a lot about is how do you also do this in a way that provides accountability and transparency? Because at the end of the day, the police department works for us taxpaying citizens and you want to know how's your money being used? it's being done in a way that's kind of society just and and forward. So that's the product side and then policy is you have to hold people accountable. Yeah. I mean we've seen the social experiment and and parts of right you need you need to actually prosecute the crime and you know it's it's seemingly straightforward but a lot of the times we decriminalize things that should be criminal and that causes a problem. So that's what I would do if I was in charge.

Yeah. And I think like one of the things that people don't think through when they think about crime um is like like the you don't have that many choices. You have kind of a choice of lots of crime or if you're going to prevent crime, there's kind of the Singaporean model which is very harsh capital punishment. You know, we'll hang you in the town square, we'll hit you with a cane, we'll lock you in like an El Salvadorian prison. um or uh intelligence. Uh and in what intelligence does is it um basically makes everybody safer. It makes the suspect safer. It makes the police safer because now everybody understands the crime situation. And then you're also much likely much more likely to get caught. And there's an old Chinese saying that says certain punishment means no punishment. And that is the the only way that you can actually achieve it in the US uh reduction in crime is better intelligence. And you know people say well root cause um you know like if we get rid of all poverty and this and that and the third well yeah sure if you create a utopian society which nobody's ever done and like uh the people have tried it's been much more brutal and many more people killed than in societies that don't go for utopia. Yeah, but like in reality, you just kind of have to deal with the situation as it is, I think. And by the way, nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals, like more than anybody. Uh they know exactly what the policies are, what the technology is, when police change shifts, all that kind of thing. And so if you do have great law enforcement, um then you're very likely to discourage crime.

What was that quote that you mentioned just before the Oh, yeah. Well, the the game had a uh a song where he said, you know, real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts, which is Yeah. Like, of course. But I mean, to your point on on on that, like I'll never forget maybe in 2022, there was a rap song released uh in Southern California with reference to flock and that had got flocks to stay away. And I was like, we've made it. We made it. Like this is really important culturally. Yeah. It's a key KPI to keep track of. Yeah, I think that's right. And then you know like it's uh if you grow up it's very important like if you think about like if you're growing up outside of the system um and the most viable way to make a living is crime then you know that is a career path. And so by reducing law enforcement you create a crime career path and it kind of lets us avoid creating real career paths for people in that situation. And so it's a cascading effect of just badness.

Well, I think to your point too, the when if I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it's actually double bad because now prison's already very expensive, right? There's an economic cost of now that person's no longer productive in society. Like, yeah, well, we're throwing people away, right? like you know with the minimum sentencing and everything you know it's very hard to go to prison and come out then you have this black mark on your on your life where you can't get an apartment you you know you can't get a gun you can't vote uh you can't get a job and you know that's the worst possible thing. So the best thing is to say hey look if you commit crimes you're going to get caught. Um and then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else.

Totally agree. Are we doing sort of the wrong thing by making it not clear that you're going to get caught or or saying that sort of making it not the deterrence not 100% um you know uh as clear as it should be while sort of arbitrarily doing long prison sentences instead? Yeah. I mean I think that like if you have great technology, if you've got a kind of a comprehensive flock deployment, then what happens is like you don't have to advertise it. Yeah. because like the streets are watching. They know what to to quote Jay-Z like that's that's going to happen. Um, but if yeah, if you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations. Uh, because you like like it's a pretty I mean, look, if I can um become a criminal and make like 10x what I can work make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like you know, like and then then in my neighborhood, it's not even like there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy. Um, and it's just too much. It's a societal failure uh for everybody who's in that situation.

Well, on that note, what do you say to people who say, "Hey, we weren't advocating for defund the police. We were saying redirect that money to, you know, group therapy or sort of, you know, mental health, you know, or other services that are more preventive. Let's what would you say to that argument?" It's just like a misunderstanding of incentives, I think, right? Like incentives drive culture. If you get rid of law enforcement, then look, we don't have a strong enough consistent we're a heterogeneous society, ethical kind of structure to make people go, okay, like you know, robbing somebody is bad or or for sure like selling drugs is bad or bookmaking or or whatever the crime is. like a lot of people don't even know that's a crime um you know until they're much older and so forth. So like it's not viable to, you know, stop crime with a big incentive. Like yeah, you can go talk to somebody as a social worker and say, "Hey, you shouldn't do that." But like if they go, "Well, look, I have a very strong cash incentive to do it." Yeah. Then like how is that going to work? So you have to have I'm not against social work but you can't do it at the expense of crime enfor you you know law enforcement and we saw that I mean like we ran the experiment it didn't work um you know and and I think people would say well we didn't hire enough social workers but you know like social workers can't deal with a like a robbery or murder or rape or like a you know violent crime in progress and these are not mut mutually exclusive you can do both. No, no, I was gonna say to V's point, there is a in some parts of the country, cities, whole cities, there isn't a stigma in doing something like stealing a car. Yeah. And you don't just change that overnight with more social work. And I think like I've seen programs at least where, you know, they their phrase is more, you know, at promise versus at risk programs where it's like if you don't want to get in this cycle, create that path, but you still actually have to fix the root problem, which is you should be held accountable if you steal someone's car.

It was interesting you brought up the the sort of Dr. you know, [ __ ] the police. Now, taking a photo with with police because some people say, "Hey, hiphop at times is glorified a certain, you know, crime um lifestyle." Are other people sort of evolving like Dr. Dre has or how how is sort of the community um you know, over time you thought about sort of this? Well, look, I think that um there so [ __ ] the police uh had a real basis in it in that there was like if you look at the LAPD in that era um they you know and this was the drug war era they were like very very very aggressive and it was you know brutalize first like ask questions second you know kind of culture of that police force. So, he was making a real comment on a real thing. Um, you know, an ice cube and so forth. Um, but the answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing, right? Like like that's the right way to police. You need and I I give you an example. So, what the Vegas uh police say said, you know, kind of if you look at it before the drone program, before flock. Okay. So, if you don't have flock, what happens? you get a call, there's a, you know, 1988 Toyota Corolla, uh, that was stolen, um, and, you know, it's blue and it's driving, you know, this way. Okay. So, then a guy gets pulled over over, not the right guy. Um, I'm getting pulled over for the police. They're highly suspicious. They're nervous. Um, and I'm like, whatever. I'm a black man, so I'm already like trained to be wary of this. And so now you can have an incident. Whereas and and if it's a flat camera, you know that's the guy that is the guy. And so now you're not sending in one police officer because you know it's the guy. You're sending in a team. You're going to apprehend them safely. Uh you know at you're going to take your time because you know like you don't have to move on to the next one. it's a totally different situation. And then you can start to build relationships in the community because you're not like falsely arresting people and that kind of thing. And so if you look at, you know, Vegas has the highest murder clearance rate in the country, well over 90%. Why is that? You talk to them, it's because anytime a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. And in most cities, they don't talk to the police. Um, and so by doing community policing, they're able to get that information. and they're able to clear the murders. They're able to make the community safer. And mostly, by the way, people should understand this. The victims of crime are poor people by and large, you know, and so when you go defund the police, we're not going to enforce law. You're basically terrorizing the poor community.

And this is what was called the Ferguson effect, right? Like crime actually went up. Yeah. No, of course. Of course it did. And it and it's uh you know, people just don't think these systematic problems all the way through. They they just go to the very first thing like police are bad. Yeah. Well, like the system hasn't been working so let's fix the system as opposed to vilify any individual. Yeah. Garrett, can you say more about why sort of the I don't know if it's the clear clearance rate or just the sort of rate at which we catch you murders or or solve crimes has has been dropping and and you know Yeah. Well, I think I'll provide one positive reason why clearance rates are down and the rest is very negative. On a positive side, our expectations of a society to arrest someone have gone up, which is which is good, right? I think a the number of people who you hear about getting released 10 years later because now we have DNA or 10 years later because now we have video events. Like that's actually a good thing, right? It should be harder to put someone in jail for life. Yeah, that's one reason, right? Like that's that's a good thing. Like and some of that's from TV, you know, you watch NCIS NCIS and you're just like there's cameras everywhere kind of. Yeah. So, that's the one. The second is, and and Ben mentioned this, witness cooperation is gone. I mean, what's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk? Yeah. So, so no one shows up, which is a huge problem. Um, society, we've given up on pretending like we're going to help you. So, that's the second issue. Third issue is a pretty big mix shift in crime. So, if you think about the 60s, 70s, 80s, majority of crime was domestic. you you would kill a partner, you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend. So, it was it was not randomized crime. Now, the majority of homicides are random. Um it is a drug deal gone gone wrong. It is a gang rivalry over territory. That is the predominant type of crime. That is way harder to solve because if it if it was a traditional type, you go, "Okay, let's check the family. Great. We're done. Case closed." So fourth one um the amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way but faster than both skill set and technology has kept pace. So even though let's pick on Vegas has hundreds probably thousands tens of thousands of cameras. You got to go search them. You got to go put it together like that doesn't just and now like AI is nobody's watching the camera. No one's watching them, right? And like we can look at recent events where you know there have been these you know shootings on college campuses and they're like why don't they find them faster? There's thousands of cameras. I'm like the the technology is not there yet. Now Flock has some tools to help with that but we're not deployed everywhere. And the last one which we hit on was just staffing. We talked about early retirement. Yeah. So even though let's pick on Atlanta. Atlanta is was at a low was at 60% staffed. They're now up to 75 80. That gap is all 21 year olds. Yeah. They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years. But so you your seasoned experienced detectives have all retired. Wow. And so it's this compounding effect where it doesn't look pretty good. And that's why you know outside of Vegas the national average is around 47% clearance rate. So you have a coin flip for murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder. Flip a coin. Flip a coin. Yeah. And you got to imagine if you're if you're, you know, upper cortile, you should get away with it forever. Wow. Yep. Um sorry to bring the moods down.

Yeah. the I I do love your sort of teach for America but for policing idea for people who are listening who are inspire like what would it take for that to get off the ground like well if you remove the like debt grievance part actually not that that much I think the biggest change is if you look at to today um and I don't you could debate whether this is important or not you typically are looking at almost 52 weeks of training before you get out in the field that's too slow you know I think teacher America does probably what, like a four or eight week program? I don't actually know, but it's probably pretty quick. Yeah. I mean, you're college educated. You're going to figure it out. Yeah. Policing has a different expectation. So, I would continue to see uh more either civilian jobs, which some agencies are doing, where they're just creating different entire departments for civilians, and then in that case, there's no academy. You also don't have a gun, which is fine, right? Um, but I think that's actually like it's actually not much to pull it off. I think it just takes a major city, most likely needs to be a major city to say, I'm going to create 200 entry- level jobs. You requires a college degree, it's two-year commitment, and you know, I think it's pretty doable. Talk to a mayor about it.

Yeah. And I do think that as police uh forces get much higher tech, I I think it gets much more interesting too for uh college graduates and people with higher education and so forth because uh it just changes the nature of what policing is. Um, you know, when you have full intelligence, then I I can't overemphasize how much safer everybody is. Yeah. Um, like police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped like 75% when we first put the the cameras and the drones in place. Just because you're you're not in this weird unknown situation where you don't know, you know, if they have a gun, you have a gun, there's not enough police around. All that kind of thing just makes for extremely dangerous situation. and you know we have a and this is how you end up with this like militarized police uh situation which you know is not a very sustainable idea.

Let's go deeper on Vegas as a as a case study. Ben, what has most surprised you in your in your work um with Vegas or or what do you think other cities can learn from the the work that you guys are doing? Well, I think that the most surprising thing is to to me is just like how much the actual community likes it. Like we've got criticism in the press and and whatnot of course you know surveillance big brother like Ben's a penguin all that kind of thing. Uh but the community, you know, everybody who lives there and Vegas is kind of a unique city in that like it's got crime tourism. Yeah. People fly in. Yeah. Let's do some crime and then fly out and all that kind of thing. And then there's like a lot of people go bananas. Yeah. Uh in Vegas. So it's it's way beyond any criminal motivation. that's like mental health and and that kind of thing or mental health combined with like hard drugs combined with, you know, Vegas. Uh so, so there's a lot of that and but for the people who live there, you know, the all the hospitality workers, you know, the people who are working for tips and all that kind of thing. Um the fact that you know when we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right um you know the right culture you know adding the technology to that has kind of made the community go wow like I am I'm proud to be here. I feel safe. I know that if a crime gets committed and we always say in the like you can commit a crime in Vegas you can't get away with it. Um and people really really appreciate that. I've gotten, you know, so many people come up to me from all over the city saying, "Hey, thank you. We really see the difference and appreciate what you're doing and so forth." So, I I didn't think it would be that visible that fast. I think the other thing, too, and you I don't know if you actually know this, but the model of of what Vegas is doing is caught on more nationally where this public private partnership is picking up speed because the pace of government innovation is quite slow. Yeah. in private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, has mutual incentives to be safer. So, think about like who's the largest supporter of the Morrisville Police Department, Lowe's, because Lowe's is based there. Yeah. And they have thousands of employees that live there. And so, to for Lowe's to spend a million dollars, it's very small for them, but can transform that police department. And like more cities are waking up to like there's a better way to run a city.

So, this is so important because if you look at the Vegas PD, it's like, well, they've got like, I don't know, thousands of officers. They've got, you know, huge budget in this and that and the other. But can they make the marginal investment in technology? Absolutely not. Um, it's very, very difficult. It's extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. Um, you know, they don't want to have to lay off people to do it. And it's mostly headcount, right? Yeah. And it's Yeah, it's mostly it's almost all headcount. And so by just like adding like less than a percent to the police budget, you can completely transform the police force. It's it's pretty amazing. Uh and uh you know, it's very rewarding work. I mean, just like little things. So we had a tremendous attrition problem in the 911. 911's a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. It's all this kind of thing. Um, and you know, they everybody was quitting. They five minute call waits for 911. Imagine waiting on hold for five minutes on 911. Um, and you know, I I was like, "Well, what's the problem?" And they're like, "Well, you know, like the work conditions are hard. Like, there's no ice machine." Like, that was literally that. So, I was like, "Fuck that. I'll buy that." So, I bought an ice machine, an espresso machine. We put in a gym. Um, and now the call weights are less than 30 seconds. And so, you know, just like that tiny investment uh can change everything. But I think to your point, like uh in Atlanta, um I'm on the police foundation board. I think we contribute about $30 million a year to the police department. Yeah. And I'll never forget this is a couple months ago, the head of the like SWAT team came in. Yeah. And was like, I would like new equipment. I'm thinking, yeah, how bad can it be? And he walks in and it's like, I mean, you would be embarrassed. And it's like your job is actually to go into fire like line of fire. It's like he was like I would like a million dollars to get all new equipment for our SWAT team. It's like this is like very logical but it is hard when you're a city. You have no flexibility in your budget. You have no ability to react.

It's it's just it's a it's a and cities in general right are under tremendous budget. You know most of them have run programs for years borrowing from the future. They're highly in debt. um you know, they've got big pensions to pay off, so it's really hard to change a city budget. It it seems like relatively small amounts of of money for for for these companies or individuals can can make a massive difference. Is is this repeatable in cities, you know, beyond Vegas and um and like in San Francisco, how how many companies would pay money to make it safer for their employees to to come into the office every day? I hope a lot. Yeah. As soon as as soon as people see it, they want to do it. Like people just don't know that's possible. Um they're like what? I can give money to the police. So I mean so if you look at all of the latest innovations Yeah. in San Francisco 100% private funded. Really? 100%. Now they're choosing to stay, you know, as quiet as they can. But I know Yeah. In San Look, you know, look, we don't want a repeat of of Penguin Biden. So like you don't Well, let's get a coalition. If I was if I was donating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well. Yeah. Well, hey, it is interesting. I mean, for anyone listening, you should go tour the San Francisco Police Department's Real Time Crime Center. It's powered by Flock. And I guarantee you will walk away and you will say, "Where do I sign a check to give?" Yeah. Because you want a drone in your neighborhood. You want more cameras in your neighborhood. Like, this is the way to do it.

How much do we have to pay for the Xi homeless, you know, program when he comes? It's a million dollars. Yeah. Right. Right. They literally raise taxes for this is such a tiny amount of money uh compared to those sorts of. Wow. And and then just to close the loop on it, what we typically see too and and this is the same in Vegas is the expectation is like the first year two years are covered and then the city has to decide do you want to keep it and you roll it into a budget because with enough notice they can afford all these products. It's just hard to get started. Yeah. As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished and flock hasn't been uh you know exempt from that because of all the great work that you've done you know solving a huge is it like 20% of do about a million arrests this year. So what are what are the criticism that you get for and and and I just want to point out arrest of the right person. Yes. Like this is such a big thing in America like the number of people who you know particularly if you live in the wrong neighborhood, if you look the wrong way and so forth and get like arrested for the wrong crime or arrested or totally innocent um has been just like a massive problem because you just one of those is a complete tragedy. So the fact that they've arrested a million of the correct people with like a perfect AI match is really really significant. It is a it is a cultural shock to a police department when you go from subjectivebased policing to objectivebased policing like Ben's describing. Um so look I think we get predominantly criticized for privacy which I I find uh falsely focused. I don't think there's any privacy erosion in Flock. Um I think Flock puts a spotlight on trust issues. And so I'll give you a good example. And and by the way, the the Flock cameras are all in public spaces. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so whatever you're doing in public, somebody probably has a phone and is really invading your privacy if you say the the ironic part is when we do get criticisms from people that are less familiar with technology. I laugh because I'm like do your eyes. If the federal government wanted to find you, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dump. Yeah. And I will know your exact location in real time at all times, by the way, which is what they do. Yes. But that's way more effective. Uh that's so you know there are going to solve that. So I think for the privacy thing it's it's quite it's quite false. The trust is real though. And so if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department.

Yeah. And that's what this highlights because if you don't trust your police department, you don't want them to have guns, you don't want them to have technology, you want them to go away. And so there are some communities where that trust is just is just deeply fissured and we're not going to fix it. Like I don't think that's our job. We're not we're just highlighting it. So typically when we see critics, you know, they they call it privacy, but that's just a cover for I don't trust the police to do their job effectively. And so what we try to do, at least in our tools, is build those levers so that if you're in, you know, Piedmont, California, and you can go to their transparency page and see why are they using Flock, how are they using it, what are they doing, like that's actually I think that's good in building more and more trust. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like some people are scared about a world in which there's so little trust in in the police that basically everyone is getting private security, you know, all these neighborhood um Well, that's the irony of defund the police. It's defund the police for poor people. It's privatized the police for rich people. Yeah. Which, you know, has failed in many countries. Yeah. And it's a not a good idea by the way. No, no, no. Yeah. And and and say more about why that is. The crimes are committed like 98% against poor people. Like that is who are the victims of crime. And so you take away the public funding of police for poor people. Um then you basically end up with a completely degenerate society. You basically turn whole neighbors in into the third world which we by the way have in the United States in a really major way. Uh and you know you just have to put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to raise kids in that environment. It is crazy that that happens in this country. It's just absolutely insane.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at the core premise of America, it's economic mobility. Yeah. I want to do better than my parents. I want my kids to do better than me. You have to have three things to do that. You have to have food, right? And to Ben's point on on privatizing, like you look at one of the biggest issues in poor communities, it's a lack of sourced food. Second is you have to have a shelter. Okay. Third is you have to be safe. If you don't have a bedrock of safety in your life, nothing else can be done. Nothing. Everything will o your entire mind becomes occupied by can I actually walk to school? Yeah. Will I make it to 18 years old 21? And so if you look at that you go by privatizing you remove a core tenant of economic mobility which is what you see politically politically where we start to say I don't believe in the American dream anymore because it's it didn't work for me. And that's I think the fundamental risk is actually like that that we have a generation of of kids who don't think America will work for them. Yeah. And that's I think that's actually a huge problem.

It's also you you mentioned you know uh 98% is against poor people. It's also done by a very small percentage of people who commit all the crimes right. Yep. And so what do we do with that percentage of people? Maybe you know people talk about criminal justice reform. Sometimes they talk about basically not putting you know criminals in prison um and and letting them free. Um I guess what is the steelman of like how do we solve for this? What do we do to address this? Well, look, I I think that one, if you're getting the So, there's a the separate conversation of prison reform and look, the way the prison system works and the incentives in it in the United States has a lot of issues. Uh, you know, principally um that it's not we've gone completely away from rehabilitation and this some of this comes from timebased sentencing and other things. And so our recidivism rate is over 70% in the United States and countries that do like a better job it can be, you know, much below 40%. So we are throwing away like look there's certain people who are psychopaths and we're never going to reform them. Um but there's a big most people in prison I had this conversation with my friend Shaka Sangor. I was in prison for 20 years. Most people in prison are actually bettas. So there are people whose idiot friend had the idea to go rob the local drug dealer or whatever and you know and then they get caught up and then they're in prison. Now the problem is those people who could be productive citizens once they get to prison become trained to be much harder criminals. And so you know that's something that we definitely uh we we one it would be a huge cost savings for the country. too. It would be, you know, much better for society and much better for people who get arrested. But like that I I would just say that's an independent problem of law enforcement. And I think the problem with uh mixing those two is you know, I guess the prison system needs reform and needs to be improved. And you know, but we still have to keep people safe. And so I think you have to address those a bit in independently. You can't you're not going to solve the cris the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like that just you just make the the you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point which is like I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do. You basically then create an incentive for nobody to be productive for, you know, your incentive for murder, incentive for robbery, incentive for rape, all that kind of thing.

Yeah. G, why don't you say more on the on the policy side in terms of are are there certain cities where certain policies are are much more effective that others should learn from or Yeah. Well, I mean, I think on the to to Ben's point, just to close that out, too. I mean, there's evil in the world. Yeah. And Flock nor any of us are going to fix that. And so we will always need some place to deal with them. Um then the question is to the 99% of criminals today who are not evil and they're more capitalistic or opportunistic criminals. So I think to your point like there are some interesting activities particularly around nonviolent either juvenile or young adults where putting them in prison is the worst thing to do. They will go from nonviolent to violent in months. They will get stuck in it for their entire life. And so we're seeing more and more cities say there's a better way to do this. You know, you can go to two places, three places, right? You can go to work, you can go to school, you can go home. It's way better than jail. It's cheaper for the city. It's actually now teaching them to become a productive member of society. And so I think for us, like that's probably the most important kind of policy change we're starting to see is less of a mindset that oh, we should throw people in jail. I think the other thing we're looking at at and we actually we had a great conversation with the DA here in San Francisco at Jenkins of just like there also needs to be some technology and either flocks in a builder or someone should to make that part of the process go faster. Um so I was in Shelby County in Tennessee Memphis and there's you know thousands of people waiting for their trial. What do you think's happening in that place? I mean it's they're becoming criminals and so there's also an an effort of like we actually need to speed up the judicial system and I don't think more humans is the answer. So also seeing more and more cities adopt technology to speed that up.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, so in Vegas they have ju just to show you how like fixable this problem is. They have this. So there's an anti-rescetivism program called Hope for Prisoners, which basically, you know, teaches prisoners coming out of jail how to get back into society and then it helps them get jobs. The Vegas prosecutor will, if you're like an 18-year-old kid and you commit a first time offense and it's not violent, they'll send you they they won't prosecute you. They'll send you to Hope for Prisoners and you go through the rehab. they are close to zero percent recidivism on that program. Um just because you know a lot of the times it's like well how do I get people become criminals sometimes because that's that is a career path. Yeah. Um and so if you create an alternative career path, nobody wants to go to jail. Nobody, you know, like unless you're insane or like a a real psycho, that's not the path people want to be on. It's just a path they end up on. And so, you know, creating other avenues um is really good, but like you have to also disincentivize the criminal career path. Yeah. Like those go together.

I um Delansancy Street restaurant also another examp is that is that a successful example? Yeah, of course. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Where Yeah, it's restaurant and they take people who previously been in prison and give them sort of you know Yeah. No, look, I think that businesses, you know, hiring people particularly out of uh and I think the Lansancy Street hires a lot of people out of juvenile juvenile hall. Um, you know, taking kids Yeah. out of the system early is very very productive. It's look, once you've been in prison 10 years or 20 years, it's really hard to adapt back into society. It's a very it's you're going into a whole different world and it gives them a lot of dignity. You know, they they tell the story to people. It's it's very moving moving place.

Um what's interesting because there's there's sometimes I'd call it a form of gaslighting where they say what are you complaining about? Crime is down. Like look at all all the numbers. Why do you feel unsafe? That's just uh you know a clip you saw on Twitter by some right-wing person. You know why are you feeling unsafe walking the streets of San Francisco? Um what what do you say to what's the right way of thinking about that? It's it's funny you mentioned that there's a um an elected official um a state representative of a certain state and I won't disclose her information and they were a very loud antagonist to flock and sadly she was like a lot of political figures are she was the victim of a targeted attack her house was shot at she's a massive fan of flock now because that person was arrested within minutes because there's a flock on her street called number one they're like yeah we got the guy he's in and he had been posting online about, you know, she's this, she's that. And so there is a bit of like, oh, we want to defund the police, just not in our city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the main monster. Well, and then a lot of the politicians who want to defund the police have massive private security. Yeah. It's a Yeah. If you've got three guys walking around with you all the time, you feel fine. But I also think like for me at least, our expectations of safety should only go up. Yeah. Like just like we expect information at our fingertips, why shouldn't we feel safe everywhere we go? They say like, "Hey, living in a city is dangerous." You know, that's what you signed up for. I mean, that's that's the only I've only gotten into one argument with an an antagonist who I said, you know, I just don't think crime should exist. And he and he was like, I think it's just a part of living in a big city. And I was like, that seems horrible. Like it's like trash, too. Like I like clean streets. Like these are not unreasonable things to ask for.

Yeah. That seems like a very odd uh perspective, but I you know I I under like particularly if you're a young person I could see uh well they worry about overly uh you know and uh you know putting people too too many people in prison for the wrong crimes or they worry about uh militarized police. All those seem like reasonable concerns. Yeah, I guess I guess the the thing for me is you know who's going to decide how many homicides is okay, right? Yeah. And is it okay to say like you or your family or your friends, you know, is that okay with you? And then most people would say no to that. It's just like fine. It's it's like a fine thing for the other guy. Yeah. And what I think to to bend to your point too, the number of times we've been in debates where you've got a privileged person in a community articulating a desire for less policing, yet the person who actually need it needs it is sitting there saying, "Wait, wait, wait. Time out. I actually want more all the all the tech town halls look like that and that's what every town hall looks like and thinking like you shouldn't be making decisions for other people. Yeah, I'm so empathetic. I want you murdered, right? That's the uh it's the safest thing for you. Yeah, it's so crazy. Well, the other thing on crime statistics is u you know like I think it's pretty widely known that like a lot of crime stats have been faked, under reportported, etc. And then if you're not prosecuting crimes, particularly in San Francisco, we had this where they don't get called in. Like if your car got broken into in San Francisco and you called the police, they would be like, "What do you want us to do?" Like we're not going to prosecute it. So people just stop calling. And the real measure of this is the surveys that they've done in almost every city on um have you been a victim of a crime and versus the actual official crime statistics go in the opposite direction. Yeah. And so, you know, over, you know, longitudinal uh data. So, I just think like it's it's a narrative that's supported by like fake numbers, right? And it's also the stuff that's also unreported is just do you feel safe walking, you know, in in your city? Do you feel safe with your kids, you know, walking at night? And um anyways, and and by the way, the reporting on that did change after 2020. So like literally the practices of how crimes are recorded, the how crimes are prosecuted changed and so people go well like the trend line is correct even if the numbers No, it's not. It's not correct.

Yeah. And what I love about what you guys are doing at Flock is that you're giving the technology so that you know cities and states can choose where they want to be on the spectrum basically. Talk more a little bit about that because different different places have different values. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, so there's probably two, there's two big levers that a city can pull. So, one is retention. So, we were before Flock was started, there was other companies in this space and they would historically store location data in perpetuity. And my philosophy starting the company was like that seems more of a risk than an asset because it's just just a lot of data. Um, and so we store for 30 days, but you can flex that up and down. So, in New Jersey, they store it for five years. That's the state law. That's not our choice. That's just the law. California, there's a max of 90 days. We have some agencies in California that store for seven days. Yeah. I mean, you could store for a day. Now, the efficacy is probably linearly correlated by the retention period because like how often do you call a crime the same day it happens? Actually, not every time. You're away, your car's stolen, whatever it could be. So, one is data retention and the second is data sharing. Like, what other police departments do you want to work with? Criminals don't really care where cities start and stop, but cities do by design. And so, you can control where you share. So in some states like California, the data can never leave the state. In Virginia recently adopted a similar bill, uh Illinois, Colorado, more states are saying, "Hey, you know, we we trust our state." I think that's an okay approach. I worry about, you know, Ben, maybe, you know, do criminals ever leave California to Nevada? Like I think they do. So, like it's

by the way, so this is this is one of the things we ran into on the Tupac case, by the way, uh was the LAPD did so much stuff to foul that case in Vegas. Um which is why that murder went unsolved for whatever it was like uh almost 30 years. Um and why they do that? Well, in in that case, the LAPD was corrupt and the well, there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who uh killed Tupac. And, you know, thankfully we kind of uh reopened the cold case and we caught the guy. But it's, you know, like when you think about it in terms of the actual victim Yeah. and how bad it was that like one of the great artists in the half century ended up being portrayed as like this weird criminal victim of a crime because we never solved it. Uh like that's what happens when you don't share information. Like that's the that's a real issue. Yeah. But yeah, so I mean for us, you know, we've got some agencies, you know, some of the most liberal cities in the country, huge fans of Flock. They tweak it to their likings. And I think we just get back to it's not our job as a company to write the law, decide what laws are enforced. Immigration is not enforced in California. I don't care. That's up to Californians. I live in Georgia and we have different expectations of what's criminal, what's not criminal. And you know, there is a difference between local, state, and federal. And we just try to stay out of it and say good luck everyone. We're here to support.

Yeah. Like I mean, I think you have bigger fish to fry, you know, if you're certainly Garrett. Um and it I think sometimes as a society it's really hard like this is one of the challenges with democracy is some of these problems are very complex and um you know like crime and punishment is a systemic like complicated issue and it's hard for people who are really digging into the problem to design the right system and then once you throw it into polic politics, you know, anybody says anything and it gets all convoluted and this and that and the other. So, it is like really tough to deal with that. And I think that's why we, you know, that's why we don't have a much better system than we have. Yeah. But I think the other thing too, Ben, to your point is when it happens though, that complication becomes very simple when you have strong leadership with a backbone normally in a mayor and a DA, city council and a sheriff where they're like, I'm going to arrest you if you commit a crime in my city. Yep. You have to say that out loud. You have to say it and do it. Well, but then the problem is you're going to get arrested and the prosecutor is going to prosecute you and the judge is going to be like enforce the law. Yeah. which is it's a much harder combination than you might think, you know, and there have been look there's a huge push to not crim to decriminalize crime essentially in this country and look it's still going on and it's you know there are still these you know prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not wow convicting people. Yep.

Yeah. And is that for ideological um reasons or do we have a big organized crime problem in in this country or was you you mentioned earlier a big disorganized crime problem? Well, I will I will say though that the the se sheer sophistication of of some criminal groups is actually astonishing. There is definitely low-level crime, but you've got there's it's become somewhat politicized, but there are truly a large number of Eastern European and South American gangs operating largecale businesses. And I call them businesses because while they commit crime, they don't run sloppy. And so I'll give you an example like in logistics space. So Ben and I are two buddies from Eastern Europe. We go and buy a freight forerter, a legitimate company. We start receiving semis full of product. And guess what? They just disappear. And then after about a month, we shut the company down and disappear. And we've taken tens of millions of dollars of goods and then we flip it on Facebook Marketplace and all secondary places and it's clean. No one gets shot and everything looks clean on paper. And like this is obviously not easy to like you have to be sophisticated, but like this is large large scale and it works. And by the way, this so this is what happened. You know, I I had uh when the crime went really crazy in San Francisco, I had a long conversation with Mayor Breed about it. And uh one of the things that so in San Francisco, right, like the whole political movement was people are hungry. You can't arrest them for shoplifting and so forth. So as soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up right shutting down the big mall. like there's no shopping in San Francisco whatsoever anymore. Um, and so all the citizens got punished. But like it wasn't hungry people. It was like organized crime systematically selling the goods. Um, second, it was that kind of thing. And so you get now the people that they deployed were low-level criminals, right? Like you can just pick have a kid go rob the thing for you and you pay them, right? Um, but that's that's not what's going on. It's not that the kid is hungry, it's that the kid is now a career criminal um working for an or an organized gang um probably from South America. So, you know, like the side effects of these off-the cuff, nobody thought it through crazy ideas um are like highly consequential.

Yeah. Garrett, talk about what the world looks like in a world where flock achieves its goal. Like what's the future of policing? You know, flock camera on every block. Like talk talk about Yeah, I think the word Ben used was intelligence. Yeah. And so much of that shift is starting to happen. I would add to the intelligence precision. And like I'll paint for you a picture of a recent success story that to me is the future and it just hasn't happened in every city yet. Yeah. So there's a individual um who leaves a hospital mentally unwell um and shoots someone in a drive by just driving by and start shooting people. This is a real story. Um because all the police departments in the city worked like in the neighboring cities worked together. They put out a hot list entry for, hey, we're looking for this vehicle, armed, dangerous, mentally unwell. That vehicle pulls into the largest commercial center for one of the cities. It's a big mall. The mall is also a flock customer. So, the police department gets a ding on that camera and says, "Hey, we found this guy. Now, let's pause." Traditional response is you deploy SWAT and it's going to take about 15 minutes to get everyone ready. They're going to come in hot and someone's going to die. It's not clear who, either a citizen, an officer, or the suspect's going to die, but let's assume someone's going to die. And then just as not as important, but just as a matter of fact, that mall is also going to see a dramatic decline in attendance and it could lead to probably the end of the mall, which is not good too for that city.

Okay, let's unpause. What happened? Sitting at a comfortable desk like we are here, a real-time crime center operator clicks a button that says launch drone. The drone is at the mall in about 40 seconds. From about a half mile away, we can zoom in, find that the individual has a tattoo. Um, we pulled that because we have a product called Nova that when an LPR hit comes through, we can say, "Oh, wow. This person's been arrested six times. Is there any Oh, there is interesting information. This person has a very distinguishable forearm tattoo." So, we spot the tattoo halfway. This guy has no idea we're following him. We don't see a gun. Two plane close officers walk up. The whole time they know they've got overhead protection. They're being helped just like you would in the army. They take them down. No one has any idea. And they then present this to city council and city council was like, "We need drones everywhere. Yeah, we need drones everywhere. It's safer. It's more precise. There's a level intelligence." And so when I look at this police department, they've got all their data integrated. They have all their sensors integrated, it's just happening. And I think for us, when we think about a kind of agentic layer on top of that where now you can start to reduce some of your staffing problems, but some of these jobs, yeah, no one wants to work the night shift. wants to like some jobs are just like not fun. There's a way to do it with software. So I think that kind of intelligent precise policing is where we want. I think the net effect of that to Ben's earlier point is officers spend more time with their community. Yeah. Less time filling out paperwork, less time writing reports, more time engaged.

Just quick last one story. Don't you have a couple stories of of of you actually saving like a baby? Oh, I mean we we helped return over 450 missing children this year. Oh my god. And that's the the not funny aha where it's like people are like oh we should you know ban Flock and I'm like until your child is stolen. Yeah. I've got three kids and I want to know that if anything goes happens wrong with them. Flock is there. Yeah. And this like you get carjacked and your baby's in the back seat and they take the baby and like that kind of thing. I know it happened. I mean there was a case down in San Diego this year where Defense Point it was at a mall. Yeah. hops in kid in the back like obviously wasn't none that wasn't a part of the plan but became a part of the plan and like thankfully you know they've got a lot of flock cameras in San Diego and and we were able to get the individual but that happens doesn't happen every day in your city but it happens every day in the country. Well Garrett you're you're doing heroic work and one of the most inspiring things about working as Z is is work with you. So thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, hey,