Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:11:40 · Garrett Langley
[00:11:40] S0: Now that's that's... Yeah. It's very good. But there... There's kind of two things going against that, though. One is a rise in, let's call it, transparency or awareness, which is fifty years ago, you read the news once a day. That's it. Now you have a constant barrage of news information. So you think about this, you know, the recent weekend, most likely, of us would have found out on the weekend news Monday morning. Instead, we found out about it Friday night, Saturday morning, kinda throughout the weekend, which creates this sensationalized sense of, like, what's happening. That's not good necessarily. The second thing is it is getting harder to solve crime. So, like, let... Let's unpack something like homicides. If you look at the data, our homicide clearance rates are down almost two x in the last forty years, you know, which means you've got about a fifty fifty chance of getting away with homicide in America today, which is pretty alarming. Right? That's a good... For statistics, pretty good odds. So why is that the case? So there's really, like, three things that have changed in the last few decades as it relates to homicides. The first is witnesses don't cooperate anymore. Like, it it used to be kind of expected societally that if you had information related to a homicide or violent crime, you'd stand up. Now no way. Right? You're you're... There's a fear of retaliation. There's kind of no societal expectation. There's no personal benefit. And so we used to rely on eyewitness, and now we can't. Okay. That's a problem. Second is our expectations of truth have gone through the roof. And and this is, like, largely a good thing. But, you know, people like you and me watch NCIS on TV, and we assume there's cameras everywhere. And so when you show up By
00:13:22 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:13:22] S2: the way, how do you know I love front television? [00:13:24] S0: Yes. Well, if you watch that and you're like, oh, like, this is how the real... And the world doesn't work this way. And so you you get to a judge, you get to a jury, and absent incredibly hard evidence, an arrest will not occur. And that's actually, I think, good. We're holding ourselves to a higher standard of eliminating wrongful arrests, but that kind of moves the difficulty level up. And then those two things are compounded by a staffing crisis. Right? So you saw over the last decade, societally, we no longer prioritize law enforcement as a kind of idolized workforce. Like we do firefighters and and doctors. And that's created this this gap. Not only are not only are we always short on humans, we're short on experienced humans. And so while patrol and kind of men and women driving around in in patrol vehicles is largely flat, detectives are down dramatic. So you have this kind of trifecta where it used to be very hard to get away with killing someone in America, and today is scantily really easy. And and that's like a problem that we look at and go, technology can fix this. Like, technology can make a dramatic impact on how easy it is to get away with farmicide.
00:14:32 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:14:32] S2: We're gonna come back to sort of what you see could continue to be possible. But I I wanna double click for a minute so that I really understand. So you have many different devices. A lot of it is video. There's algorithms that help parse through the data. Also have a lot of customers that define safety very differently. A school, a Fortune 500 retailer, and a major police department all have unique different needs of, like, what they're trying to solve for. How do you maintain a unified philosophy while servicing so many different customers?
00:15:10 · Garrett Langley
[00:15:10] S0: So we really only hold one or two tenants core to us. The first is we follow the law, which might sound simple, but it's important. We follow every law. And then two, we don't define which laws are societally enforced. And so you mentioned you live in New York. You know, jaywalking is against the law. It's clearly not societally enforced in New York. But you go to Denver, people don't jaywalk there. It's wild. Like, they they wait for the light to turn green, and they but they follow the crosswalk, and it's great. That's that's expected in Denver. It's not in New York. So the way we've architected the system is in a way that every customer has certain levers they can pull to kind of tweak how the system works for them to enforce the laws they want. And we've talked about this, you know, the retail example earlier. I'll give you one other good one. If you were to go to a major home improvement store, and you were to drive a U Haul, that would be flagged as very suspicious in our system. We have a a vacant program. Hey. If a U Haul ever comes on property, send us a notification. And you end wondering, why would that be weird? I'm like, well, if you think about home improvement, DIYers like you and me will get a refrigerator shipped to our house. General contractors have their own trucks. So the U Haul kind of example doesn't make sense. You shouldn't most likely be driving U Haul. And there's nothing suspicious about driving a U Haul on a normal road. So for that city customer, that would be a weird alert. But for home improvement customer, they might want that alert. And so the whole system for, like, what you get alerted to, what you look for, how long the data is stored, who has access to it, like, there's a a full team of kind of compliance and product people who think about how do we allow every customer to get the perfect version of Flock.
00:17:01 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:17:01] S2: Garrett, that's a really good example. Can you give us any other, like, unique, weird things that get flagged? By the way, really glad that that U Haul at a Home Depot gets flagged. That feels... That actually feels safer for for society. Give us an example of some of the other kind of interesting tidbits you picked up. [00:17:20] S0: Yeah. So here's another good one. There's a small town in Illinois, and I won't name the city. But it's a small town. Let's call it seven to 8,000 people, mostly residential. This is maybe two years ago. And they had this consistent case where between three and 04:00, so right during school pickup, a black tinted out SUV would break into homes. So, like, this seems like a pretty reasonable case. Right? Like, the the person would take off their license plate. They go into the communities to block SUV. So the police department created an alert that said, hey. The next time we see a black SUV with tinted windows without a license plate driving between three and 4PM when it enters a neighborhood, we wanna treat it like it's a stolen phone. It's like, one, it is illegal to drive it on a license plate. But two, in this small town, it's just they got hit over and over again. And, like, that person wound up getting arrested the next day once they added that alert. And so you look at that, and, like, there's nothing necessarily suspicious about driving between three and four and a blacked out SUV normally, except in that town.
00:17:20 · Garrett Langley, Alexa von Tobel
[00:17:20] S0: Yeah. So here's another good one. There's a small town in Illinois, and I won't name the city. But it's a small town. Let's call it seven to 8,000 people, mostly residential. This is maybe two years ago. And they had this consistent case where between three and 04:00, so right during school pickup, a black tinted out SUV would break into homes. So, like, this seems like a pretty reasonable case. Right? Like, the the person would take off their license plate. They go into the communities to block SUV. So the police department created an alert that said, hey. The next time we see a black SUV with tinted windows without a license plate driving between three and 4PM when it enters a neighborhood, we wanna treat it like it's a stolen phone. It's like, one, it is illegal to drive it on a license plate. But two, in this small town, it's just they got hit over and over again. And, like, that person wound up getting arrested the next day once they added that alert. And so you look at that, and, like, there's nothing necessarily suspicious about driving between three and four and a blacked out SUV normally, except in that town. [00:18:20] S2: So basically, your point is, like, you can get incredibly specific about what you want the videos and all of the data that's coming through to go flag and then find it nearly instantly the next time that it's flagged.