Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:09:20 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:09:20] S2: I love that. Just to give you a sense of how obviously profoundly widespread the platform is, you are in more than 5,000 communities working with almost 5,000 law enforcement agencies, 4,800, and tens and tens of thousands of businesses. What's the product? Like, let's pretend I'm a small business and I buy Flock Safety. What are we getting?
00:09:42 · Garrett Langley
[00:09:42] S0: Well, nowadays, we have about a half dozen products that you could buy. But I'll give you a good example. You know, we work with, on the business side, a lot of retailers. And so retailers, you know, when you pull into their parking lot, you might see one of our overt products like a trailer. It's got flashing lights. It's got a speaker that will talk down to it. It's got cameras that can pan, tilt, and zoom. That's a very overt station. So if you're looking to make a an astronomer presence, that's there. We also have, well, covert stations, like our license plate recognition cameras. And that allows the retailer to keep track of every vehicle coming off and on their properties. That might not seem that interesting, but if you look at one of the most pervasive crimes impacting retail, it's organized retail thefts. And this is a this is billions, tens of billions of dollars of theft on annual basis. This is not your 16 year old stealing the screwdriver. This is very organized games targeting, you know, our country's biggest and smallest retailers. And so being able to build that web of, okay. Well, this vehicle hit six different, you know, locations on the same day. That's fairly abnormal shopping behavior. And so that's not illegal. But if you were to to build an investigation, that's definitively something worth noting. And so it's a combination of both cameras, audio devices, and then and then kind of the software to pull that all together, which allows us to help... You know, I think we're gonna finish the year just around a million arrests on the system.
00:11:11 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:11:11] S2: A million arrests. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Actually, Garrett, just... Actually, Garrett, can you just give us a quick overview from your point of view of, like, what's crime look like in America today? Like, in your point of view, if you just summarize, you know, I live in New York City, so I have a sense of New York City crime. I I, you know, I don't keep tabs on crime elsewhere. It feels like things are getting more dangerous, not less. [00:11:36] S0: So, I mean, the good news is that generally speaking, crime is going down. [00:11:40] S2: Great.
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?