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For years, Flock CEO Garrett Langley was a vocal corporate ally to law enforcement, calling privacy critics "terroristic" and accusing opponents of wanting to "normalize lawlessness." On August 13, 2026, that posture reversed.
Watch the video summary below:
Executive Summary
Across national interviews, Flock's CEO repositioned law enforcement from partners to liabilities: demoting police as customers, dismissing the profession as biased and understaffed, and blaming officers for abuse that his own platform fostered. His new accountability measures translate that rhetoric into operational reality. Langley has turned his paying customers into the villain of his company's story. His messianic mission has not changed. Its target has.
This report aggregates Langley's quotes across 10 interviews and outlets: Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek, Pirate Wires, Puck, SFGATE, TBPN, Vanity Fair, and Washington Post.
"Police Might Pay the Bills"
Langley's sharpest reformulation of who Flock serves came on CNN on August 13, when he explicitly demoted law enforcement from customers to financiers:
Our customers are the community. Police might pay the bills. Police might make the decisions, but our customer is the community, because that's who actually receives the benefit of the product. [Emphasis added]
Flock built its business on law enforcement contracts, the foundation of hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Police and the communities they serve are not natural adversaries. Langley made them one. Describing law enforcement as the party that merely "pays the bills" creates a conflict that Langley himself inserted, publicly demoting, to a national television audience, the agencies whose contracts sustain the company.
The same CNN interview shows how Langley arrived at that framing:
I've spent a lot of time in the last two years talking to individuals, and a lot of them have said, "Well, I don't trust the police," and I go, "Why?" "Oh, well, the police have abused their power so many times." What's changed for me is realizing that we have a responsibility, maybe an obligation even, to the communities we serve to set the standard. [Emphasis added]
The shift is from vendor to overseer. Langley is no longer positioning Flock as a tool police use. He is positioning Flock as the institution that sets the standard police must meet.
Dismissing the Profession
Langley's indictment extended beyond misconduct to law enforcement as a profession. In a Bloomberg Open Interest interview, he dismissed the profession outright while pitching Flock's drone and software products as its replacement:
More than 80% of police departments are understaffed against their budget. Literally, no one wants to be a cop right now. And that's been a problem that's plagued this industry for the last decade. [Emphasis added]
"Literally no one" is an overstatement. Departments hire every year, and people do want to serve in law enforcement. More striking is who is saying it: a CEO whose company depends on police departments being effective, declaring to a national audience that the profession is undesirable. Every interview Langley does, casting law enforcement as bad, makes the recruitment problem he describes harder to solve.
In the same interview, he cast pre-Flock policing as methodologically biased:
I think about the policing world before Flock where officers drove around looking for suspicious people. Now a camera says that car was stolen... This is a new way to police that's objective, and we're removing that subjectivity. [Emphasis added]
Describing officers as people who "drove around looking for suspicious people" is open condescension toward the profession — a dismissal of an entire field of law enforcement practice as unguided and biased. "Removing subjectivity" compounds it: framing Flock's cameras as the corrective for a fundamentally compromised human judgment. Perhaps this is savvy for the Bloomberg investor audience.
Blaming Police for the Abuse
Langley's broadest line of attack was to position Flock not as a platform that enabled police abuse but as the institution now exposing it. He told Pirate Wires exactly what story he was trying to tell:
The story should be Flock has built a tool that catches bad cops. Why aren't more technology providers building tools to catch bad cops?
He then made that case across outlet after outlet, escalating with each appearance.
To Puck, he deflected the company's crisis directly onto law enforcement:
Peoples' concerns were actually not with Flock. It was with who was using it, and people had a concern of whether they trusted local law enforcement. [emphasis added]
Asked on CNN's Situation Room whether Flock bears accountability for the abuse cases, Langley redirected to an anecdote about a woman he met in Ohio:
I eventually realized it was not about the camera; it was about trust. She didn't trust the police system. She didn't trust the police department. [emphasis added]
Then, asked directly what he would say to victims of officer misuse, he offered an apology directed entirely at police, not at Flock:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry that the system has failed you. I'm sorry that you no longer trust the police department whose job is to protect you. [emphasis added]
To CBS News, he denied causation:
I don't think that Flock created police abuse. I think we're the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.
To the Washington Post, he went further, claiming it is wrong to even frame the problem as people abusing Flock — and that no institution but Flock is confronting what he cast as a systemic police failure:
It's not that people abuse Flock. It's that Flock actually found cops that abused their power, and I want to find all of them.
To Newsweek, he placed the indictment historically:
Police abuse was here 20 years ago, and we think that the problem is no one else is shining the light on what law enforcement does.
On TBPN, a Silicon Valley tech show with ~1.2 million followers, he was bluntest:
Lo and behold, law enforcement abuses their power at times. And that's horrible, right? I mean, it's really bad.
Flock co-founder and Chief People Officer Paige Todd speculated in Vanity Fair that officers who used the system to stalk were already stalkers before Flock gave them the tool:
I think it's very rare that someone just wakes up and becomes a stalker because of Flock. I think they probably were before, but now our tool is actually making it very clear that that's happening.
Back on CNN, Langley called on state regulators to prosecute his own customers:
Today, it's more often than not simply a termination, and I think the offense should carry criminal charges.
Langley went even further with SFGATE, setting the concrete metric for his accountability changes: success "will be measured by how many officers abusing the technology are arrested and removed." The escalation peaked in Vanity Fair:
You will see over the next six months a dramatic increase in officers being arrested or fired for abusing Flock, because we are forcing our customers to do it now. [Emphasis added]
Rhetoric Reinforced by Action
Langley's rhetoric is matched by sweeping changes he has imposed on police departments. His August 13 accountability package translated words into vendor-imposed conditions of access that fundamentally changed how police use the system.
The practical effect is that Flock, not the police department, now sets the operating standard for law enforcement access: deciding what constitutes a normal search, when an officer loses access, and how long data is retained. A CEO who publicly calls police abusers, predicts their mass arrest, and lobbies for their criminal prosecution has also built the infrastructure to surveil and restrict them.
Conclusion
The mission Langley has pursued since founding Flock, eliminating crime and building a safer America, remains intact. The enemy has shifted. He spent years calling privacy critics terrorists and accusing opponents of wanting to normalize lawlessness. By August 13, he was calling his police customers abusers, predicting their arrests, lobbying for their criminal prosecution, and declaring the community his real customer instead. His new platform restrictions give those words operational force. Whether Flock's business can survive a CEO who has turned the mission against the profession that built it is the question August 13 has forced into the open.