The Crime Crisis In America and How Technology Fixes It

What if America tried to eliminate crime instead of just reacting to it? Not with slogans, but with staffing, technology, and strategy scaled to the problem. In this episode, Erik Torenberg speaks with Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, about what is happening in the cities that are trying. Flock now works with over 5,000 communities to detect crime, recover missing children, and close cases faster than ever. Ben has been closely involved in Las Vegas, where Flock technology, drones, and community policing have raised clearance rates while reducing use of force. They outline what a real national crime-reduction strategy could look like: solving the police staffing crisis, using intelligence to make policing safer, understanding why clearance rates have collapsed, and how public–private partnerships are filling gaps cities cannot. They also tackle the hard questions around privacy, criminal justice failures, and the hidden role of organized crime in everyday offenses.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, but 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 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 and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Outside of Vegas, the international average is around 47% clearance rate. So you have a coin flip.

• 0:50Ben Horowitz?

  For murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Coin, coin. I don't think smart is when we do get criticisms, 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 cellphone dump.

• 1:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  And I will know your exact location and time at all times.

• 1:08Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, which is what they do.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yes, because it's way more effective. So I think for the privacy thing, 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.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Imagine if a major American city actually set a goal to eliminate crime, not just manage it. What would that take in practice and what would it feel like for the people who live there every day? In today's episode, we get as close to that question as you can in the real world. I'm joined by Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, and Ben Horowitz, co-founder of A16Z. Garrett and his team are behind a lot of the new intelligent policing infrastructure you're starting to see in cities, from license plate readers and gunshot detection to drones and real-time crime centers. Ben has been working with Las Vegas on a very public experiment in using that technology to drive crime down while actually improving trust in the police. We talk about what a serious national strategy to reduce crime would look like, from staffing and culture to products and policy.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  We get into the Teach for America idea for policing, why clearance rates are collapsing in most cities but rising in Vegas, how to think about defund the police versus public safety, and whether intelligence can really beat both mass incarceration and doing nothing. We also talk honestly about the criticisms: privacy, surveillance, who gets targeted and who actually benefits when crime is allowed to flourish.

• 2:30Erik Torenberg?

  Garrett, welcome to the podcast.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:33Erik Torenberg?

  So this group here is heavily invested in eliminating crime. Garrett, obviously 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 was taking a multifaceted approach and asked you, Garrett, to sit on a committee to help identify what are the different levers or what's the strategy, the comprehensive strategy to eliminate crime? What would be some of your main advice?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Let's break it down in terms of people, products and policy.

• 2:59Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  So people, I saw a funny quote online that the way to solve our infertility issues is just to remove income tax once you have three kids. I was like, that's actually pretty novel. We have this massive student debt problem, right?

• 3:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Why not create a Teach for America for law enforcement?

• 3:15Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  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 analyst, 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.

• 3:28Erik Torenberg?

  Wow.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  For two, four years and you don't have to go overseas and fight in a war. You can literally just stay at home and that would dramatically fix one of the biggest issues in policing, which is a staffing crisis.

• 3:37Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And a skill set issue. So that's like the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. I'd go have like a national law enforcement act for staffing.

• 3:44Erik Torenberg?

  Right. And also raise the status of police.

• 3:46Ben Horowitz?

  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 is a cop show to like complete vilification of the police, defund the police.

• 4:01Erik Torenberg?

  Abolish it, please.

• 4:02Ben Horowitz?

  Abolish, abolish cop shows.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04Ben Horowitz?

  Like they're all gone. They're all off the air. How much of it is cultural versus just a shortage of people?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  It's entirely cultural.

• 4:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  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 COVID.

• 4:35Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  And like, they've never bounced back.

• 4:37Ben Horowitz?

  Worst possible time.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the worst possible time. So do you think, Ben, to your point, like, the only way I see to do a kind of culture reset is to just make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt?

• 4:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  To go help their communities?

• 4:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I think that's an actually very important and underrated idea, because one of the things that we've seen is that because of the shortage, many police departments have lowered their standards. So the kind of criticism of the police was, okay, you have, 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 of it, people are lowering standards to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:25Ben Horowitz?

  And then there was a famous incident where the criminals just went and murdered a guy. And it was funny, because, or not funny, haha, but like, I was showing it to the Vegas police, the video of that incident, and the first thing they said was, oh, that's not police brutality. They went to kill that guy. Like, 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, what happened in the LAPD with the Rampart scandal, right after the Rodney King incident. They had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, et cetera, et cetera. They had trouble recruiting.

• 6:05Ben Horowitz?

  They started recruiting people out of gangs, and those gang members ended up, among other things, killing the notorious B.I.G. and this kind of thing. But people don't realize what the reaction to criticism. I think we just have to be looking forward, careful about, like, okay, what is the actual problem? As opposed to, police are bad. I think that puts us in a very different kind of world that we don't want to be in.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Agree. And I think 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. But it's like they've gone to such extremes, like they buy you a house.

• 6:47Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  You get a take home car.

• 6:49Ben Horowitz?

  Amazing.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I mean, it's always person. I'm like, there's literally millions of people that could do this job.

• 6:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Just, I don't think it's a cultural issue.

• 6:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like a big thing in Vegas that we're doing is trying to kind of with Flock Safety and with some of the other technology we bought and the Cybertrucks and so forth is to try and improve the image for recruiting because that's such a big thing. And we have the highest population in Las Vegas of veterans in like the whole country. So we have plenty of people who could be great police, but we have to kind of continue to improve the image.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  It's really funny. You mentioned the Cybertruck because I know there was some like anything good in life criticism aligned.

• 7:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  And it's funny because my parents hometown where they still live, this is maybe like six years ago, bought for Teslas for their fleet.

• 7:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And the chief was like, every single 18 year old wants to drive this car. This is why I'm doing this.

• 7:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Like he was heavily applauded in that community.

• 7:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Because it's a very logical like marketing.

• 7:47Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And these are a bunch of like 18, 20 year old men. They like shiny toys.

• 7:51Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  That's super cool.

• 7:52Ben Horowitz?

  It's a cool, cool looking truck.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're trying to drive in a Toyota Camry or Cybertruck, like one makes you feel cool.

• 7:58Ben Horowitz?

  Well, the Cybertrucks, they have been great for recruiting despite the criticism that I got. Well, actually TechCrunch portrayed me as the Penguin, that I'm like a crime boss in Las Vegas and I make these donations in order to like to pay off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pay off the police to do my like evil bidding.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Your evil venture capital.

• 8:18Ben Horowitz?

  Because yeah, because Andreessen Horowitz is not a good enough business. I need to be in whatever the crime ring in Vegas is. But interestingly, since we got the trucks, 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, Dr. Dre, famous for the song Fuck the Police, saw the Cybertruck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of the Cybertruck.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  That's pretty good.

• 8:45Ben Horowitz?

  At his request.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. So that's people.

• 8:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And products.

• 8:50Ben Horowitz?

  Okay.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I think Vegas is a good, we can pick on Vegas because they've got a pretty good technology stack. You gotta go crime by crime. So if you have a gun violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know majority of gun violence does not go reported. If I shoot you, Eric.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna call 911 on myself. Unfortunately, I have a good shot.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  You're not calling 911 either. So that's a problem. You have drones. Vegas has a great deployment of drones. San Francisco does as well. It's tall in the news. So you need drones. You need cameras. You've got all these sensors, right? And then what's missing historically is now this AI layer, 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? 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, the taxpaying citizens. And you want to know, how's your money being used? It's being done in a way that's kind of societally just and forward. So that's the product side. And then policy is you have to hold people accountable.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I mean, we've seen the social experiment in parts of California.

• 9:51Ben Horowitz?

  Right. You need to actually prosecute the crimes.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  You know, 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.

• 10:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And I think like one of the things that people don't think through when they think about crime is 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 just hit you with a cane. We'll lock you in like an El Salvadorian prison. Or intelligence. And then what intelligence does is it basically makes everybody safer. It makes the suspects 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.

• 10:47Ben Horowitz?

  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, reduction in crime, is better intelligence. And, you know, people say, well, root cause, you know, like if we get rid of all poverty and this and that and third. Well, yeah, sure. If you create a utopian society, which nobody's ever done and like 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

• 11:30Ben Horowitz?

  to how policing works than criminals. Like more than anybody. 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, then you're very likely to discourage crime.

• 11:48Erik Torenberg?

  What was that quote that you mentioned just before the?

• 11:50Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah. The game had a song where he said, you know, real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts. Which is, yeah, like, of course.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  But I mean, to your point on that, like, I'll never forget, maybe in 2022, there was a rap song released in Southern California with reference to flock. And that, like, who's had got flocks, so stay away. I was like, we've made it. This is really important culturally.

• 12:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that's a key KPI to keep tracking.

• 12:20Ben Horowitz?

  I think that's right. And then, you know, like, it's, if you grow up, it's very important, like, if you think about, like, if you're growing up outside of the system, 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.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think to your point, too, the, 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. There's an economic cost of now that person's no longer productive in society. Like, I see.

• 13:08Ben Horowitz?

  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, 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. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. Totally agree.

• 13:37Erik Torenberg?

  Are we doing sort of the wrong thing by making it not clear that you're going to get caught? Or saying that, sort of making it not, the deterrence not 100%, you know, as clear as it should be while sort of arbitrarily doing long prison sentences instead?

• 13:51Ben Horowitz?

  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.

• 14:03Erik Torenberg?

  No.

• 14:03Ben Horowitz?

  Because, like, the streets are watching. They know what's it to quote Jay-Z, like, that's, that's going to happen. But if, yeah, if you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations. Because you, like, it's a pretty, I mean, look, if I can 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 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.

• 14:41Ben Horowitz?

  It's just too easy and it's just too much, it's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.

• 14:49Erik Torenberg?

  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, what was it, group therapy or sort of, you know, mental health? You know, or other services that are more preventive? What would you say to that argument?

• 15:06Ben Horowitz?

  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 for sure, like, selling drugs is bad, or bookmaking, or whatever the crime is. Like, a lot of people don't even know that's a crime, 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.

• 15:48Ben Horowitz?

  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.

• 15:57Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Ben Horowitz?

  Then, like, how is that gonna work? So you have to have, I'm not against social work, but you can't do it at the expense of crime enforcement, you know, law enforcement. And we saw that. I mean, like, we ran the experiment, it didn't work. You know, and then I think people would say, well, we didn't hire enough social workers, but, you know, like, social workers can't deal with, like, a robbery, or murder, or rape, or like, you know, violent crime in progress.

• 16:21Erik Torenberg?

  And these are not mutually exclusive, you can do both.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  No, no, I was gonna say, to Ben'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.

• 16:31Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 16:49Erik Torenberg?

  It was interesting, you brought up the, this sort of Dr. Dre, you know, fuck the police, now taking a photo with police, because some people say, hey, hip hop at times has glorified a certain, you know, crime lifestyle. Are other people sort of evolving like Dr. Dre has, or how is sort of the community, you know, over time, you thought about sort of this?

• 17:10Ben Horowitz?

  Well, look, I think that...

• 17:13Ben Horowitz?

  There so fuck the police had a real basis in it in that there was like if you look at the LAPD in that era, 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, you know, and Ice Cube and so forth. But the answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing, right? Like, like, that's the right way to

• 17:53Ben Horowitz?

  police. You need, and I give you an example. So what the Vegas police 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 that was stolen. And, you know, it's blue and it's driving, you know, this way. Okay. So then a guy gets pulled over, not the right guy. I'm getting pulled over for the police. They're highly suspicious. They're nervous. And I'm like, whatever, I'm a black man. So I'm already

• 18:36Ben Horowitz?

  like trained to be wary of this. And so now you can have an incident. Whereas, and if it's a flock 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. 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

• 19:21Ben Horowitz?

  Anytime a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. And in most cities, they don't talk to the police. And so by doing community policing, they're able to get that information. 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.

• 19:49Erik Torenberg?

  And this is what was called the Ferguson effect, right? Like crime actually went up.

• 19:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, of course, of course it did. And it's, 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. Well, like, the system hasn't been working, so let's fix the system as opposed to vilify any individual.

• 20:11Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Garrett, can you say more about why sort of the, I don't know if the clearance rate or just the sort of rate at which we catch murders or solve crimes has been dropping? And, you know.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 20:46Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  That's one reason, right? Like, that's, that's, that's a good thing. Like, some of that's from TV, you know, you watch NCIS, NCIS, and you're just like, there's cameras everywhere, kinda. So that's the one. The second is, and Ben mentioned this, witness corporation is gone. I mean, what's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk?

• 21:07Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  So, so no one shows up, which is a huge problem. Societally, we've given up on pretending that 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 would kill a partner, you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend. So it was not randomized crime. Now the majority of homicides are random. It is a drug deal 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 was a traditional type, you go, okay, let's check the family. Great, we're done, case closed. So fourth one, the amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way,

• 21:53Speaker 01

  but faster than both skill set and technology has kept pace. So even though, let's pick on Vegas, Vegas has hundreds, probably thousands, tens of thousands of cameras. You're gonna go search them, you gotta go put it together. Like, that doesn't just, you know, like AI's switching up. Nobody's watching the camera. No one's watching them, right? And like, we can look at recent events where, you know, there've been these shootings on college campuses. And they're like, why don't they find them faster? There's thousands of cameras. I'm like, the technology's 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.

• 22:31Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:41Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years. But so your seasoned, experienced detectives have all retired. And so it's this compounding effect where it doesn't look pretty good. And that's why, you know, outside of Vegas, the international 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 gotta imagine, if you're, if you're, you know, upper quartile, you shouldn't get away with it forever.

• 23:09Erik Torenberg?

  Wow.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Sorry to bring the moods down. Yeah.

• 23:15Erik Torenberg?

  The, I do love your sort of Teach for America, but for policing idea for people who are listening, who are inspired, like, what would it take for that to get off the ground? Like?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Well, if you remove the like debt grievance part, actually not that, that much. I think the biggest change is if you look at today, 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.

• 23:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  You know, I think Teach for America does probably what, like a four, eight week program? I don't actually know, but it's probably pretty quick.

• 23:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you're college educated, you're going to figure it out.

• 23:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Policing has a different expectation. So I would continue to see 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.

• 24:05Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  But I think that's actually, it's actually not much to pull it off. I think it just takes a major city, most likely it needs to be a major city to say, I'm going to create 200 entry level jobs, you know, requires your college degrees, two year commitment and, you know, I think it's pretty doable. I'll talk to a mayor about it.

• 24:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I do think that as police forces get much higher tech, I think it gets much more interesting too for college graduates and people with higher education and so forth, because it just changes the nature of what policing is. You know, when you have full intelligence, then I can't over emphasize how much safer everybody is.

• 24:45Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Ben Horowitz?

  Like, police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped like 75% when we first put the cameras and the drones in place, just because 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 an extremely dangerous situation. And, you know, we have a, and this is how you end up with this like militarized police situation, which, you know, is not a very sustainable idea.

• 25:15Erik Torenberg?

  Let's go deeper on Vegas as a, as a case study, Ben. What has most surprised you in your, in your work with Vegas? Or what do you think other cities can learn from the, the work that you guys are doing?

• 25:25Ben Horowitz?

  I think that the most surprising thing is, to me, is just like how much the actual community likes it. Like, we've got criticism in the press and whatnot, of course, you know. Surveillance, big brother, like Ben's a penguin, all that kind of thing. But the community, you know, everybody who lives there in Vegas is kind of a unique city in that like it's got crime tourism. Yeah. People fly in.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Some crime.

• 25:52Ben Horowitz?

  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. In Vegas, so it's way beyond any criminal motivation. It's like mental health and that kind of thing, or mental health combined with like hard drugs combined with, you know, Vegas. 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 up for tips and all that kind of thing. The fact that, you know, when we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right, you know, the right culture, you know, adding

• 26:32Ben Horowitz?

  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, and they're like, you can commit a crime in Vegas, you can't get away with it. 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 didn't think it would be that visible that fast.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I think the other thing too, and you, I don't know if you actually know this, but the model 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.

• 27:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, has mutual incentives to be safer. So I think about like, who's the largest supporter of the Mooresville Police Department? Lowe's, because Lowe's is based there.

• 27:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And they have thousands of employees that live there. And so 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.

• 27:39Ben Horowitz?

  So this is so important because you feel like at the Vegas PD, it's like, oh, they've got like, I don't know, thousands of officers, they've got, you know, a huge budget in this and that and the other. But. Can they make the marginal investment in technology? Absolutely not. It's very, very difficult. It's extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. You know, they don't want to have to lay off people to do it.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And it's mostly headcount, right?

• 28:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and 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 pretty amazing. And, you know, it's very rewarding work. I mean, just like little things. So we had a tremendous attrition problem in the 911. 911 is a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. It's all this kind of thing. And, you know, they, everybody was quitting. They, five minute call waits for 911. Imagine waiting on hold for five minutes on 911. And, you know, I was like, well, what's the problem?

• 28:46Ben Horowitz?

  And they're like, well, you know, like the work conditions are hard. Like, there's no ice machine. Like, that was literally, so I was like, fuck that. I'll buy that. So I bought an ice machine, an espresso machine. We, we put in a gym. And now the call waits are less than 30 seconds. And so, you know, just like that tiny investment can change everything.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  But I think to your point, in like, in Atlanta, I'm on the police foundation board. I think we contribute about $30 million a year to the police department.

• 29:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And I'll never forget, this is a couple of months ago, the head of the SWAT team came in. He was like, I would like new equipment. I'm thinking, how bad can it be? And he walks in, 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 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 just, it's a, it's a.

• 29:47Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, 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. They've got big pensions to pay off. So it's really hard to change the city budget.

• 30:03Erik Torenberg?

  It seems like relatively small amounts of money for these companies or individuals can make a massive difference. Is this repeatable in cities beyond Vegas and like in San Francisco? How many companies would pay money to make it safer for their employees to come into the office every day?

• 30:22Ben Horowitz?

  I hope a lot. Yeah, as soon as people see it, they want to do it. Like, people just don't know that's possible. They're like, what? I can give money to the police?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  So if you look at all of the latest innovations in San Francisco, 100% private funded.

• 30:40Erik Torenberg?

  Really?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  100%. Now, they're choosing to stay as quiet as they can, but I know. Look, you don't want to repeat a penguin bin.

• 30:51Erik Torenberg?

  Well, let's get a coalition.

• 30:52Ben Horowitz?

  If I was donating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  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?

• 31:07Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Because you want a drone in your neighborhood. You want more cameras in your neighborhood. Like, this is the way to do it.

• 31:13Erik Torenberg?

  How much do we have to pay for the G homeless program? When he comes?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  It's a million dollars.

• 31:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, right, right. They literally raise taxes. This is such a tiny amount of money compared to those sorts of things.

• 31:26Erik Torenberg?

  Wow.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And then just to close the loop on it, what we typically see too, 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.

• 31:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished and Flock hasn't been exempt from that because of all the great work that you've done, solving a huge. Is it like 20% of crimes?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you do about a million arrests this year.

• 31:55Erik Torenberg?

  So what are the criticisms that you get for?

• 31:58Ben Horowitz?

  And I just want to point out, arrests of the right person.

• 32:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Ben Horowitz?

  Like, this is such a big thing in America. Like, the number of people who, 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 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.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  It is a it is a cultural shock to a police department when you go from subjective base policing to an objective base policing like that is describing. So look, I think we get predominantly criticized for privacy, which I find falsely focused. I don't think there's any privacy erosion in Flock. I think Flock puts a spotlight on trust issues. And so I'll give you an example.

• 32:59Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, the Flock cameras are all in public spaces.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:03Ben Horowitz?

  So whatever you're doing in public, somebody probably has a phone and is really invading your privacy.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  If you as I say, the ironic part is when we do get criticisms, 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 cellphone dump.

• 33:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And I will know your exact location in real time at all times.

• 33:24Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, which is what they do.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yes, because it's way more effective. That's so, you know, there's not only her to solve that. So I think for the privacy thing, 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.

• 33:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  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, it's 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 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 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.

• 34:21Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, it seems like some people are scared about a world in which there's so little trust in the police that basically everyone is getting private security, you know, all this neighborhood.

• 34:31Ben Horowitz?

  Well, that's the irony of defund the police. It's defund the police for poor people. Privatize the police for rich people.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, you know, has failed in many countries.

• 34:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and that's not a good idea, by the way.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 34:44Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, and say more about why that is.

• 34:47Ben Horowitz?

  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, then you basically end up with a completely degenerate society. You basically turn whole neighborhoods into the third world, which we, by the way, have in the United States in a really major way. 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.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at the core premise of America is economic mobility. I want to do better than my parents, or my kids 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 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, your entire mind becomes occupied by, can I actually walk to school?

• 35:54Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Will I make it to 18 years old, 21? And so if you look at that, you go, by privatizing, you remove a core tenet of economic mobility, which is what you see politically, where we start to say, I don't believe in the American dream anymore because it didn't work for me. And that's, I think, the fundamental risk is actually like that, that we have a generation of kids who don't think America will work for them.

• 36:16Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And that's, I think that's actually a huge problem.

• 36:19Erik Torenberg?

  It's also, you mentioned, you know, 98% is against poor people. It's also done by a very small percentage of people who commit all the crimes, right?

• 36:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 36:27Erik Torenberg?

  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 and letting them free. I guess what is the steel man of like, how do we solve for this? What do we do to address this?

• 36:44Ben Horowitz?

  Well, look, I, I think that one, if you're getting, so there's a, the separate conversation of prison reform. And like the way the prison system works and the incentives in it, in the United States has a lot of issues. You know, principally that it's not, we've gone completely away from rehabilitation. And this, some of this comes from time-based 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 there's certain people who are psychopaths and we're never going to reform them.

• 37:29Ben Horowitz?

  But there's a big, most people in prison, I had this conversation with my friend Shaka Sangora, who was in prison for 20 years. Most people in prison are actually betas. 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, we, we, one, it'd be a huge cost savings for the country. Two, it would be, you know, much better for society and much better for people who get

• 38:14Ben Horowitz?

  arrested. But like that, I would just say that's an independent problem of law enforcement. And I think the problem with mixing those two is

• 38:27Ben Horowitz?

  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 independently. You can't, you're not going to solve the prison, the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, 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, incentive for murder, incentive for robbery, incentive for rape, all that kind of thing.

• 39:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Garrett, why don't you say more on the, on the policy side in terms of, are there certain cities where certain policies are much more effective that others should learn from? Or?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think on the, to Ben's point, just to close that up too. And there's evil in the world.

• 39:23Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And Flock nor any of us are going to fix that. And so we will always need some place to deal with them. 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.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  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, those people in jail. I think the other thing we're looking 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, you know, flocks in a builder or someone should, to make that part of the process go faster. So I was in Shelby County in Tennessee, Memphis, and there's 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 effort of like, we actually need to speed up the judicial system. And I don't think more humans is the answer.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So also seeing more and more cities adopt technology to speed that up.

• 40:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, actually. So in Vegas, they have, just to show you how like fixable this problem is, they have this, so there's an anti-recidivism program called Hope for Prisoners, which basically, 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 won't prosecute you. They'll send you to Hope for Prisoners, and you go through the rehab. They are close to 0% recidivism on that program. Just because, you know, a lot of the times, it's like, well,

• 41:42Ben Horowitz?

  how do I get, people become criminals sometimes because that's, that is a career path. 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 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 is really good, but like, you have to also disincentivize the criminal career path. Like, those go together.

• 42:14Erik Torenberg?

  I, um, Delancey Street Restaurant, also another example, is that, is that a successful example?

• 42:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, definitely, definitely.

• 42:21Erik Torenberg?

  Where it's, yeah, it's a restaurant and they take people who've previously been in prison and give them sort of, you know?

• 42:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, like, I think that businesses, you know, hiring people, particularly out of, uh, and I think Delancey Street hires a lot of people at a juvenile, juvenile hall.

• 42:37Ben Horowitz?

  You know, taking kids out of the system early is very, very productive. It's like, 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.

• 42:51Erik Torenberg?

  And it gives them a lot of dignity, you know, they tell the story to people, so it's very moving, moving place. 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? What, what, what do you say to, what's the right way of thinking about that?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  It's funny you mention that. There's an elected official, um, the state representative of a certain state, and I will disclose the information. And they were a very loud antagonist to Flock. And sadly, uh, she was like, a lot of political figures are, she was the victim of a targeted attack. Her house was shot at.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  She's a massive fan of Flock now. Because that person was arrested within minutes. Because there's a flock camera on her street, she called 911, and they're like, yeah, we got the guy, he's in jail. 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.

• 43:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  And that's the main mantra.

• 43:59Ben Horowitz?

  And then a lot of the politicians who want to defund the police have massive private security.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, 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. Like, just like we expect information at our fingertips, why shouldn't we feel safe everywhere we go?

• 44:19Erik Torenberg?

  They say like, hey, living in a city is dangerous, you know, that's what you signed up for.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  That's the only, I've only gotten into one argument with 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 don't know, I think like, clean streets, like, these are not unreasonable things to ask for.

• 44:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it seems like a very... Odd perspective, but I, you know, I, I mean, like particularly if you're a young person, I could see.

• 44:48Erik Torenberg?

  Well, they worry about overly, you know, and, you know, putting people, too many people in prison for the wrong crimes, or they worry about militarized police.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  All those seem like reasonable concerns.

• 45:00Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that's a still.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  I guess, I guess the thing for me is, you know, who's going to decide how many homicides is okay?

• 45:07Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 45:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And is it okay if it happens to like you or your family or your friends, you know, is that okay with you? And then most people would say, no, that it's just like, fine. It's, it's like a fine thing for the other guy.

• 45:20Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  And what I think to bend to your point, too, the, 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, wait, timeout, I actually want more.

• 45:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, I want all the technology I'm getting.

• 45:41Ben Horowitz?

  Town halls look like that.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  And that's what every town hall looks like. And you're thinking like, you shouldn't be making decisions for other people.

• 45:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. I'm so empathetic, I want you murdered.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Ben Horowitz?

  That's the.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  It's the safest thing for you.

• 45:51Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's so crazy. Well, the other thing on crime statistics is, you know, like, I think it's pretty widely known that like a lot of crime stats have been faked and are reported, et cetera. 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, have you been a victim of a crime? And versus the actual official crime statistics go in the opposite direction.

• 46:31Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, over, you know, longitudinal data. So. I just think like it's a narrative that's supported by like fake numbers.

• 46:45Erik Torenberg?

  Right. And it's also the stuff that's also unreported is just, do you feel safe walking, you know, in your city? Do you feel safe with your kids, you know, walking at night? And anyways.

• 46:55Ben Horowitz?

  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.

• 47:12Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And what I love about what you guys are doing at Flock is that you're giving the technology so that 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.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  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 were 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, it's a lot of data. And so we store for 30 days, but you can flex that up and down. So in New Jersey, they store 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. 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

• 48:07Speaker 01

  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. Illinois, Colorado, more states were 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, it's, it's.

• 48:41Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, so this is one of the things we ran into on the Tupac case, by the way, was the LAPD did so much stuff to foul that case in Vegas, which is why that murder went unsolved for whatever it was, like almost 30 years.

• 48:59Erik Torenberg?

  And why they do that?

• 49:01Ben Horowitz?

  Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt and they were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac. And thankfully, we reopened the call case and we caught the guy. But it's, you know, like when you think about it in terms of the actual victim.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:28Ben Horowitz?

  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. Like, that's what happens when you don't share information. Like, that's a real issue.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. But see, 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's 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. Yeah. We're here to support.

• 50:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  I love Ben up on personal.

• 50:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like, I think you have bigger fish to fry, you know, if you're certainly Garrett. 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, 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 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.

• 51:05Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that's why we, you know, that's why we don't have a much better system than we have.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think, Ben, to your point is, when it happens, though... That complication becomes very simple when you have strong leadership with a backbone.

• 51:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Only in a mayor and a DA.

• 51:22Ben Horowitz?

  Sheriff.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  City council and sheriff where they're like, I'm gonna arrest you if you commit a crime in my city.

• 51:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  You have to say that out loud. You have to say it and do it.

• 51:30Ben Horowitz?

  Well, but then the problem is you're gonna get arrested and the prosecutor is gonna prosecute you and the judge is going to be like enforce the law.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:40Ben Horowitz?

  Which is, it's a much harder combination than you might think.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:44Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and there have been, like, there's a huge push to not criminal, to decriminalize crime essentially in this country. And I know like it's still going on and it's, you know, there are still these prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 52:02Ben Horowitz?

  convicting people.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And is that for ideological reasons? Or do we have a big organized crime problem in this country? Or what was, you mentioned earlier.

• 52:12Ben Horowitz?

  A big disorganized crime problem.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Well, I will, I will say though, the, the sheer sophistication 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

• 52:32Ben Horowitz?

  Ah, yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  operating large scale 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 buy a freight forwarder, 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.

• 53:01Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And all secondary places.

• 53:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  And it's clean. No one gets shot. And everything looks clean on paper.

• 53:08Ben Horowitz?

  Ah.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And like, this is obviously not easy to, you have to be sophisticated. But like, this is a large, large scale and it works.

• 53:15Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, this, so this is what happened, you know, I have.

• 53:20Ben Horowitz?

  When the crime went really crazy in San Francisco, I had a long conversation with Mayor Breed about it. And 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. And so all the citizens got punished. But like, it wasn't hungry people. It was like organized crime systematically selling the goods. Secondhand, it was that kind of thing. And so you get, now, the people that they deployed were low

• 54:03Ben Horowitz?

  level criminals, right? Like, you can just pick, have a kid go rob the thing for you and you pay them.

• 54:08Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 54:09Ben Horowitz?

  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.

• 54:15Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Ben Horowitz?

  Working for an organized gang, probably from South America. So, you know, like, the side effects of these off the cuff, nobody thought it through, crazy ideas are like, highly consequential.

• 54:31Erik Torenberg?

  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, a Flock camera on every block? Like, talk about that.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the word been used was intelligence.

• 54:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And so much of that shift is starting to happen. I would add to the intelligence precision.

• 54:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And like, I'll paint for you a picture of a recent success story that, to me, is the future. And it's just hasn't happened in every city yet.

• 54:54Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  So there's an individual who leaves a hospital mentally unwell and shoots someone in a drive by, just driving by and starts shooting people. This is a real story. 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. Note's pause. Traditional response. Is you deploy SWAT. It's gonna take about 15 minutes to get everyone ready. They're gonna come in hot and someone's gonna die. It's not clear who, either a citizen, an officer, or the suspect's gonna die. But let's assume someone's gonna die. And then just as, not as important, but just as a matter of fact,

• 55:40Speaker 01

  that mall is also gonna see a dramatic decline in attendance. And it could bleed to probably the end of the mall. It's 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. 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 of your, oh, there is interesting information. This person has a very distinguishable forearm tattoo. So we spot the tattoo. Half mile away, this guy has no idea we're following him. We don't see a gun. Two plainclothes officers walk up.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  The whole time, they know they've got overhead protection. They're being helped, just like you in the army. They take them down. No one has any idea. And they present this to city council and city council was like, we need drones everywhere. We need drones everywhere. It's safer, it's more precise, there's a level of 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 a gentic layer on top of that, where now you can start to reduce some of your staffing problems. But some of these jobs, no one wants to work the night shift. No one wants to, like, some jobs are just not fun. There's a way to do it with software. So I think that kind of intelligent, precise policing is where we want.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  I think the net effect of that to Ben's earlier point is officers spend more time with their community. Less time filling out paperwork, less time writing reports, more time engaged.

• 57:23Erik Torenberg?

  Just a quick last one. Sorry. Do you have a couple of stories of you actually saving like a baby?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  I mean, we helped return over 450 missing children this year.

• 57:31Erik Torenberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  And that's the, it's not funny, where it's like, people are like, oh, we should, you know, ban flock. And I'm like, until your child is stolen.

• 57:40Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Because I've got three kids and I want to know that anything goes, happens wrong with them, flock is there.

• 57:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And this like, you get carjacked and your baby's in the backseat and they take the baby. I mean, like that kind of thing.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  You know, it happened. I mean, there was a case down in San Diego this year where at a point it was at a mall. Hops in, kid in the back. Like, obviously, that wasn't a part of the plan, but it became a part of the plan. And like, thankfully, you know, they've got a lot of flock cameras in San Diego 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.

• 58:14Erik Torenberg?

  Well, Garrett, you're doing heroic work. And one of the most inspiring things about organization Z is working with you. So thank you for the work that you do.

• 58:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yes. Thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Thank you.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z, and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments

• 59:07Speaker 02

  in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.