Drones, Data, and Deterrence: Technology's Role in Public Safety

Flock is a public safety technology platform that operates in over 4,000 cities across the United States, and solves about 2,200 crimes daily. That’s 10 percent of reported crimes nationwide. Taken from a16z’s recent LP Summit, a16z General Partner David Ulevitch joins forces with Flock Safety’s founder, Garrett Langley and Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Together, they cover the delicate balance between using technology to combat crime and respecting individual privacy, and explore the use of drones and facial recognition, building trust within communities, and the essence of objective policing. Resources: Find Garret on Twitter: https://twitter.com/glangley Find Sheriff McMahill on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sheriff_LVMPD Find David on Twitter:https://twitter.com/davidu Learn more about Flock Safety: https://www.flocksafety.com Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/ Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I woke up Sunday morning to the most shocking email I've ever received from a company.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Every piece of that technology is the equivalent of three police officers. It can get into places and see things and detect things that I don't care how good of a cop you are, you would never be able to see it.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Show me a list of crimes that aren't being solved in a city, and we'll go build technology to change that.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I'm sending human beings through a door with an armed subject.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  We have incredibly blue cities, incredibly red cities. We have purple cities. We've got from Berkeley, California, to Dallas, Texas, to Dallas, Georgia.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  30% of their homicides are resolved. If you believe you can get away with committing the most heinous crime in any of these cities, you are going to continue to commit those crimes.

• 0:46Steph Smith?

  At A16Z's recent LP Summit, we brought together hundreds of our limited partners and portfolio founders back together again in Las Vegas. Now, this event was overflowing with stories of how founders are challenging the status quo and harnessing technology to make the world a better place. However, there is one important industry where lives are directly on the line. That is, of course, public safety. Yet, despite being so critical, the industry is equally misunderstood. And that is why we've chosen to open up one of our summit sessions to the public, to show what a better version of the future can really look like,

• 1:26Steph Smith?

  even in an industry where technology is not always celebrated, to say the least. So today, you'll get to hear from Garrett Langley, founder of Flock Safety. Flock is a company at the forefront of leveraging technology to bolster public safety. Covering 4,000 cities in America, they solve about 2,200 crimes a day. To really put that into perspective, that's around 10% of crimes solved. Here, Garrett is in conversation with Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and A16Z general partner David Ulevitch, as they discuss how technology can play a role in thwarting crime without becoming Big Brother. Plus, they discuss the role of drones in facial recognition,

• 2:11Steph Smith?

  the reality of building trust in communities, and what objective policing really means. But first, let's kick things off by hearing from A16Z general partner, Catherine Boyle, who shares her perspective on how technology can be used for good and how that fits into our race towards American dynamism.

• 2:33Steph Smith?

  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 in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  It is wonderful to be here today, seeing you all face to face, and to introduce our next panel, because I truly believe that this panel embodies the spirit of American dynamism. Now, I've known Garrett Langley for a very long time, back when Flock Safety was just a tiny company building V1 of their products in Atlanta office. And I'm going to share with you a story today because it is probably one of the most impactful stories that I have for my entire investing career. It was fall of 2020, at the height of COVID, and Garrett was going out for his first growth round. And I was being the most annoying investor. We had gone back and forth for about a week on diligence materials, hardware, software. Let me get a revert of the model. Let me talk to your customers.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  And Garrett, being the pro he is, responded like this, just constant back and forth. And it felt like we were really jamming. And then it was Saturday morning, and I sent a few emails and more data requests, and I didn't hear anything, crickets. And hours went by, hours went by. And I just thought, oh, my gosh, I've lost this deal. There is no way that I'm going to get to work with him. And I went to bed Saturday night, thinking that it was over. And I woke up Sunday morning to the most shocking email I've ever received from a company. And I want to paraphrase it for you. Garrett said, "I'm so sorry that I haven't gotten back to your responses, but we had an emergency request from Atlanta PD." And it was an all-hands-on-deck moment for the team.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  A baby was out for a morning stroll with his mother in a low-income neighborhood in Atlanta, and was snatched from his stroller by a husband-and-wife team that was premeditating a kidnapping because they intended to raise this baby as their own. They were so premeditated and looking for a sitting duck that they brought two sets of clothing, boys' clothing and girl clothing, and immediately changed the baby after they snatched him from his mother and drove off in a car. Now, law enforcement officials will tell you, in the first 24 hours, if you do not find a child who can't talk or a baby, the likelihood that you are going to find a child who has been kidnapped in a premeditated fashion is very low. But Garrett delivered some good news. He said shortly after the kidnapping,

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Flock Safety Cameras in Atlanta picked up the car and was able to follow that car across multiple counties and find that baby unharmed a couple hours later and bring him back to his mother and bring the perpetrators to justice. So when I received that email, I was expecting my first son, and so I just started bawling uncontrollably because there are so few examples like that where heinous crimes are perpetrated against humanity and against citizens, and where technology has helped be the solution in order to bring people to justice and to make sure that babies go unharmed. And it made me proud to know Garrett, and it makes me extremely proud to be an investor in Flock Safety. And I'm also really proud of my partner, David Yulovich, who's led multiple rounds into Flock Safety and did so at a time

• 5:57Speaker 00

  where a lot of people didn't want to invest in public safety technology. It wasn't a popular thing to do. And it's because of him that I think we have a true public safety not only practiced at Andreessen Horowitz, but that we have these companies such as Prepared and Skydio, and companies that are working with multiple law enforcement agencies around the country to make communities safer. We are also very fortunate today to have a special guest, Sheriff Kevin McMahill of Las Vegas, who has been an innovator in this community for 30 years in law enforcement. He started his career in the U.S. Army and then worked his way up through Las Vegas PD. In 2010, he was assigned one of the hardest assignments, the highest crime neighborhood in Las Vegas,

• 6:41Speaker 00

  to be leader and to bring the crime rate down. And through his innovative approaches of working with community leaders, faith-based leaders, and others, he was able to bring crime down in that neighborhood by 40%. He was also in leadership during the mass shooting in 2017 and has delivered many innovations since that mass shooting in Las Vegas to make not only Las Vegas, but other areas safer. And in 2023, he was elected in a landslide election to be Sheriff of Las Vegas. The world is getting less safe. Crime is rising, and it's not something that we want to talk about. It's not something that we want to think about. But it's because of public safety leaders, like the ones that are going to be on this stage, that we can have this important conversation

• 7:22Speaker 00

  about how technology can be used for good and to make our communities safer. So without further ado, I'm pleased to introduce Garrett, David, and Sheriff McMahill.

• 7:31David Ulevitch?

  That was great, Catherine. Thank you for doing that. And thank you, Sheriff McMahill and Garrett, for being with us. I'm going to call you Kevin.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 7:39David Ulevitch?

  Okay, okay. Let's just jump right in. Garrett, that was an amazing story that Catherine told us. One of the best parts of this job is getting emails from you about crimes that you've solved, things that you've stopped from happening or getting worse. Do you have more stories you can share with us?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's two maybe that come to mind. We solve a lot of crime, but most recently in Wake Forest, they rolled out Flock and within their first 24 hours, found three stolen cars, a missing child, and two automatic firearms on campus, which is alarming because you would think a campus would be safer. I think the other one that was more recent was just earlier this fall out in UCal Berkeley. And during freshman orientation, five individuals with semi-automatic Glocks stole this 18-year-old's Jeep. Obviously, this was supposed to be the best day of his kid's life. He's now going to college, and now he's had the worst day of his life. So criminals don't care about city boundaries,

• 8:37Speaker 02

  but for some reason, law enforcement has always had a struggle sharing data. So in this case, when the student called in 911, he said, "Look, my Jeep's been stolen. These guys have guns." The Berkeley PD is able to immediately put that into flock. And now everyone in the Bay Area has pretty much someone looking out for them. And within under an hour, that car gets off the highway in Palo Alto, who's also a flock customer. They get an alert. They know there's five individuals with semi-automatic weapons in the car. SWAT team responds. Those people are now in jail. And I think it's that kind of story that sadly happens every day. Thankfully, not in your community every day, but those are two kind of more recent crazy stories.

• 9:14David Ulevitch?

  Thanks for sharing those. Those are great. Sheriff, you were here during one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history six years ago this month. Tell us a little bit about how that day changed law enforcement in Las Vegas, how it impacts how you lead today, and even some of the technological changes that have been implemented.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that day was a day, obviously, that nobody will ever forget here in Las Vegas. And for a reminder, 58 people died that day and two subsequent. 422 other people were shot and survived after being shot with an AR-15, and 850 people were injured. Getting the information that particular day, it took us literally three or four days. I didn't even know until the third day that seven of our officers had been shot. That's how chaotic and how much casualties that we were dealing with that particular day. I will tell you that it changed a lot, and we began to teach around the country a variety of different things. Something as simple as instead of having all of your off-duty paramedics respond to the scene,

• 10:15Speaker 01

  have them respond to the hospitals, because we didn't know at the time that nurses can't run a main line, but a paramedic can. So we had nurses doing paramedics' jobs, doctors doing nurses' jobs. So we really fine-tuned that and taught that all across the country. Technology that has come from that is things like ShotSpotter, being able to tell us where those are at. The technology continues to evolve in these companies as well as being able to tell us what floor they're on, what room it's coming from. But also, a lot of this ability to capture when somebody's carrying a weapon into one of our casinos. So we have this technology now that we have deployed. I won't. Name the place, but we had one particular casino hotel that had become sort of a haven

• 10:56Speaker 01

  for our gangsters here. They were having gang parties every single weekend. And we had numerous shots fired, numerous people killed. Every time my cops responded over there, there was a big fight. And so we put gun detection technology in the elevator banks before they got on the elevator. And in one weekend after we deployed it, we found 60 handguns that were going to be taken into a casino hotel. That's how out of control it got. That place is probably one of the safest places that we have now. And so that ability to share that technology across the spectrum here in Las Vegas has allowed each one of these casino companies to talk to one another to keep us more safe as we move forward. So that has really been a big benefit of that.

• 11:36David Ulevitch?

  Thank you. That's incredible. Garrett, switching back to you. What I don't think people know is quite the size and scale of the company today. Can you just give us some highlights of how large Flock Safety is and how big of an impact it's having?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are one of the bigger, better kept secrets, probably. But we're live in just over 4,000 cities in America. So that's almost 70% of the population that's covered by Flock. And from a efficacy, we solve about 2,200 crimes a day, which is just around 10%.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Do you mind if I jump in?

• 12:07David Ulevitch?

  Please.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Let me tell you one story that really sort of resonated with me was I had a shooting at one of my local high schools, a street right out in front of the high school. And you can imagine that as the sheriff in any town USA, when you have a shooting outside of a high school, it causes you a lot of concern. Obviously, we're thinking active shooter. In this particular case, another piece of our technology, the ShotSpotter technology, was able to detect that over 60 rounds had been fired. And we knew that there were two vehicles that had been shooting. Flock had not yet even gone live in Metro, but we had had these cameras deployed out. We just hadn't flipped the switch to actually turn them on. So my detectives utilizing all the investigative skills that we had, we really had nothing, other than to find out that we had two cars with multiple people

• 12:52Speaker 01

  in them, and multiple different calibers of weapons being fired out in front of one of our local high schools. And I was, quite frankly, frustrated as hell, because we had no leads, we had nothing to go on. One individual had been shot. A lot of times, people just get dropped off at a hospital with a gunshot wound, and they don't tell us anything about it. So we're trying to piece all this stuff together. So we got ahold of you all and turned it on, and Flock was able to solve that crime for us before they'd even actually went out and done that. And so What I want to tell you about this is, is we've created what we call the real-time crime center at Metro. You're all invited to come check it out sometime. It's one of the most fascinating things. I'm not a technologist by any stretch of the imagination. I barely know how to turn my phone on sometimes, to be honest with you. But I will tell you

• 13:36Speaker 01

  that this technology is changing the game. We are going to get to a place at some point where it becomes impossible to commit a crime because technology will help us resolve that. When you look at Las Vegas Metro today, we have over a 90% clearance rate on all of our homicides for five years in a row. You won't find that anywhere else in the United States of America. That's in part because of technology, in part because of great detectives and leadership that are actually making this work. But I want you to understand something about that. When you go to other cities like Chicago as an example, 30% of their homicides are resolved. If you believe you can get away with committing the most heinous crime in any of these cities, you are going to continue to commit those

• 14:18Speaker 01

  crimes. Bad guys know that when you come to Las Vegas, because of our abilities, technology being at the forefront of it, you are going to get caught.

• 14:27David Ulevitch?

  Love that. Well said, yeah.

• 14:32David Ulevitch?

  There's a lot of communities in Vegas. It's not just the Strip. And you've had a long career here as a patrolman, working your way up, all the way to under sheriff, and then being elected sheriff. Talk to us a little bit about how you changed the way that you lead and encourage your officers to lead, both with technology and community engagement.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  You know, one of the most interesting parts about technology, when we first started, we started off with one crime camera. And I wasn't a big believer in it, but like any good leader, that when you have people that are very interested in getting something started, and you just give them the opportunity to go do it. And I think one of the things that, you know, in the intro, they mentioned that I had the opportunity to get assigned to the Bolden area command, which is West Las Vegas, our predominantly African-American part of town. And what I learned when I started to work over there, it led in every crime category that you don't want to lead in. Robbery, homicide, sexual assault, gangs, everything you don't want it to be in. And as I went over there to understand and realize that I had 13 homicides in the first six months, and I had a 0% solve rate.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And the people in the black community were saying that you don't really care about us. We were talking a little bit about this with this Atlanta caper is that communities of color, because the police typically have a very low solve rate in those communities, have a higher level of distrust for the police. And so every opportunity that we've had to deploy these technological solutions into their communities, it was met with a very high level of distrust. And as we really spent the time about educating them, but also one thing that we're not very good at is really showing them the success, right? We don't like to celebrate this stuff, but we have to go out there and figure out a different way to talk to our communities about what this technology is doing. So they don't think that we're spying on them, that they don't think that we're utilizing

• 16:19Speaker 01

  this technology for nefarious purposes. And once I have done that, I've been doing that since 2010, talking about this technology everywhere I possibly can within our community, to groups like yourselves, because every piece of that technology is the equivalent of three police officers. It can get into places and see things and detect things that I don't care how good of a cop you are, you would never be able to see it. So it's a really exciting piece for me.

• 16:43David Ulevitch?

  Your comment on the communities, just as a quick aside, when I first made the very first investment, I actually called my sister, who has dedicated much more of her life to sort of, I would call them, I guess, social justice causes. And sometimes she's a good barometer for me of how I should think about things that I might not think about in my normal frame of mind. And her initial reaction was like, oh, no, no, no, this is going to be surveillance, that marginalized communities won't want this. And so in part of the diligence, we actually called into some of these community leaders and tried to find out what do people really think? And what they find out is exactly what you said, that actually it makes policing more objective, it makes the solve rate go way up. And in fact, some of the biggest advocates are those community leaders from more marginalized communities. And that was something I didn't expect, but we now see over and over again. And so on that note, Garrett, you're not just building a company,

• 17:28David Ulevitch?

  but you're building something that gets put into communities and has a huge impact. Talk to us about how that engagement has shaped your roadmap.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think to your point, the underlying shift that's occurring in law enforcement, historically, the way they operated is they knew what neighborhoods had crimes. And so they'd go fishing. That was the word they used. They would drive around in those neighborhoods looking for someone doing something wrong. So it's like, all right, suspicious people, suspicious activity, like it's ripe for prejudice. Now, to Sheriff's point, it's objective. That car is stolen, that car has a warrant. They don't really care who's inside, they're about to go find out. And it was this interesting shift where now this law enforcement agency was not only more effective, they needed less people, they were also delivering a more equitable product to their community. Because they could say, look, we don't have time to go fish anymore. All we do is wait for the ding in the car that says, hey, there's a stolen car down the street, go get them.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And so I think for us, David, like one of the things we've spent a lot of time on is we have incredibly blue cities, incredibly red cities, we have purple cities. We've got from Berkeley, California, to Dallas, Texas, to Dallas, Georgia, which is a beautiful city, if you're ever in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. All different political spectrums, but they all have the same desire, which is to be safe. And they want their kids to be safe. And so what we've spent a lot of time building is kind of two directions. One is how do we drive more transparency in law enforcement? But to the Sheriff's point, we've unfortunately trained law enforcement to be afraid of the media. Because the only time the Sheriff gets a phone call is when something really, really bad has happened. And where we spend time is trying to coach and encourage chiefs and sheriffs to cover the positive stuff, too.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  You're solving so much crime and making such a positive impact, it's okay to talk about it. And when you have this backbone of transparency and auditing that you know there's gonna be a bad apple, that's fine. Law enforcement's not perfect, no one's perfect, but it's worth it. And then I think the second thing we've spent a lot of time on is we will go have, and the Sheriff and I will have a breakfast, we had this back in November. And I'm like, Sheriff, tell me the top three crimes you didn't solve this year. And like, okay, that's what I'm gonna go build. Because the data is, the Sheriff was alluding to, is the only way to actually eliminate crime, which is our goal, is to solve it. Most humans operate with a Boolean mindset, that if I think I'm gonna get away with it, I'm gonna do it, right? If you have kids, you've seen this happen with your kids, where they think you're not looking, so they do something bad.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And as soon as they realize that you see everything, as a parent, you have eyes in the back of your head, is it better behavior? And so what we have found is the only correlation between a drop in crime is an increase in clearance rate. So the reason why Sheriff runs such a safe city is because he clears his cases. So for us, that's our kind of overall product strategy, is show me a list of crimes that aren't being solved in a city, and we'll go build technology to change that.

• 20:09David Ulevitch?

  Awesome. Sheriff, what about drones? What role are drones playing in law enforcement? And then actually, if you hold part of your answer, we're going to talk about where that might go in the future.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm smiling because I just, I always laugh at this stuff because I've been doing this job 33 years now, and I just never really imagined where we were going to find ourselves. And, and I have to say, building off of what Garrett was talking about, one of the things that really attracted me to the technology is the mindset that I have a duty and a responsibility. I have 6,000 employees. I'm the seventh largest police department in this country. I have 58 million visitors and 2.5 million permanent residents. I have a responsibility to those officers to keep them safe also. And let me tell you, in 2010, we shot and killed 25 people. Right now, year to date, we've shot six.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  And I attribute that not only to exceptional training and leadership, but to the ability to utilize technology effectively so that we approach these armed individuals in a markedly different way than we ever have. And so now this, this drone piece that enters into it, we started off with drones. We were using them in SWAT operations. Fly a little drone through the door. They got defeated, quite frankly, oftentimes by the bad guy. But we get the drone through the door so we could have eyes and ears in for my operators because I'm, I'm sending human beings through a door with an armed subject. So I need to slow these things down and gather intelligence and do the things that will keep these men and women safe. And so we did all of that. And now, today, as we sit here right now,

• 21:44Speaker 01

  we have a drone as a first responder program.

• 21:46David Ulevitch?

  Can you explain what DFR, what drone as a first responder, what that means?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, to me, the really simple way to explain it is, humans are very good at a lot of things, but you've got to imagine you've got a 19-year-old entering into a high stressful situation. They've got a gun, potentially, someone else has a gun. The best thing you can do is de-escalate as fast as possible. It's much easier to do that from a drone where no one's life is at risk. I also think the thing that we keep track of on the DFR perspective is the average response time to a 911 call is inflated due to the number of unnecessary calls of service. Sending a drone is a lot cheaper, it's a lot faster. So you imagine sheriff's got 6,000 officers. That number sounds really big. How many do you have actually on active patrol at any given time? A third?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  A half.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  A half? So it's really only 3,000 that are actually serving right now. With a DFR program, the sheriff can effectively double his headcount, triple his headcount from inefficiency by having drones respond first, assess the situation, and then decide, is this nothing? Turn off the alert? Or is this necessitates a human reaction?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So we have that piece of it going. We actually just rolled this out now. So we have a number of units that are out there with the drones and they'll launch and they're responding to all the high priority calls for service, shots fired. We'll be on the other side, park the drone, throw drone up, they go up. They get real time intelligence to the first responders. And it's just an incredible opportunity for us to keep our officer safe, but also reduce the amount of suspects that are going to end up dying because of their own actions. And so, you know, the other big part is, is that we have the responsibility for search and rescue here in Southern Nevada. We fly in our helicopters up in these canyons where it's unbelievable how close they actually get with their helicopter blades to these canyons. I'm talking literally half an inch.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And it's a dangerous, dangerous business to be in. But we have a responsibility to save people's lives. And so there's unbelievable places to hike just within an hour here of Las Vegas. And there's a lot of activity up there. So we deploy those drones with the night vision. And when it gets dark and we're able to locate these victims that are up there in ways without me having to put my officers in dangerous situations. And so that's another real great advantage for us as well.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Just to explain a few more details. What's happening today is being launched from the back of police vehicles. But I think we're very close to a moment in time where somebody can call 911 and a drone will be automatically dispatched from the roof of a police department to

• 24:11David Ulevitch?

  Provide eyes on the sky is the house on fire? Is it a three alarm fire? Is it a small fire in the kitchen? Immediately as fire medic police are responding. And that kind of situational awareness is unprecedented. And in regions like Las Vegas, it's great to have a few helicopters, but they can only respond to one incident at a time. If you have two copters, maybe two at a time. That's a tiny fraction of the 911 calls you get. And being able to launch a fleet of drones that can cover an area very quickly over a wide area is really going to transform the way we respond and keep both officers safe and communities safer. And that's very exciting.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I just have to highlight what you said here. I want you to imagine this. Shot spotter technology detects a gunshot, somebody being shot in a neighborhood. The drone that's located on a business launches up overhead within 30 seconds. Back at the real time crime center and officers watching this. Providing real time intelligence to those police officers who are now responding to go in to save lives and stop the suspect's actions. That is an absolute game changer in my profession. I'm so excited about that part. I can't even.

• 25:13David Ulevitch?

  Me too. That's true. That doesn't even need to be a 911 call.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  It'll beat 911 every time.

• 25:17David Ulevitch?

  That's right. That's right. With more fidelity. Yeah, it's really an exciting time. I think as we introduce these advanced technologies into public safety. And we'll talk about 911 in just a moment. All right. So we talked about community engagement and I mentioned when I first made the first investment, I talked to my sister to get her pulse check, which she told me I was going to be a terrible person. Now, of course, now, of course, she thinks it's amazing. But Flock is really in Garrett. This is really a testament to your leadership as a CEO. Cause it's go any number of ways as a CEO of a company building cameras with computer vision technology to find stolen vehicles. But you've really set the standard in public safety around privacy, protection, community engagement, data that you collect. Can you talk about how that works? And how do you answer to people that want to know about the sort of big brother concerns

• 26:02David Ulevitch?

  and surveillance state kind of concerns? How do you deal with the people that ask those important questions too?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's just three key points. I think the first, I think this is a benefit. I've probably met with a thousand mayors in the last five years. And we have incredibly rich, diverse country. It's great. We can be different. But like, our differences are so small in the spectrum of people's point of view on the world. Like, we all believe we should be safe. We should believe we have some sense of liberties. And I live in one, which is Atlanta. And so the way we think about it is like, I don't set the rules in Austin. And so from a data retention, from a transparency, from an auditing, the chief has a tough job in Austin. He has seven days of data retention. And he has to show up every single month and provide an audit of every single search that's conducted on his system. That's dramatically different than in Dallas, or in Tulsa, or Oklahoma City,

• 26:51Speaker 02

  where the chief doesn't have to do that. And they have a one-year data retention. Because that's what's appropriate for them. And I'm sure the sheriff has his own set of rules that he feels is comfortable for his community. Because like, we don't have to have the same thing. We should all agree that we feel safe. So the first is, we put the onus on the community to self-manage. Like, the city council, the mayor, they were elected. And the sheriff, in this case, was elected to protect his community. We should give him those tools. I think the second thing is, people have this misconceived notion that we are like, getting closer to pre-COG, or we're going to predict a crime has happened. We don't do that as a business. So the way we think about the business is creating a rules engine that allows people whose actual job, as a detective, as an asset protection individual, to assess what is suspicious.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  I also think it's important to take a perceptive of, we've already given up the traditional sense of privacy, because we enjoy having Instagram and Facebook and the internet. This is actually dramatically less. And we live in a pretty safe world, given those trade-offs.

• 27:50David Ulevitch?

  Absolutely. As a follow-up, because I think maybe not everyone knows, it's not just public safety organizations and law enforcement organizations.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  If you look at most of our revenue concentration, it's pretty common that the community is spending more money on FLOCK than the police department. So if I pull up the Las Vegas map, you're gonna see the sheriff's 180 or so cameras. And then you're gonna see all these other dots on the map. And you're like, oh, that's the Wynn Hotel. They added four cameras to cover their parking lot. The sheriff has access to those. He's getting alerts. It's a symbiotic relationship where the Wynn Hotel is saying, we want to be safe. We know it is your job. We know it is not a reasonable thing to ask you to put these cameras here. And that's the same for neighborhoods. It's the same for small business owners. It's this idea that if we work together, we can be much more powerful and successful.

• 28:38David Ulevitch?

  Sheriff, tell us a little bit about the process you go through to roll out new technology in Las Vegas, both on the officer training side, but also the community engagement process.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So I think it's interesting when you talk about privacy. As Garrett mentioned, there really isn't a whole lot of privacy left in the world, in the world that we live in today. And people know that and understand it. What they really care about is whether or not the police department has access to this information. And so, because they don't want us to be J. Edgar Hoover's FBI building dossiers on people that are not doing anything. And I completely understand that. I agree with that. I think it's really interesting. And I think probably the single most effective way for us was that we engaged all of our critics from the very get go. We bring them down to the real time crime center. We allow them to physically watch what is actually happening with the technologies. Probably the biggest issue we had

• 29:32Speaker 01

  was along the facial recognition technology piece. And we use facial recognition technology, but we only use it as a tool within an investigation. And we only bounce that facial recognition technology off of jail management systems. So booking photos, people that have already been booked for a crime. And people understand that a lot better, right? We're looking at Kevin McMahon as having potentially committed a crime. There's a picture that looks like Kevin McMahon. We put it in, we verify it. But you can't utilize that as probable cause. And you can't actively utilize cameras to actually utilize facial recognition technology. So groups like the ACLU, NAACP, we've just rolled the red carpet out to them to see every piece of technology we have

• 30:16Speaker 01

  and explain in those investigations, how the technology was utilized to actually help us develop the leads that good gumshoe detectives then have to use to follow up in those pieces. Because they want to start at it's not effective and there's nefarious use for it. Once we get them in and let them see it, then they become our biggest proponents of it. And I don't have to spend a lot of time convincing anybody afterwards because they're out doing that themselves.

• 30:44David Ulevitch?

  We talked about what does the future look like for law enforcement backstage from 911 to robotics and Robocop? What would you want to see if you could ask for anything or things that you'd love to see introduced into your position to keep communities safe?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  We have a robo dog already. So now we have this dog that we send in, the thing walks in, the guy can kick it over if he wants to, the dog can get back up and keep doing, gives us the ability to communicate. I think people like you are the ones that are going to be exposed to the things that we need and you all will help us determine how it is that we can utilize those. I think the advances in 911 probably right now are the things that excite me the most. I'll give you one example of this. When 1 October happened, in the first minute, we had 9,000 911 calls.

• 31:26David Ulevitch?

  Crazy.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  There's no call center in the world that can handle 9,000 911 calls. And imagine if you had an emergency aside from the mass shooting, we would have never even got to your call for hours or days even. So that ability to use AI and technology within that 911 call center to appropriately direct calls, to answer those calls in a timely manner is a really exciting innovation for me as we move that forward. And I know we're all continuing to work on it.

• 31:54David Ulevitch?

  And Garrett, any closing remarks on the future roadmap of technology?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The thing that I heard a long time ago, I think from someone in this group, was the future is actually already here, it's just unevenly distributed. So in the case of Flock, our future is that crime is no longer a problem. My kids are five and three and I'd like to think that when they're my age, they'll be like, wait, so it used to be like unsafe? Like you used to actually have to worry about your personal safety? And the reality is that's already happening. We've got dozens of agencies that like the sheriff are at 100% clearance rate on violent crime and they are approaching 100% clearance rate on nonviolent crime. I want to go live there. And I think that's going to get faster and faster. If you go to a place like Elk Grove, California, for any of y'all in Northern California, the Bay Area, they're in the future.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  So in their real time crime centers, they get all their 911 calls. They have our DFR product. So when a 911 call comes in, a gunshot detection, a stolen car, they have strategically placed about a dozen of our drones and docks throughout the city. They can get to any call for service in 30 seconds.

• 32:59David Ulevitch?

  Amazing.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Imagine the change in quality of life for that community where they know, no matter what is happening, law enforcement can be there in 30 seconds. And I think that will fundamentally change the way we think about our relationship with law enforcement and our overall quality of life.

• 33:15David Ulevitch?

  Awesome. Well, thank you both. Thank you, Sher, for all the work that you do and for taking time out of your day to be here. And thank you, Garrett.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 33:21David Ulevitch?

  Thank you.

• 33:25Steph Smith?

  If you liked this episode, if you made it this far, help us grow the show. Share with a friend or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. You know, candidly, producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking into a void. And so if you did like this episode, if you liked any of our episodes, please let us know. I'll see you next time.