Flock Safety’s claim that its technology helped solve more than one million crimes in the US in 2025 is not supported by the available evidence, while experts have questioned the methods used to produce the figure.
Garrett Langley, the company’s chief executive, has repeatedly used the statistic in public appearances and company material. In a podcast interview in March 2026, he said: “Last year we helped clear just over a million crimes in America.”
He later told the automotive publication The Drive that “over a million cases were solved last year with this technology”, and described the level of abuse of the system as “incredibly low relative to that”.
Flock has since offered a broader explanation of the figure. Spokesman Paris Lewbel said it included case clearances, investigative leads, assistance across jurisdictions, searches during active investigations and other deployments.
“The most precise way to describe our 2025 national estimate is that Flock technology supported approximately 1 million investigations and incidents,” Mr Lewbel said.
The company did not say whether Mr Langley had been imprecise in describing the figure as one million crimes solved, and did not provide the underlying data used to support it.
How Flock calculated the figure
Flock set out its methodology in a May 2026 blog post detailing the results of its 2025 Impact Census, which involved about 700 law enforcement agencies using its system.
Agencies that formally tracked outcomes supplied raw counts, while others provided percentage estimates. Flock said the study found that its technology assisted in 20% of cleared cases in customer jurisdictions during 2025.
That finding was based partly on responses from 307 agencies which supplied percentage estimates. The responses were then compared with FBI crime and clearance data for each participating agency.
The one million figure was calculated separately and covered “all use cases”, including direct case clearances, investigative leads, assistance between police departments and field deployments. Flock’s own notes described the figures as directional estimates rather than audited totals, adding that the methodology was “not a finished product”.
Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who supports the technology, said the claims were of limited value. “It’s worth about the paper it’s printed on,” he said, while adding that academic research still pointed towards an effect, albeit a smaller one.
Andrew Wheeler, a criminologist and data scientist who has published research on automated number plate technology, said that the study failed to account for whether cases would have been solved without Flock cameras.
“The ‘a million crimes solved’ is probably a gross over-estimate based on that particular work,” Mr Wheeler said.
He said Flock’s analysis had not used established empirical methods to account for that counterfactual.
The company’s claims have nevertheless appeared in local government discussions. In Costa Mesa, California, a police recommendation to continue a Flock contract costing 151,800 dollars a year cited the estimate that the technology had assisted in solving 20% of cleared cases in 2025.
The city council later voted by six to one to retain the cameras while renegotiating the contract.
Earlier Flock crime claims also questioned
Flock’s figures have faced scrutiny before. In 2024, it began saying that its technology was “instrumental in solving 10% of reported crimes in the U.S.”
That claim was linked to a white paper written by two Flock employees and based on survey responses from 477 agencies. Only 123 agencies provided data used in the final statistical model, and they were not randomly selected, meaning they were not shown to represent the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country.
The paper itself did not contain the 10% figure. Instead, it concluded that each additional camera per sworn officer was associated with a 9.1 percentage-point increase in an agency’s number plate reader-assisted clearance rate.
One of the academics consulted on the paper, Johnny Nhan, later said he had discussed some of the work but had not been familiar with the methods and data sources in sufficient detail. He said he personally did not want to assess its conclusions about effectiveness or the impact on crime rates.
In an interview in August, Mr Langley acknowledged that there was no peer-reviewed study supporting Flock’s national crime-solving claims. “No, there’s no peer-reviewed study, and we’re not articulating that it was peer-reviewed,” he said.
He instead pointed to figures for July showing 1,025 missing people detected and 22,000 stolen cars detected. Flock later clarified that those figures referred to unique vehicle detections involving vehicles associated with records in national crime and missing-person databases.
The detection of a vehicle connected to a missing-person case is not the same as detecting the missing person. Flock has said its number plate cameras do not use facial recognition technology.
Inconsistent figures on company material
Several crime-solving figures displayed on Flock’s website and company documents were also difficult to reconcile.
A 2026 company fact sheet said Flock technology was being used to solve more than 2,000 crimes a day and accounted for more than 10% of all reported crime in the US. Another page of the same document referred to more than 2,800 crimes solved each week, equivalent to about 400 a day.
The company’s frequently asked questions page separately referred to more than 1,000 crimes solved per day and more than 2,200 crimes solved per week.
Mr Lewbel said the figures had been published at different times and reflected different periods, datasets and methodologies. Following questions about the claims, the fact sheet and other documents were no longer available, while the daily figure of more than 1,000 crimes solved was removed from the FAQ page.
Flock has raised more than 1 billion dollars from Silicon Valley investors and has been valued at about 8.4 billion dollars. Mr Langley has continued to present the million-case figure as evidence of the technology’s benefits while acknowledging concerns about privacy abuse.
“I look at the million-plus cases and go, OK, this is a trade-off that I can make,” he said in a recorded talk. “But that’s my choice.”
