In brief
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley told Fox News that the country has to prioritize a compromise between privacy and safety.
He compared calls for an outright ban to banning vehicles, pointing to drunk driving and seatbelt laws as the better model.
Langley's remarks followed a Washington Post investigation that found police departments were not auditing how officers used the cameras.
The CEO of Flock Safety has called for "compromise" amid a growing backlash against the company's AI-powered license plate cameras, which have been vandalized across the country and have drawn bipartisan fire in Congress."What we have to prioritize as a country is compromise," Garrett Langley told Fox News in an interview broadcast Saturday, arguing that Americans who frame the argument as a choice between privacy and safety are "prioritizing the wrong thing."Flock has united lawmakers who agree on little else. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said this month he would introduce legislation to stop "AI mass surveillance," and House Republicans led by Representative Tim Burchett have introduced a bill barring the federal government from buying Flock cameras. Missouri Republican Josh Hawley has opened a separate Senate inquiry.An outright ban, Langley argued, would be "like banning vehicles"—a response the country rejected in favor of drunk driving statutes, seatbelts and airbags. He named two things regulators should fix instead: data retention, where Flock recently cut its own recommendation to seven days against a strictest-in-the-nation state limit of 21, and accountability for officers who abuse the system. "The person who wants a bad cop gone first is a good cop, and 99.9% of cops are good," he said.
