> “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”<p>So this guy admits he did things that he shouldn't have then contends that he shouldn't have to say sorry for them? Am I reading this right? Isn't the point of an apology to acknowledge the bad outcome and signal to aggrieved parties that the offender will try avoid repeating the negative behavior? If yes and this guy is refusing to do it then what does that say about his world view?
Well, at least he won't have to apologize to his wife for throwing her under the bus.
Have you ever lived in a red state? In a rural area? "Never apologize, especially when you know you're wrong" is a foundational principle in many cultures and households.
I live in a rural area in a red state and it's quite the opposite. People are perhaps maybe a bit too apologetic. I think the unwillingness to apologize or acknowledge oneself as wrong is a symptom of emotional immaturity rather than political persuasion.
It is more contextual than a simple binary, especially the emotional context. If the event triggers their shame more than their identity, you get the larger than required apologies. If their identity is the primary thing that is triggered, they will get defensive and double down. It's not just a rural thing.
This attitude is also very common for law enforcement or prosecutors.
As is throwing your wife under the bus when you get challenged.
I mean, it works for the president of the US. I think this attitude is a lot more common than people would like to admit.
Only due to the cultural shift over the past 10 years, I would say. You also see it coming out of “streamer” culture, as well as evangelical “prosperity gospel” culture, where any means justify the ends of acquiring wealth - and no shame need be felt.
The president is unlikely to feel consequences for the attitude, but Langley likely will as Flock enterprise value trends towards zero.<p><i>Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835</a> - September 2026 (45 comments)<p><i>Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August</i> - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate-flock-contracts-at-record-pace-in-august/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate...</a> - August 28th, 2026
I think his point is that the people that are against the technology will never change their mind, regardless of what you do to assuage them. It's a lost cause.<p>Everyone and every business makes mistakes. We don't go on an apology tour every time we make a mistake. On the net he believes he's doing good in this world.<p>For instance, a mistake he spoke about was not providing strict enough guards on operators, allowing them to conduct unlawful searches. He's since corrected that and looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this? Is the anti-flock lunatic cutting down cameras going to read the press release and think "gee, Flock is turning a new leaf", obviously not. It just adds more fuel to the fire taking away from the good work they do.
Flock's value proposition is essentially Uber's, except instead of evading taxi regs Flock lets your LEOs evade the need to get warrants.
Flock does not do good work.<p>Flock enables mass surveillance of a type that destroys liberty, and is opposed by sensible people who understand freedom, history, and who respect the brave men and women who have fought for our rights.<p>Flock is defended exclusively by pathetic, weak little men who are afraid of their own shadows, and who (wrongly) believe that unchecked government power is a good thing.
If allowing unlawful searches to be done is just a little whoopsie, then all the actions by those "lunatics" you're complaining about are even less than a little whoopsie.
Historically it was an easy step going from "these people are not real" to "these people are now dead".
What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?
If it generates profit, yes.
Many of the Nazis didn't kill people themselves, they just helped in the process.
>What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?<p>No, he'll merely <i>facilitate</i> that, at scale.<p>IBM <i>technically</i> didn't kill any Jews too in WW2[1].<p>[1]<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.highereducation" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...</a>
More like another reason for cops to mow down protesters. True Citizens would never protest something so obviously beneficial to everyone /s
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Good did not hit an officer with her car, and was driving <i>away</i> from him when she was shot through the side window of her car.<p>Pretti was <i>legally</i> armed and was shot and killed while face down on the ground.<p>This is all corroborated with video and contradicts statements from the involved federal agents. Charitably they were “mistaken”, realistically they lied to cover themselves.<p>There are many more instances where federal agents lied about what happened and their accounts were later refuted by eyewitness testimony <i>and</i> video. Just in those cases the victims did not die. Look up all the cases that were thrown out of court because government’s case rested on falsehoods.
>Do cops really "mow down protestors"?<p>Yes [1].<p>>The only cases I could find are ...<p>I am aware that Google's search quality has gone down, but surely not to <i>that</i> extent.<p>Or, as kids say today: skill issue.<p>> Alex Pretti who was armed at the time and arguably resisting arrest<p>> arguably<p>As argued by the people who killed him, of course.<p>In any case, ICE are <i>not police</i>, i.e. not <i>cops</i>, so I dunno why you would derail the discussion to ICE if you are talking in good faith.<p>Cheers.<p>[1] <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/</a>
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That's why the dehumanizing title "illegals" exists for immigrants.
"Illegal alien" is a term used throughout federal immigration law, e.g. <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366" rel="nofollow">https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366</a>
Cowardly fragile male ego threatened by a changing world feels a need to join in the tribal dehumanization of others to prop up a false sense of superiority and security. How sad.
"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.<p>It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.<p>Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.
You are implying that the law cannot be dehumanizing?
That doesn't make it exempt from being dehumanizing. Indeed codified dehumanization is one the primary mechanisms by which it is realized.
The current regime is openly racist and dehumanizing towards many groups, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
"Illegals" != "Illegal alien"
That's just some kind of language bifurcation by political affiliation in the US. The right-wing term for immigrants who didn't enter the US through ports with documentation is indeed "illegals", though it seems the word "immigrants" is as pejorative among that crowd. The left-wing term for immigrants, both domestic and international and irrespective of arrival method is "transplant" and is fairly pejorative as well. I don't think "transplant" is any more specifically humanizing.<p>It's just that documentation-status matters to one, and does not matter to the other.
"Transplant" is certainly not any kind of mainstream left term in the USA, and this is the first time I have ever heard the claim. The left counterpart of the right's "illegal immigrant" is instead "undocumented immigrant" vel sim.<p>It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in <i>their</i> lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of <i>The X-Files</i> theme tune.
Transplant means anyone who moves into your city, in my experience. It has a kind of NIMBY ish or anti gentrification tone, like "NJ transplants don't understand like real new yorkers" but I don't think it refers to immigration specifically.
I have never heard the word transplant use that way. I prefer to simply use "immigrants."<p>I have heard liberals emphasize "undocumented" instead of "illegal" which makes sense to me.
It's everywhere though. Not to detract from the massive problem of mass surveillance, but just recently when that data center in Russia got, and those derpy images of "stats about Russian" bots were circulated, I saw a lot of "the right-wing support is not organic" stuff.<p>Something is driving people into bubbles so they only talk <i>about</i> the other, never <i>with</i>. And both agree that "centrists", "normies", etc. are the most despicable of all. Seems like a recipe for <i>something</i>.
> Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”<p>So every other law enforcement tool has also been subjected to russian troll farms and eventually the fake furor dies down?<p>Or is he admitting that those of us who don't stand to make billions off of a private surveillance network are actually the real humans here?
Better not prosecute people who cut down the cameras then, since that's part of the non-real backlash.
Clearly a company denying that the public comprises real people with real autonomy should be entrusted with privacy issues.
The anti-Americanness Langley exhibits boggles my mind.
How do you do, fellow russian bots?
Is this "unreal backlash" in the room with us right now?
The Flock CEO is another example of investor blindness to founder weirdness. It used to be a positive signal if a founder was a bit odd. But compared to current tech industry leaders, what's odd?<p>Garrett Langley scares the normies. That's fine if your audience is just cops. But it doesn't go over well with the public at large. By many accounts Steve Jobs could be a raging asshole, but he never showed that face to the public. But if the people advising you are accelerationists with a thing for the antichrist, you're going to be clueless about what normal people think of you.
I'm attending in-person local political organizing meetings and we're all just locals concerned about, among other things, Flock.<p>I would like to personally register my own homegrown, organic, hard-working American backlash.
As soon as you make vague and unsubstantiated claims that people physically gathering to protest against you (or your company) are paid protestors you immediately lose whatever credibility you had in the first place (though you likely had very little already if this is where you are) in the eyes of anyone with a functional brain.
Why you shouldn't hang out in echo chambers, at least not exclusively. I'm sure in this guy's echo chambers it's all great.
"Paid protesters"<p>Every accusation is a confession. Flock pays for support. They have a marketing department and they tell cops what to tell elected officials to think.
Can you remind me where I can submit my invoices to get paid for my protests? I must have misplaced my memo
It would be funnier if it was paid protesters that they had paid so that they could say that.
Ah yes, the "all criticism is fake news" strategy.
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You can't blame Flock. They're making the very safe bet that cops are very, very stupid and have a lot of xenophobic, conspiratorial theories about crime.<p>Meanwhile, Flock is in and of itself a conspiracy. The only way to fight (imagined, arbitrary) conspiracies is (of course) to conspire. They won't fight fair, so you can't either.<p>It's important to mention that mainstream liberals and European radical NATO centrists believe exactly the same thing, just aimed at the people who they're afraid of. Neither side, the social liberal centrists or the anti-social liberal centrists, is going to slow the adoption of Flock at all. Eventually somebody is going to drag out Obama (at significant cost) to defend it in some commencement speech, and he will also blame the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs, and <i>youthful idealism.</i> To "No Kings" liberals, this will be <i>completely different.</i><p>It's a false equivalence, they'll say. Somebody taught them that a few years ago. Then they'll say something about "whataboutism," and finish up by explaining how two things can be true at the same time.
As with most antistate issues today, there is a mix of bots/institutional interference (both foreign and domestic), and real people. Both can be true.
Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.
Unless you've been very careful to only surround yourself with people who share your exact views, you probably <i>do</i> know some. They just don't speak up, because: what's the point debating it with you?
Data centers and Flock are the two things uniting left and right protesters.
I think this point is most accurate. I know a few pro-Flock people - most are either working for a YC company or are in the process of their application.
The vast majority of people are not pro-techno fascism and mass surveillance. I think you'd have to work very hard to find that kind of person. People on the left and the right are very united in their hatred of spy cams.
I am a pro-flock real person. I'll get down-voted and likely flagged for saying this so you may believe I don't exist but I do.<p>Crime has gone down considerably in the last two years.<p>> The declines were reflected in several of the FBI’s long-term measures. The 2025 robbery rate of 49.4 per 100,000 was the lowest in 20 years, while the rape rate of 36.1 was the lowest since 2012. The murder rate was the lowest in the past 20 years.<p>I imagine giving police the ability to apprehend violent criminals through technology is driving this reduction in crime. Not a stretch. You can think that this is not worth the tradeoff, but if you think giving police a tool like Flock will not have an impact of apprehension of criminals you have your head in the sand.<p><a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-historic-rate-new-fbi-data-show" rel="nofollow">https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-hist...</a><p><a href="https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flock-mass-surveillance-and-the-collapse" rel="nofollow">https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flock-mass-surveillance-and...</a>
Supervisor Matt Dorsey in San Francisco is pro-camera-enforcement and I was glad to be able to meet him and thank him for his efforts both for speed cameras and for ALPR in San Francisco. For my part, I'm not wedded to Flock so if people get upset about the brand name, I'm happy if the government uses Axon instead to provide the same outcome. The use of drone policing, ALPR, and speed cameras has substantially improved safety in San Francisco.
Yeah, I am generally pro-surveillance of public spaces and public property, but I think Flock has taken a particularly careless approach to the project. I would much rather have another vendor simply sell the cameras to the municipality and have the government administer the network, rather than have a company like Flock retain the data themselves and make it available to unknown third parties. You can maintain public oversight much more directly that way.
Take flock out of some cities and see if their crime trend continues. I expect you'll find the cameras really don't move the needle much.
In Houston, three cameras near an attempted child abduction had been cut down. Police Chief Noe Diaz said investigators consequently could not use them to identify and track the suspect's red sedan.<p>Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals. It obviously does. It only makes sense that a police officer having access to cameras that track license plates in real time would help apprehend criminals escaping capture. Come on, you don't seriously believe this. What would have to be true about the world, police, criminals etc of this not to be true.<p><a href="https://www.police1.com/alprs-in-focus/why-cities-are-rethinking-alprs-and-how-police-agencies-are-responding" rel="nofollow">https://www.police1.com/alprs-in-focus/why-cities-are-rethin...</a>
The issue, of course, isn't how cameras can be used to help apprehend criminals. It's that they can be abused by people who have access to them, in ways we haven't even imagined yet. People don't trust that appropriate safeguards are in place, and it's not clear how to defend against abuses, or that it's even possible. In a society that supposedly prioritizes liberty, privacy, and innocence until proven guilty, such technology should be treated with maximum suspicion.
Have you tried zooming out on the stats at all, or analyzing any other variables? You realize there was a crazy spike in crime in the wake of the pandemic, right? Certainly a reversion to the mean might happen alongside the implementation of cameras.<p>My own city's police (Redwood City, CA) credited Flock cameras with an increase in the clearance rate from 12% to 13%. Pardon me if I don't go out and celebrate.
You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.
SF has (had?) a lot of car thefts.<p>Suppose there was a technology where, when you report your car as stolen, police would be able to track exactly where this car is currently and it's history over the last 2 weeks.<p>You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?
> You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?<p>Speaking as a San Francisco resident: No. SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property.<p>Speaking as a USian: Even if it <i>did</i> lead the cops right to the car <i>and</i> provided <i>unimpeachable</i> evidence that what the footage showed was a <i>theft</i>, rather than something legal, I still don't want these electronic mass-surveillance systems to be deployed. Dragnet surveillance is plainly unacceptable.<p>If -somehow- we can magically build such surveillance systems to be <i>completely</i> unable to provide data that's unrelated to a search warrant or other such court order, I'd reconsider my stance. However, building such a system is simply impossible.
This is a myopic view of the situation. Suppose you had $100M to spend. What would lower crime more:<p>1. Helping to shelter the homeless, deal with mental health issues and make sure people are properly fed.<p>2. Build a mass surveillance network at the expense of all of the above.<p>Regardless, mass surveillance is far worse than any amount of car theft.
The police (and larger state apparatus) turning antagonistic toward the public will certainly increase crime, not decrease it. When cops go to war with literally everyone, the "law" will cease to apply in any meaningful way. A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.
Because the rest of the people just don't care about it and understand the technology has been a thing for a long time. You know 100 people that want to take them down but you probably also know 1000 people who don't care and aren't even speaking about it. People just became obsessed with one company, then some agitators sprinkled in a healthy dose of antisemitism plus conspiracies, now you got the public lynching of a company. It's unfortunate.<p>Don't get me wrong, Flock did have and still has some issues, just like any other company. They've been trying to fix the issues. But, as far as I'm concerned, the positives heavily outweigh the negatives, even though there are rare cases of abuse.
I ran an in depth study of Flock for my city. It's been deployed here for several years. What I found is that there is no statistically significant correlation between Flock being installed and any reduction in any kind of crime. I suspect my city is not unique in this regard.<p>Flock rode a post-COVID wave of general crime reduction and claimed responsibility for it, but it appears that the only meaningfully effective use of Flock is for stalking, terrorizing immigrants, assembling opposition dossiers, and parallel construction.
It doesn't seem to me like Flock would reduce crime but increase the rate at which crime's are solved. Maybe a better stat would be median age of a criminal case involving a vehicle before and after Flock was deployed.<p>edit: i dont know if any stat would work at the city level, the advantage of Flock is the network works across state/county lines. So someone committing a crime in one state and then driving all night can still be located two states away without police departments having to coordinate a search.
I think its more likely that people don't know about Flock, not that they don't care.
Antisemitism? Public lynching? We're talking about a fascist spy company not a human being.
> healthy dose of antisemitism<p>Uh, what?
The concern with this is that it gives any company/government/etc. latitude to plant paid protestors or bot traffic in order to undermine opposition with greater efficacy in the AI era. Intelligence agencies have understood this tactic for many years.