Surveillance camera startup Flock Safety and its leadership have frequently asserted that their technology plays a massive role in clearing criminal cases across the United States. In a March podcast interview, CEO Garrett Langley stated that the firm helped clear just over a million crimes nationally during the previous year. He repeated a similar figure to an automotive publication, noting that over a million cases were resolved using their technology while maintaining that privacy abuses remained exceptionally low. Last month, a company blog post announcing privacy updates reiterated that Flock technology assists law officers in more than one million solved crimes annually. According to last year we helped clear just over a million crimes in America,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley, In a March 2026 podcast interview.
However, an independent review revealed that the assertion of one million solved crimes in 2025 lacks support from available evidence. When questioned for clarification, Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel offered a different perspective, explaining that the figure encompasses various deployments rather than direct clearances alone. According to Lewbel, the estimate includes investigative leads, cross-jurisdictional assistance, active search operations, and general deployments. He stated that the most precise description is that Flock technology supported approximately one million investigations and incidents.
The company did not address whether Langley used imprecise phrasing when claiming the system solved one million crimes, nor did they provide underlying data to substantiate the figure. Flock initially detailed its methodology in a May blog post regarding its 2025 Impact Census, which involved roughly 700 participating law enforcement agencies. That study indicated that 20 percent of cleared cases within customer jurisdictions last year received assistance from Flock technology. The organization explained that 307 agencies provided percentage estimates, which were then cross-referenced with FBI crime and clearance statistics for each respective department. The one million figure, however, was derived through a separate, broader calculation encompassing multiple use cases. According to flock, Agencies that formally tracked outcomes supplied raw counts, while others provided percentage estimates. When the city council in Costa Mesa, California, considered whether to continue its contract with Flock this summer at an annual cost of $151,800, city records show, its police department issued a positive recommendation that cited in part the claim that “Flock technology assisted in solving an estimated 20% of cleared cases” in 2025. The white paper is an analysis based on survey responses Flock received from 477 agencies, 123 of which supplied data used in the final model.
Independent data analysts have dismissed the reliability of these statistical claims. Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, characterized the figures as having little practical value. Footnotes attached to the company blog post explicitly note that the impact census figures represent directional estimates rather than audited metrics. These disputed statistics have increasingly surfaced during local government deliberations regarding municipal surveillance contracts. For instance, the Costa Mesa City Council in California debated its ongoing contract costing roughly $350,000 annually before voting 6-1 to retain the cameras while renegotiating terms. According to it’s worth about the paper it’s printed on,”, Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who is a proponent of the technology. “…But I think if you look under the hood of the academic research, that still points you in a direction of there’s an effect — it’s just a smaller effect. On July 21, Costa Mesa City Council voted 6-1 to keep the cameras but renegotiate the city’s contract with Flock. According to a major issue with Flock’s study is that even if Flock is used to help with a case, “it doesn’t necessarily mean in a counterfactual world where Flock cameras didn’t exist, the case wouldn’t have been solved,”, Andrew Wheeler, a criminologist and data scientist at Gainwell Technologies who has published research on automated license plate technology.
Criminologists argue that even with proper caveats, fundamental flaws persist in how the company measures its impact. University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor William Wheeler pointed out that assistance in an investigation does not guarantee the crime would have remained unsolved otherwise. Because the company’s study failed to account for such counterfactual scenarios, Wheeler concluded that the million-crimes figure represents a gross overestimation. This is not the first instance where the firm’s statistics have faced intense scrutiny from researchers.
In 2024, the company began publicizing that its technology proved instrumental in solving 10 percent of all reported crimes nationwide. That claim originated from a press release accompanying a white paper authored by two internal employees. Notably, the specific 10-percent figure does not appear anywhere within the text of the white paper itself. Instead, the document concluded that each additional camera per sworn officer correlated with a 9.1-percentage-point increase in an agency’s clearance rate. The paper noted it was created in consultation with academics Johnny Nhan from Texas Christian University and Richard Helfers from the University of Texas at Tyler.
Wheeler criticized the methodology of the 2024 paper when it was published, while consultant Johnny Nhan subsequently distanced himself from its conclusions when questioned by media outlets. Nhan explained that although he discussed an early draft, the underlying methods and data sources were not disclosed to the external consultants. Conversely, promotional material released by Flock in 2024 featured a quote attributed to Nhan praising the company’s transparency throughout the process. When directly asked during an August interview whether peer-reviewed studies validate these national crime-solving claims, Langley acknowledged that no such peer-reviewed research exists.
Despite the lack of formal academic validation, Langley pointed to specific monthly detection metrics as definitive evidence of efficacy. He highlighted that during the previous month, the system detected 1,025 missing individuals and 22,000 stolen vehicles, arguing that such detections directly generate valuable investigative leads for law enforcement personnel.
