Can a camera on every corner make us safer? | Garrett Langley

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. A network of license plate readers, cameras, drones and audio sensors is already changing how some police departments in the US investigate crime. And if you live here, there's a good chance you've passed one of Flock's cameras without realizing it.
Garrett Langley founded Flock, and he says the technology helps bring safety to communities everywhere. But the technology his company has built also raises urgent questions about privacy, policing, and surveillance.

**Garrett Langley** (0:42)
Whether this is a constitutional violation, what does this mean to my privacy? And are you building mass surveillance? Pretty good questions.

**Elise Hu** (0:49)
In his talk, he says the old model of policing, officers driving around looking for suspicious activity was low and riddled with bias, while data-driven technology can get to the truth faster.
A national network of cameras and sensors isn't a simple idea, and it's a controversial one. Garrett takes on the hardest questions about his company's technology. The biases that exist in training models, who owns this data, how long it's stored, who gets access, and what happens when these tools are abused?

**Garrett Langley** (1:22)
With everything that's powerful should come heightened responsibility.

**Elise Hu** (1:26)
Stick around after the talk for a brief Q&A between Garrett and TED Chairman Chris Anderson. We'll then hear from TED's tech curator, Bilawal Sidhu, about why he brought Garrett to the TED stage, and why he thinks the conversation around safety, privacy, and surveillance can't be avoided. It's all coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Garrett Langley** (1:55)
I'm gonna start with a story.
Speaking to a grandmother in rural Tennessee, and she was taking care of her 11-year-old granddaughter.
So she wakes up, she walks into her room, the bed's empty. She looks around, there's no note, there's nothing. If your heart's not racing right now, it should be. She calls 911, detective arrives. No sign of force, there's nothing, except one thing that he remembered. There's a flock camera just down the street. So he pulls out his phone and runs a search for the night and finds one car.
He runs that tag and it's his worst nightmare. It's a registered sex offender. So he logs in a flock and he's looking for this car and he sees the car is traveling down I-75. And if you're not familiar with Tennessee and Georgia, that's the connecting state. It's the highway. The person's on the highway.
The detective doesn't know what to do. So he does whatever hero does as he moves into action. He jumps in his car and races down I-75.
As he approaches the interstate line, he sees the vehicle. Violent struggles pursues. And at the end, he hears crying.
And the girl's in the back.
She's bound, but she's alive.
They went on to go search the suspect's house, and the nightmare got scarier. Everything one would need to not only assault, but dispose of the body was there.
And that girl's alive today because the detective had two things. He had a license plate, and he had direction to travel. This, for me, is one of thousands of stories I sadly hear about every day in America. I started Flock nine years ago because of this exact type of problem. See, I live in a city called Atlanta, and I was frustrated. Crime felt too easy to get away with. It didn't make sense to me that you could steal someone's car and have an 80 percent chance of getting away with it. Or you could kill someone and have a 50 percent chance of getting away with it. So I kept pushing, kept pushing, and eventually I found a major in the Atlanta Police Department who told me, Mr. Langley, it's not apathy, it's not effort, it's evidence. If all we had was a license plate, we could catch these people. So I did what engineers did. I built a license plate reading camera. It sounds simple, but I called two of my best friends from Georgia Tech, and we built this camera. He said, you have to have a license plate. So we did that, put it up in my neighborhood, and about two months later, we solved our first crime. And that was the beginning of Flock. And now, as you've heard, the company has grown quite a bit since then. We do more than cameras. We build cameras now. We build drones. We build audio detection devices. We build software that connects it all together. And the concept is actually still this simple nine years later. Car drives by. We do what we call a vehicle signature. We look for the make, the model, the color, anything a detective would notice.