Flock cameras and chatbots: How AI is reshaping emergency services

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for Here & Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Garrett Langley** (0:21)
We don't want chaos, or I don't want chaos. I like law and order. I like a society that has a bedrock of safety.

**Chris Bentley** (0:28)
Companies selling mass surveillance to cops say they're making the world safer, and that the citizens vandalizing those cameras are terrorists.
It's Friday, August 28th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, we're looking at some of the ways first responders are using artificial intelligence.

**Jason Koebler** (1:03)
From cops using AI-enabled cameras and online AI personas, having these fake personas entrapping people, is this the type of society we want to live in?

**Chris Bentley** (1:12)
to emergency dispatchers turning to AI for help with non-urgent calls, lightening the workload for their human operators.

**Roxy Van Gundy** (1:20)
Our first shift was going for 12 solid hours, and they were having to put 911 calls on hold to answer non-emergency calls.

**Chris Bentley** (1:33)
But first, let's talk FLOC.
Thousands of law enforcement agencies have struck deals with companies peddling AI-assisted cameras that read license plates. FLOC is the biggest but not the only one, and the proliferation of their cameras has sparked widespread backlash over mass surveillance, and enabled some abuse of that data by cops, which the Washington Post's Drew Harwell told us about recently.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:59)
We found officers using the mapping feature of FLOC to basically look up the location and travels of mostly women in their life, wives, exes, women they wanted to meet.

**Chris Bentley** (2:13)
Now, since people have been reporting on FLOC, the company has announced some new accountability standards. Law enforcement will now have to use an audit tool that flags abnormal search behavior. And the company says it's shortened how long it holds data by default from 30 days to seven.
Kevin Collier of NBC News has been on this, and he told Rob Schmitz more about the company at the center of the story. FLOC is a police surveillance company, relatively new on the scene. It was founded in 2017 by a guy named Garrett Langley. He saw a police tech industry that was a little slow, a little stodgy, and he saw that there was some room for kind of a more Silicon Valley approach to that industry. It means you could pitch cities and police stations and sheriff's office on kind of more data-centric, high-tech, all-encompassing subscription model. And this subscription model part is pretty important here because FLOC takes care of everything for the departments. They don't have to maintain their own cameras, which is huge for an office that doesn't want to send people out to tinker with the cameras and steal the cameras. It also means that kind of the default mode when FLOC came onto the scene was every police department sharing all their information of every American's movement along these roads and intersections with each other. And so this kind of created a de facto national database where police could log in and see movement of other Americans across the country without a warrant.

**Rob Schmitz** (3:28)
So tell me about where FLOC's cameras are being used. Like how widespread is their technology in the United States?

**Chris Bentley** (3:35)
Very widespread. We've got hundreds of thousands of cameras installed. I believe in 49 states that we know of. They're kind of everywhere.

**Rob Schmitz** (3:43)
You know, as I said, there's obviously a lot of criticism, a lot of backlash from politicians across the political spectrum, from local community groups, even former employees. Here's one former FLOC staffer, Jonathan Paz, speaking at a town hall meeting in Walton, Massachusetts in March.

**Jonathan Paz** (3:59)
You know, FLOC basically sold me this dream that we were all confined to missing people. And it didn't take very long to understand this very hard truth. Companies like these, their only role is to help the government spy on them.
Their only role as surveillance companies is to bypass public scrutiny and just surveil, surveil, surveil with them.

**Rob Schmitz** (4:22)
Should we note here that Paz is now running for Congress in Massachusetts as a Democrat. Kevin, how big has the backlash against FLOC been?

**Chris Bentley** (4:31)
I have covered surveillance technology for more than a decade, and I've never seen anything like this. And I think one aspect of this is really remarkable, is how genuinely bipartisan it is. You can see people who are libertarian-bending, who say, no, I don't want the government tracking me, and you can see people who are further on the left, who say, well, this information can be used for immigration enforcement, for example.