Faced with recent questions about the privacy costs of its technology, the surveillance camera startup Flock Safety and its CEO have deployed a tidy statistic to tout its benefits.

“Last year we helped clear just over a million crimes in America,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a March 2026 podcast interview.

“Over a million cases were solved last year with this technology,” Langley told the auto industry publication The Drive, “and the level of abuse is incredibly low relative to that.”

“Today, Flock technology assists your officers in more than one million crimes solved annually,” Langley said in a blog post last month announcing new privacy updates.

But a CBS News review finds the claim that Flock helped solve a million crimes in 2025 is not supported by the available evidence. 

In a statement for this report, Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel cast the statistic in a different framing. In addition to case clearances, he said, it includes “investigative leads, cross-jurisdictional assistance, searches conducted during active investigations, and other Flock deployments.”

“The most precise way to describe our 2025 national estimate is that Flock technology supported approximately 1 million investigations and incidents,” Lewbel said.

The company did not answer whether Langley had been imprecise in claiming Flock solved one million crimes in 2025, and did not provide CBS News with underlying data supporting that claim.

Flock first explained the source of its claims of one million crimes solved in a May 2026 blog post announcing the results of its 2025 Impact Census, in which about 700 law enforcement agencies that use Flock’s system participated. Flock says agencies that formally tracked outcomes supplied raw counts, while others provided percentage estimates. The blog post also said the study found 20% of cleared cases in customer jurisdictions in 2025 were assisted by Flock technology. 

In explaining the 20% finding, the company said 307 agencies supplied percentage estimates. Those responses were then referenced with FBI crime and clearance data for each responding agency.

The “one million crimes” statistic was a separate and broader calculation. “Across all use cases — direct case clearances, investigative leads, cross-jurisdictional assists, and field deployments — Flock supported approximately 1 million investigations and incidents during the year,” the company said in the blog post.

Experts in crime data say the company’s crime-solving statistical claims are not reliable. 

“It’s worth about the paper it’s printed on,” said 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.”

Footnotes and caveats on Flock’s blog post regarding its 2025 Impact Census say these figures are “directional estimates rather than audited totals” and that its methodology is “not a finished product.”

The company’s claims have surfaced in local government documents and deliberations as municipalities grapple with the costs and benefits of the surveillance technology.

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. 

On July 21, Costa Mesa City Council voted 6-1 to keep the cameras but renegotiate the city’s contract with Flock.

Even if its CEO described Flock’s statistical claims with all the caveats included on its website, criminologists say there are bigger issues with its methodology.

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,” said Andrew Wheeler, a criminologist and data scientist at Gainwell Technologies who has published research on automated license plate technology.

Flock’s study of 2025 crime, he said, did not use established empirical methods to account for this counterfactual.

“The ‘a million crimes solved’ is probably a gross over-estimate based on that particular work,” Wheeler said.

Disputed statistical claims

It is not the first time Flock’s statistics have come under scrutiny. 

In 2024, the company began claiming that its technology “is instrumental in solving 10% of reported crimes in the U.S.” (This is distinct from its later claim that an estimated 20% of cleared cases in 2025 were assisted by Flock technology in customer jurisdictions.)

The 10% claim was promoted publicly in a February 2024 press release connected to the release of a white paper authored by two Flock employees. 

However, that 10% claim is not actually contained within the text of the Flock-authored white paper. 

Rather, the paper concludes that every additional camera per sworn officer is associated with a 9.1-percentage-point increase in the agency’s license plate reader-assisted clearance rate.

The white paper says it was “created with the consultation” of two academics — Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University and Richard Helfers of the University of Texas at Tyler.

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. Because the agencies were not randomly selected, it was not established that they were representative of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. 

Wheeler, in a blog post at the time, criticized the white paper’s methodology and called the conclusion that Flock helped solve 10% of crimes nationwide “ridiculous.”

Nhan, one of the two consultants for the white paper, told 404 Media in 2024 that he and Helfers helped with statistical calculations and formatting, but regarding the conclusions, he said he “personally would have done things much differently.”

In response to questions from CBS News, Nhan similarly backed away from the 2024 paper’s conclusions. 

“I did get to look at a version of the paper and did discuss a little bit, but the methods and data sources were not known to us so we didn’t dive into it,” he said. “I personally didn’t want to delve into its effectiveness or impact on crime rates, which is a very complex topic for any criminologist.”

By contrast, Flock’s 2024 release attributed a quotation to Nhan praising the company as “fully transparent and accessible during every stage of the research process.” 

Asked in a CBS News interview in August if Flock’s national crime-solving claims are supported by peer-reviewed studies, Langley said peer-reviewed research was not part of the company’s claims.

“No, there’s no peer-reviewed study, and we’re not articulating that it was peer-reviewed,” Langley said. 

He added that there was “one indisputable data point” from the prior month’s data. 

“In July of this year, just last month, 1,025 missing people detected, 22,000 stolen cars detected,” he said. “Those detections lead to results.”

The detection of a vehicle associated with a missing person case, however, is different from the detection of a missing person. Flock has said its license plate cameras do not use facial recognition technology.

Asked for underlying data supporting the “indisputable” July figures, Lewbel told CBS News those two statistics “are based on unique vehicle detections involving vehicles associated with records in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s AMBER Alert database.”

Internal inconsistencies

As of late August, Flock’s website featured a series of crime-solving statistics that could not easily be reconciled. Several of those statistics were removed following an inquiry from CBS News.

“Flock technology is currently being used to solve approximately 2,000+ crimes per day, accounting for over 10% of all reported crime in the United States,” the company said on the third page of a 2026 Company Fact Sheet that was, until recently, part of a media kit available on its website. 

A separate page of the same fact sheet provided an entirely different figure: “2,800+ crimes solved weekly with the help of Flock Technology.” (That’s about 400 crimes per day.)

Elsewhere, the company’s FAQ page stated both “On average, 1,000+ crimes solved per day with the help of Flock Technology” and “On average, 2,200+ crimes solved per week with the help of Flock technology.” (The latter figure is about 314 crimes per day.)

“The statistics cited in your questions come from materials published at different points in time and reflect different time periods, datasets, and methodologies,” Lewbel said in written response to questions about the inconsistencies.

Following questions from CBS News earlier this month, Flock’s 2026 Company Fact Sheet and other documents which had been stored in a publicly-viewable Google Drive folder linked from the “Media Kit” section of the company’s website became unavailable.

The company’s FAQ page also changed, removing the claim of “1,000+ crimes solved per day.”

“A trade-off that I can make”

Flock’s crime-solving claims have coincided with a period of rapid growth and investment. The company has raised more than $1 billion from Silicon Valley and, according to an article in Inc., is valued at approximately $8.4 billion.

In different public statements, Langley has altered the framing around the million-crimes statistic. At times, he has cited it without any context at all.

“We never would have guessed, just like the sheer impact we’ve had, right?”  Langley said in his recent interview with CBS News. “So last year alone, over a million criminal cases.”

In an April 2026 TED Talk that has now been viewed more than 5 million times, a host asked Langley about instances in which Flock’s technology has been abused. 

Langley conceded there have been instances of privacy abuse before pivoting to Flock’s benefits.

“I look at the million-plus cases and go, OK, this is a trade-off that I can make,” Langley said in reply, without providing any further description of the one-million figure. “But that’s my choice.”

With that, the TED Talk host thanked Langley and the audience applauded as the CEO walked off stage.