Flock Safety Is Cutting 18% of Its Staff as Governors, Police Departments and Camera Smashers Turn Against It

Flock Safety built a business selling license plate cameras to police departments and cities. Now the backlash against those cameras is showing up in its own headcount.

The company is cutting about 18% of its workforce, roughly 270 of its about 1,500 employees, with departures taking effect at the end of October, Reuters reported on Friday. The cuts run across the board.

Flock says this is not a layoff. The reductions follow a voluntary separation program that Wired reported last month, which the company pitched internally as a way to shrink without resorting to mandatory layoffs. It is unclear how many of the 270 are leaving by choice.

"A voluntary program, not a layoff"

Spokesperson Paris Lewbel gave TechCrunch the company's framing. "Flock recently offered current employees a generous Voluntary Separation Program as part of our efforts to position the company for its next phase of growth," Lewbel said. "This was a voluntary program, not a layoff, and reflects our continued focus on building a strong, sustainable business for the future."

Flock would not say whether CEO Garrett Langley or other executives took pay cuts.

So there are two versions of the same event. Reuters describes a company shedding nearly a fifth of its staff. Flock describes generous severance that employees chose to accept. Both can be true, and the gap between them is the story of a startup trying to look healthy while its reputation takes a beating.

How a law and order product became a bipartisan villain

Flock has more than 100,000 cameras across the US, and police and federal agents use them to track vehicles. That reach has produced a long list of problems.

Dozens of police officers have been arrested, fired or forced to resign for abusing access to the system to search, track and stalk people without a warrant. Misread plates have led to improper stops and arrests, including a journalist driving an authorized review vehicle. Critics have also hammered the company's cybersecurity, after some of its cameras turned up publicly exposed on the open web.

The courts have noticed too. A federal judge recently ruled one warrantless Flock search unconstitutional and called the system a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance, a phrase that sticks to a company whose pitch is public safety.

Some cities took the cameras down. Flock replaced them. Then some residents started destroying the cameras themselves, and people dismantling or stealing them have gone viral online.

What makes Flock unusual is who is angry. A product designed to appeal to law and order politics has managed to alienate both parties.

Florida banned Flock from its highways. "I don't want to have this become a surveillance state," Gov. Ron DeSantis said. Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott, cut the company off from state funding ahead of the November midterms. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro panned Flock and said he would "welcome" legislation banning the cameras.

Police customers are walking too. Several departments, including the LAPD, let their contracts expire over privacy and civil liberties concerns. And the criticism spans the media spectrum, from Hasan Piker on the left to Tucker Carlson on the right.

Few tech companies manage to unite DeSantis, Shapiro, Piker and Carlson against them. Flock did, and 270 fewer people will work there by November.

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