Flock Safety loses contracts, drones rise

Flock Safety, the surveillance company behind the nationwide debate over AI-powered street-level monitoring, has lost several city contracts in the past year. The company, which acquired drone startup Aerodome for more than $300 million in October 2024, is now focusing on its aerial unit, the Flock Alpha drone.

The acquisition of Aerodome has given Flock a new product line that can read license plates from up to 2,000 feet, deploy autonomously within 90 seconds of a triggered alarm and cover up to 38 square miles. The company says the drones will account for nearly half of its future revenue.

During an appearance on the All-In Podcast, CEO Garrett Langley described drones as the company’s “fastest-growing business unit right now.” He added that drones would be the next big chapter in law enforcement, potentially as impactful as police body cameras. According to the company’s stats, about 200 drones are already deployed as first-responder units.

Ground-based license-plate readers (LPRs) have faced growing opposition. Cities such as Los Angeles have paused or canceled contracts after complaints that LPRs misidentify vehicles and that the network can be abused to target vulnerable populations. In some communities, activists have taken down cameras or physically disabled the hardware, while municipalities that asked Flock to disable the cameras have put trash bags on them when their requests weren’t met. Activists have also crowdsourced the locations of local cameras, a tactic highlighted in the fixtures section.

Drones are harder to stop from the ground. A high-resolution camera can identify license plates and track vehicle movement from the air, and the drone’s autonomous launch makes it difficult to disable once it is airborne. Flock’s website lists drone models that can be used as first-responder units in emergencies or by companies as automated security devices.

When asked for comment, the company sent CNET an automated response that read: “Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

Flock says it does not use its cameras for facial recognition or for looking inside cars. However, a recent Wired investigation found that the company already has code that could expand its product’s capabilities to identify drivers and vehicles based on movement patterns alone. The tool, called OS Investigate, integrates vehicle scan data with police incident reports and arrest records, turning the camera network into a powerful suspect-generation system. Flock maintains that the software remains in a testing phase.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a March report warning of the privacy dangers posed by drones. The report states: “If there is a drone in the sky above us, we should have a way to know whether that drone belongs to Amazon, the police, ICE, a real estate agent, or an ordinary citizen. We should also be able to see what the purpose of its flight is, what equipment it is carrying, and what its privacy practices are.”

Flock’s drones are also slated for manufacturing in Georgia, a move that the company said will support its expansion into first-responder and automated security markets. The next step for the company is to navigate the growing scrutiny of its aerial surveillance capabilities while it seeks new contracts in cities that have paused or canceled its ground-based systems.