Flock Safety's CEO wants a 'compromise' on surveillance. Critics in both parties say that's not the debate.

The Washington Post identified 46 cases in which police officers have been accused of using Flock Safety technology for unauthorized purposes. The largest cluster, by the Post's count, was officers using Flock reads to stalk wives, girlfriends, or exes, a pattern that turns the network's historical-query feature into a private investigation tool for the people sworn to operate it. Flock Safety is one of the largest vendors of automated license-plate-reader cameras and drone surveillance to U.S. police departments, with systems that log every passing vehicle and let investigators query historical reads by plate, time, and location. That is the record Flock CEO Garrett Langley walked into this week when he sat down with Fox News and asked the country to weigh "compromise" between privacy and safety.

His answer arrives inside a settings panel, not a policy.

Flock announced two changes after the Post's reporting: default data retention drops from 30 days to 7, and officers now need a case code before pulling historical lookups. Both defaults are company-controlled, and either can be overridden by the same officers the changes are meant to constrain. A feature called Evidence Mode lets a user retain footage longer than the new 7-day window, and longer holds remain available on request. The case-code gate is a procedural wrapper around a query, not a check on what the camera stores or who can flip the retention clock. The reform is a toggle. The pattern the Post documented is the kind of behavior a toggle does not catch.

The political response has not stopped at the "compromise" argument. Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on social media: "STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK." In Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed attacked Republican Mike Rogers over his support for what El-Sayed called the "mass proliferation of Flock cameras." Three House Republicans introduced a bill that would bar federal purchase of "automated surveillance systems...including a Flock Safety camera," the first time the company's name has appeared in federal legislation aimed at the category. The bill does not negotiate over a default; it would block federal procurement of the underlying class of device.

The ACLU told TechCrunch that Flock's 7-day default does not meet its 48-hour recommendation for retention, a gap the company characterized as movement and the advocacy group read as a possible step forward without conceding the floor. The 48-hour number is a floor for what the civil liberties group considers safe. The bill's proponents are negotiating from a different category: not how long a camera holds a plate, but whether the federal government buys another one.

TechCrunch has drawn a parallel between the Flock backlash and the recent data-center fights over local siting and federal permitting, framing both as a bipartisan local-federal flashpoint. That is the outlet's read, and it tracks the political shape of the week: a CEO on a media tour, a name in a bill, and a state-level attack ad all landing in the same news cycle.

Langley, asked on CBS News about one alleged stalking victim, said: "I apologize. It kills me that she went through that." He then argued that Flock did not create police abuse but is the first company to "shine a light on it and build the tools to find it." That is the closing shape of the company's ask: balance privacy against safety while the lever it actually moved is the kind of dial an officer can return to its old position before the next shift.

The next move is procedural. The House bill names the company; a committee markup, a floor vote, and a procurement ban would not run through a settings panel.