According to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, the company’s microphones detect “just gunshots.” Yet Flock’s website also promotes alerts for car crashes, fireworks, and sideshows. When questioned about the discrepancy at TechCrunch Disrupt, Langley again said: “It’s just gunshots.”
The surveillance company’s co-founder discussed and defended Gunshot Detection during an interview with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos. On its website, Flock says the product listens to gunshots as well as other ambient sounds in surrounding neighborhoods, providing “earlier awareness” of possible public safety incidents.
What Flock advertises goes beyond the account its CEO gave. Its audio systems, the company says, can instantly locate gunfire, “detect street takeovers early to stop chaos before it escalates,” and “identify severe crashes in real time so help arrives faster.” Elsewhere, the materials promise customers can “expand awareness beyond gunfire with alerts for car crashes, fireworks, and sideshows.”
Responding to TechCrunch, the company confirmed that the system has those other capabilities. Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said: “Flock’s gunshot detection technology is primarily used to detect gunfire but is also capable of detecting fireworks, sideshows, and potential car crashes. CEO Garrett Langley’s remarks were intended to emphasize that Flock’s Audio Detection technology is not designed to monitor conversations or analyze speech and does not currently detect human screaming or distress.”
Detecting an event and analyzing speech are different activities, as that response makes clear. But it does not establish that the system detects gunshots alone. Instead, it describes gunfire detection as the main use while acknowledging that the microphones also recognize other sounds.
The FAQ on Flock’s website spells out the same distinction: “in addition to gunshots, Flock Gunshot and Audio Detection can detect fireworks, sideshows, and other disruptive community events.” According to that section, the “detection library is continually expanding to include emerging threats that are relevant” to the particular needs of customers.
An earlier dispute about listening for human voices centered on human-distress detection. At Gunshot Detection’s announcement last year, Flock said it would listen for “screaming.” After privacy groups condemned that function, the company changed its website’s description to “sounds of human distress.” It subsequently said it had entirely withdrawn distress detection from the customers who tested it.
In the onstage discussion, Langley outlined why Flock developed the original product and then tested whether it could detect people being harmed.
“Most people don’t call 911 when they hear a gunshot, and so that’s why we built the product,” Langley told Loizos. “And then some of our customers said, ‘Oh, we have these in parking lots. It would be great if we could get alerted if someone was being abducted, if someone was being harmed.’”
Because the proposal sounded logical to him, Langley said, Flock developed a prototype and introduced it to a couple of customers. Significant concerns followed from some people. While acknowledging mistakes by the company, he said he was responding to what its customers wanted.
“There’s only a couple customers that were prototyping it with us, and we said, ‘OK, great, it’s just going to do gunshots, plain and simple.’ If a gun goes off, we’ll notify, and if not, that’s all it’s going to listen to,” said Langley.
That explanation accounts for the decision to end the human-distress trial. It does not resolve the conflict between his wider claim that detection is triggered only by gunshots and the other events Flock still markets and its spokesperson confirms. Dropping the ability to detect screaming does not mean every capability beyond gunshot detection has been dropped.
This disagreement is unfolding against broader resistance to surveillance. Langley used the interview to challenge what he called misinformation, saying many of Flock’s critics do not understand the operation of its products. As he appeared onstage in San Francisco, protesters assembled outside the venue to express opposition to the company.
Concerns over mass surveillance have accompanied a shift in public opinion against Flock and other companies that read license plates. TechCrunch reported on August 28, 2026, that a survey found Americans who opposed police license plate cameras outnumbered those who supported them.
There is also the question of how large Flock’s audio network is. Langley put its number of microphones on a comparable scale to ShotSpotter’s, which had about 25,000 microphones as of 2024, according to Wired. This is Langley’s comparison, rather than an independently verified total for Flock’s devices.
Flock faces growing scrutiny from members of the public and privacy advocates, including the ACLU, over the possibility that its technology could be misused. Some people have even destroyed the company’s surveillance cameras. Texas and Florida have taken steps to end their relationships with Flock; Amazon’s Ring, meanwhile, has already ended its partnership.
One question remains unanswered after Langley’s comments: how does Flock square a gunshot-only assurance with the functions it advertises? Explaining what its microphones detect requires identifying those additional categories rather than describing all of them as “just gunshots.”
