The CEO of Flock Safety, Garrett Langley, told a room of police chiefs on October 25 that the opposition to his company is mostly bots with no evidence corroborating that claim.

In a fireside chat with the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) at their conference, he said social media chatter about Flock had fallen 95 percent since July, which he attributed to someone no longer paying for posts, and added that the opposition was “anonymous bots, and so it is not real.” He added that the protests themselves featured the same people with the same signs, “not organic at all.” He also said his wife had advised him never to apologize and that he’d prefer never to do a press interview again. 404 Media published the leaked audio the next day. Flock has not commented publicly on the recording.

Flock’s customers are police departments, cities and school districts. Every one of them has to justify the cameras to a city council, a school board, or residents at a public meeting. Whether or not bots inflated the online noise (Langley claimed chatter fell by half overnight after a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian data center, which 404 Media has already said doesn’t hold up), the people asking questions at those meetings are real, and they’re asking legitimate things which is who can see the data, how do you catch an officer misusing it, what happens when the safeguards fail. A police chief can’t stand up at a town meeting and say “the CEO of our vendor thinks you’re Russian bots.” So Flock’s explanation gives his customers nothing helpful to use, and also tells them their own community’s concerns don’t count.

We know how that lands, because it has already happened once.

In December 2025, Langley emailed the police chief in Staunton, Va., writing that Flock and its agency partners were under coordinated attack from groups that want to defund the police and “normalize lawlessness.” Staunton’s chief of police, a 41-year veteran of the department, wrote back that he didn’t believe they were under attack. Langley replied, acknowledging that Staunton’s debate had been civil and calling it democracy in action. The city then cancelled its contract and published the exchange, saying Flock’s narrative “does not reflect the city’s values” even though the department had seen real successes with the cameras.

Ten months later Flock’s CEO is making the same argument but this time to a bigger audience.

More than 16,000 public safety officials attend IACP, and the audio was online within a day. So when a CEO says he’s done with press interviews and would rather just talk to customers behind closed doors, what he’s really choosing is the same audience with none of the scrutiny.

The costs to this are not hypothetical.

Secure Justice, an Oakland advocacy group that tracks Flock cancellations, counted 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021, including 93 in August 2026 alone. Flock disputes what that means with a spokesperson telling Ars Technica in late August that new city partnerships had outpaced non-renewals in 2026 by roughly ten to one, but declined to say how many new customers that represents.

Then there’s the workforce. Flock rolled out a voluntary buyout program on September 18, and Reuters reported on October 8 that about 270 employees, roughly 18 percent of 1,500, were expected to leave by the end of October, with most departures scheduled for October 29. A source told WIRED that without the buyouts, layoffs would likely have followed. Langley had already told the All-In podcast in August that the biggest damage from the public backlash was to internal morale.

So the CEO told police chiefs the backlash isn’t real four days before hundreds of his own people walk out the door, via a program the company set up partly because of that same backlash.

The most recent customer departures came the same day the IACP audio leaked.

On October 26, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District said it would not extend its Flock contract and told the company to suspend all 201 cameras on district property; its board had asked administrators to weigh the privacy concerns raised by the community against the cost and benefit of alternatives. Twelve days earlier, Cornell’s contract ran out and the university asked for its seven campus cameras to come down, a spokesperson confirmed to CNY Central.

Now, Flock isn’t only offering up dismissive rhetoric, they have also taken action. In August, Flock announced it would require law enforcement customers to turn on a tool for flagging unusual searches by year-end, suspend users automatically when activity looks abnormal, and require a case code for every search. Those are substantive commitments, though an announcement doesn’t tell you which customers have actually turned them on.

A CCO doesn’t have to concede that a useful product should disappear simply because it attracts opposition, and we also shouldn’t ignore evidence of coordinated manipulation if we have it. But even a real, documented bot campaign would still leave the questions about access and misuse exactly where they are today, and it would still leave a police chief in front of a city council with nothing new or helpful to say.

The counsel I’d give isn’t (entirely) about prep but about the story the CEO is telling himself, because that’s what leaked. In August, Flock’s position was that officers have misused this, we’ve seen it, and that’s why we’re rolling out new controls. But in October, the CEO’s position was that the complaints are bots and somebody stopped paying for them.

The bot theory might even be partly right; coordinated posting and real misuse can both exist (see Cracker Barrel). But it doesn’t matter. The second story is being used to avoid the questions the first one admits are real, and right now the second one is winning.

So the conversation with the CEO isn’t “pick one story.” It’s narrower. He can believe what he wants to about bots, but the company’s public explanation of its critics has to stop at “we’ve seen misuse, here’s what we did about it, here’s what we still can’t promise.” If he thinks the online campaign is manufactured and has the data, that needs to go to a reporter who can investigate and scrutinize it.

Then give the customers the version they can use. A police chief at a city council meeting should be able to say, yes, there were abuses, here’s the tool that flags them, here’s who at our department reviews the flags, here’s what we still can’t promise. That’s a defensible position. But “our vendor thinks you’re Russian bots” is not.