The Crime Crisis In America and How Technology Fixes It

Summary

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The a16z Show: "The Crime Crisis In America and How Technology Fixes It"

Date: December 17, 2025

Guests: Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Garrett Langley (Founder & CEO, Flock Safety)
Host: a16z

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the rising crime crisis in American cities and poses a provocative question: What if a city aimed to eliminate crime instead of merely managing it? The conversation, featuring Garrett Langley of Flock Safety, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, examines how technology—ranging from surveillance, AI, and drones to public/private partnerships—can radically reshape public safety, accountability, and trust. The dialogue candidly addresses the complexities around policing culture, recruitment, criminal justice reform, privacy, and the socioeconomic impacts of crime.

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Major Themes & Key Discussion Points

1. The Current Crime Crisis and Policy Choices

• Lost Generations: Failure to effectively deter crime results in societal losses, incentivizing criminal careers, especially where social stigma is absent ([00:00]; [13:03]).
• Trade-offs: The only options are tolerating high levels of crime, harsh punishments (Singapore/El Salvador models), or using intelligence and technology for deterrence ([10:03]).

Marc Andreessen [13:07]:
"We're throwing people away...with minimum sentencing and everything, it’s very hard to go to prison and come out. Then you have this black mark...That’s the worst possible thing. So the best thing is to say, 'Hey look, if you commit crimes, you’re going to get caught.' And then that changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else."

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2. Staffing and Cultural Crisis in Policing

• Idea: Teach for America–style Policing: Propose a national service program forgiving student debt in exchange for service as police, addressing staffing crises and elevating the profession’s status ([03:00]).

Garrett Langley [03:00]:
"Why not create a Teach for America for law enforcement where you say, look, if you’ve got student debt and you go serve in your community for two years, four years... we’ll retire student debt."

• Culture vs. Numbers: Recruitment and retention woes stem more from cultural stigma and the vilification of policing (“defund/abolish the police”) than from raw lack of manpower. Lowered standards as stopgaps have dangerous consequences ([04:11]–[06:47]).

Marc Andreessen [04:52]:
"Because of the shortage, many police departments have lowered their standards...to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals."

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3. Technology as a Lever for Crime Reduction

• Products & Tech Stack: Cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-driven real-time crime centers are critical for modern, accountable, and effective policing ([09:03]–[09:48]).

Garrett Langley [09:03]:
"You need drones, you need cameras...now this AI layer...to make sense of it...And third...accountability and transparency."

• Results in Las Vegas: Technology adoption linked to improved clearance rates and increased community trust, drop in police shootings, faster 911 response ([24:19]; [25:25]).

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4. Community Response and Public Trust

• Public/Private Partnerships: Business-funded innovations (e.g., Vega’s adoption of tech funded by private enterprise) can dramatically improve safety more quickly than government alone ([27:15]–[30:03]).
• Perception Shifts: Rather than being viewed with suspicion, technology-led policing increases both officer effectiveness and public confidence when accountability is built in ([25:25]).

Marc Andreessen [25:25]:
“How much the actual community likes it...the community go, ‘Wow, I’m proud to be here. I feel safe. If a crime gets committed...you can’t get away with it.’”

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5. Privacy, Surveillance, and Societal Criticisms

• Transparency as a Solution: Critiques aimed at privacy concerns are often proxies for institutional mistrust of police; Flock argues for transparency and public dashboards ([32:32]–[34:21]).

Garrett Langley [32:32]:
"It is a cultural shock...when you go from subjective based policing to objective...we get predominantly criticized for privacy, which I find falsely focused. I think Flock puts a spotlight on trust issues."

• Privatizing Safety: “Defund the police” leads to unintentional consequences—privatized security for the wealthy, reduced safety for the poor ([34:31]–[35:25]).

Marc Andreessen [34:31]:
“That’s the irony of defund the police. It’s defund the police for poor people, privatize the police for rich people.”

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6. Criminal Justice Reform: Balancing Accountability and Rehabilitation

• Failings of Mass Incarceration: Blanket imprisonment creates repeat offenders; there’s a need for diversion, especially for nonviolent and young offenders ([41:00]–[42:51]).

Marc Andreessen [36:44]:
"We’ve gone completely away from rehabilitation...our recidivism rate is over 70%...But we still have to keep people safe...You punish the victims on behalf of the criminals otherwise."

• Tech for Judicial Speed: Delays in the justice system worsen criminality; technology can speed up proceedings and aid in rehabilitation ([41:00]–[42:51]).

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7. Clearing Crimes and the Real Impact of Technology

• Clearance Rates: Vegas boasts the country’s highest murder clearance rate—over 90%—thanks to community and tech partnerships. National average is ~47%, meaning a 53% chance of getting away with murder ([20:21]; [22:41]).

Garrett Langley [23:00]:
"You have a coin flip for murder."

• Success Stories: Flock tech helped recover over 450 missing children in a year; advanced AI enables safer, more precise arrests even in high-risk scenarios ([57:27]–[58:14]).

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Memorable Quotes & Anecdotes

• On Deterrence:

  Marc Andreessen [10:03]:
  "Certain punishment means no punishment."

• On Root Causes:

  Marc Andreessen [11:48]:
  "Nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals."

• On Recruitment Innovation:

  Garrett Langley [03:00]:
  "Why not create a teach for America for law enforcement... We'll retire student debt."

• On Cultural Shifts:

  Marc Andreessen [07:58]:
  "The cybertrucks, they have been great for recruiting despite the criticism..."

• On Community Effects:

  Marc Andreessen [25:25]:
  “I didn’t think it would be that visible that fast.”

• On Social Experiments:

  Ben Horowitz [19:49]:
  “That’s called the Ferguson effect. Right? Crime actually went up.”

• On “Defund” Debates:

  Marc Andreessen [34:31]:
  “Defund the police for poor people, privatize the police for rich people.”

• On Reducing False Arrests:

  Marc Andreessen [32:01]:
  “The fact that they've arrested a million of the correct people with a perfect AI match is really, really significant.”

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Notable Segments by Timestamp

• 00:00–01:21: Framing the crime crisis, high clearance rate failures, cultural incentives to crime
• 03:00–06:47: Teach for America idea for policing; impact of culture, recruitment
• 09:03–10:03: Building a technology stack for police; integrating AI
• 13:03–14:49: The societal costs of mass incarceration vs. deterrence
• 20:21–23:00: Why homicide clearance rates are collapsing nationally
• 24:19–25:25: Impact of AI on police and community safety in Vegas
• 32:32–34:21: Privacy criticisms vs. public trust issues
• 34:31–36:19: Dangers of privatized security and unequal justice
• 41:00–42:51: Alternatives to incarceration, tech solutions in the justice pipeline
• 57:27–58:14: Recovery of missing children via tech; real-world success stories

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Tone & Style

The tone is candid, energetic, and occasionally irreverent, marked by insider anecdotes, humor, and streetwise cultural references. The hosts and guests freely critique failed policies and celebrate practical experimentation, placing a heavy emphasis on data, effectiveness, and community outcomes rather than ideological purity.

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Conclusion

The discussion positions advanced technology—not punitive excess or laissez-faire neglect—as the path to safer, fairer, and more efficient public safety systems. True progress will require innovative recruitment, honest assessment of cultural stigmas, partnership between private and public sectors, attention to privacy and trust, and a willingness to implement community-responsive solutions.

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Recommended for listeners interested in:

• Policing and public safety innovation
• Technology and AI in public policy
• Justice reform and urban policy
• Venture-driven civic experiments
• Candid policy talk with Silicon Valley flavor

Transcript

[Marc Andreessen]

If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations.

[Garrett Langley]

If I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it was actually double that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, well, we're throwing people away, right? Like, you know, that's the worst possible thing. So the best thing is to say, hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're gonna get caught. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make like 10x what I can make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, you know, like, and then in my neighborhood, it's not even like there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like, you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.

[Garrett Langley]

Outside of Vegas, the international average is around 47% clearance rate. So you have a coin flip for.

[Marc Andreessen]

Murder, you have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

[Garrett Langley]

Coins flip a coin. Ironic part is when we do get criticisms, people that are less familiar with technology. I laugh because I'm like, do you realize if the federal government wanted to find you a license plate reader is dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dump and I will know your exact location and time, by the way, which.

[Marc Andreessen]

Is what they do.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes, because it's way more effective. So I think for the privacy thing, it's quite false. The trust is real, though. And so if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department.

[Podcast Host (a16z)]

Imagine if a major American city actually set a goal to eliminate crime, not just manage it. What would that take in practice? And what would it feel like for the people who live there? Every day? In today's episode, we get as close to that question as you can in the real world. I'm joined by Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, and Ben Horowitz, co founder of A16Z. Garrett and his team are behind a lot of the new intelligent policing infrastructure you're starting to see in cities. From license plate readers and gunshot detection to drones and real time crime centers. Vet has been working with Las Vegas on a very public experiment in using that technology to drive crime down while actually improving trust in the police. We talk about what a serious national strategy to reduce crime would look like, from staffing and culture to products and policy. We get into the Teach for America idea for policing. Why clearance rates Are collapsing in most cities, but rising in Vegas. How to think about defund the police versus public safety and whether intelligence can really beat both mass incarceration and doing nothing. We also talk honestly about the criticisms. Privacy, surveillance, who gets targeted and who actually benefits when crime is allowed to flourish.

[Ben Horowitz]

Garrett, welcome to the podcast.

[Garrett Langley]

Thanks for having me.

[Ben Horowitz]

So this group here is heavily invested in eliminating crime. Garrett, obviously with Flock Safety, and Ben, with your work in Las Vegas as well. Let's say that America declared a national goal to eliminate crime and was taking a multifaceted approach and asked you, Garrett, to sit on a committee to help identify what are the different levers. What's the strategy, the comprehensive strategy to eliminate crime. What would be some of your main advice?

[Garrett Langley]

Let's break it down in terms of people, products, and policy.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So, people, I saw a funny quote online that the way to solve our infertility issues is just to remove income tax once you have three kids. I was like, that's actually pretty novel. We have a massive student debt problem, right? Yeah. Why not create a teach for America for law enforcement where you say, look, if you've got student debt and you go serve in your community for two years, four years as a patrol officer, crime analysts, like, there's a ton of roles you can have in a police department. Great, we'll retire student debt. So some just give it away for free. Actually go work for your government for two to four years and you don't have to go overseas and fight in a war. You can literally just stay at home. And that would dramatically fix one of the biggest issues in policing, which is a staffing crisis and a skillset issue. So that's like the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. I'd go have like a national law enforcement act for staffing.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. And also raise the status of police.

[Marc Andreessen]

So how much. How much of the people issue is the fact that we kind of went from a very kind of pro, like, police are heroes, every new show is a cop show, to, like, complete vilification of the police. Defund the police. Abolish the police.

[Ben Horowitz]

Abolish.

[Marc Andreessen]

Abolish cop shows.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, they're all gone. They're all off the air. How much of it is cultural versus just a shortage of people?

[Garrett Langley]

It's entirely cultural.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So, I mean, because you think about it, there's nothing has changed in the last 30 years that would indicate some percentage of people who were born and wanted to serve has changed. Only thing that's changed is the stigma attached to the job. And you can see that because if you look at the early retirement numbers, I mean, early retirement skyrocketed during both the social unrest and then Covid.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And like they've never bounced back.

[Marc Andreessen]

Worst possible time.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, it's the worst possible time. So do you think, Ben, to your point, like, the only way I see to do a kind of cultural reset is to just make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt to go help their communities?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I think that's an actually very important and underrated idea. Cause one of the things that we've seen is that because of the shortage, many police departments have lowered their standards. So the kind of criticism of the police was, okay, you have. And it really, like if you looked into it, there were some like psychos who joined the police force. They couldn't get them out for whatever reason. Then they do some heinous thing and it taints the whole police. Well now, because there aren't enough of it, people are lowering standards to the point in Memphis where they started actually hiring criminals. And then there was a famous incident where the criminals just went and murdered a guy. And it was funny cause I. Or not funny ha ha, but like I was showing it to the Vegas police, the video of that incident. And the first thing they said was, oh, that's not police brutality. They went to kill that guy. Like that was a homicide. Yeah. And I was like, oh, boy. But then you into the backgrounds and the guys who committed the homicide were in fact criminals who got hired to be police. Which is also, interestingly, what happened in the LAPD with the Rampart scandal. Right after the Rodney King incident. They had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, et cetera, et cetera. They had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs. And those gang members ended up, among other things, killing the Notorious B.I.G. and this kind of thing. But people don't realize what the reaction to criticism. I think we just have to be looking forward, careful about, like, okay, what is the actual problem as opposed to police are bad. I think that puts us in a very different kind of world that we don't want to be in. Agreed.

[Garrett Langley]

And I think you're right. When you look across the board, I think in the last year, I've only been to one major city who seems to be like making a dentist on staffing. But it's like they've gone to such extremes. Like they'll buy you a house.

[Marc Andreessen]

Oh, wow.

[Garrett Langley]

You get a take home car.

[Marc Andreessen]

Amazing.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, it's always Personal. I'm like, there's literally millions of people that could do this job. Yeah. Just I don't think it's a cultural issue.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean like a big thing in Vegas that we're doing is trying to kind of with flak, safety and with some of the other technology we bought in the cybertrucks and so forth, is to try and improve the image for recruiting. Because that's such a big thing and we have the highest population in Las Vegas of veterans in like the whole country. So we have plenty of people who could be great police. But we have to kind of continue to improve the image.

[Garrett Langley]

It's really funny you mentioned the cybertruck because I know there was some like anything good in life criticism online. And it's funny because my parents hometown, where they still live, this is maybe like six years ago, bought four Teslas for their fleet.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And the chief was like, every single 18 year old wants to drive this car. This is why I'm doing this. And like he was heavily applauded in that community.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Because it's a very logical like marketing. Yeah. I mean these are a bunch of like 18, 20 year old men. They like shiny toys.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah. It's a cool looking truck.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. If you're choices like driving a Toyota Camry or Cybertruck, like, what makes you feel cool?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, the cybertrucks, they have been great for recruiting despite the criticism that I got. Well, actually TechCrunch portrayed me as the penguin that I'm like a crime boss in Las Vegas. And I'm making these donations in order to like to pay off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pay off the police to do my like evil bidding.

[Ben Horowitz]

Your evil venture copy.

[Marc Andreessen]

Because. Yeah, because Andreessen Horowitz is not a good enough business. I need to be in whatever the crime ring in Vegas is. But interestingly, since we got the trucks, the number of requests for just like them appearing at community events is off the charts. Cause they look so cool. And in fact, when we did paid in full, Dr. Dre, famous for the song Fuck the police, saw the cybertruck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of the cybertruck at his request.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. That's gross.

[Garrett Langley]

So that's people. Yeah. Products. I think Vegas is a good. We can pick on Vegas because they've got a pretty good technology stack. You got to go crime by crime. So if you have a gun violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know majority of gun violence does not be reported If I shoot you, Eric.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

I'm not going to call 911 myself. And unfortunately, I have a good shot. So you're not calling 911 either. So that's a problem. You have drones. Vegas has a great deployment. Drones. San Francisco does as well as you saw in the news. So you need drones, you need cameras. So you've got all these sensors. Right. And then what's missing historically is now this AI layer, this orchestration layer on top, to say, wow, I've gone from no data to an abundance of data. How do we make sense of it? So we've got that. And then this third piece that we care a lot about is how do you also do this in a way that provides accountability and transparency? Because at the end of the day, the police department works for us taxpaying citizens. And you want to know, how's your money being used? Is it being done in a way that's kind of societally just and forward? So that's the product side. And then policy is you have to hold people accountable.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, we've seen the social experiment in parts of.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right. You need to actually prosecute the crime.

[Garrett Langley]

You know, it's seemingly straightforward, but a lot of the times we decriminalize things that should be criminal and that causes a problem. So that's what I would do if I was in charge.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And I think, like, one of the things that people don't think through when they think about crime is you don't have that many choices. You have kind of a choice of lots of crime or if you're going to prevent crime. There's kind of the Singaporean model, which is very harsh capital punishment. You know, we'll hang you in the town square, we'll hit you with a cane, we'll lock you in like an El Salvadorian prison or intelligence. And what intelligence does is it basically makes everybody safer. It makes the suspect safer, it makes the police safer, because now everybody understands the crime situation. And then you're also much more likely to get caught. And there's an old Chinese saying that says certain punishment means no punishment. And that is the only way that you can actually achieve it. In the US reduction in crime is better intelligence. And, you know, people say, well, root cause. You know, like if we get rid of all poverty and this and that. And third, well, yeah, sure, if you create a utopian society, which nobody's ever done, and like, the people have tried, it's been much more brutal and many more people killed than in societies that don't go for Utopia. Yeah, but like, in reality, you just kind of have to deal with the situation as it is, I think. And by the way, nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals. Like, more than anybody. They know exactly what the policies are, what the technology is, when police change shifts, all that kind of thing. And so if you do have great law enforcement, then you're very likely to discourage crime.

[Ben Horowitz]

What was that quote that you mentioned just before the.

[Marc Andreessen]

Oh, yeah, well, the Game had a song where he said, you know, real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts. Which is like, of course.

[Garrett Langley]

But I mean, to your point on that, like, I'll never Forget, maybe in 2022 there was a rap song released in Southern California with reference to Flock, and that got Flock. So stay away. Yeah, I was like, we've made it culturally.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that's a key KPI to keep track of.

[Marc Andreessen]

I think that's right. And then, you know, like, it's. If you grow up, it's very important. Like, if you think about, like, if you're growing up outside of the system and the most viable way to make a living is crime, then, you know, that is a career path. And so by reducing law enforcement, you create a crime career path. And it kind of lets us avoid creating real career paths for people in that situation. And so it's a cascading effect of just badness.

[Garrett Langley]

Well, I think to your point too, the. When if I woke up in 10 years and all we had done was put a lot of people in prison, it's actually double bad because now prison's already very expensive.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right.

[Garrett Langley]

There's an economic cost of now that person's no longer productive in society.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, yeah, well, we're throwing people away. Right. Like, you know, you with the minimum sentencing and everything, you know, it's very hard to go to prison and come out. Then you have this black mark on your, on your life where you can't get an apartment, you, you know, you can't get a gun, you can't vote, you can't get a job. And, you know, that's the worst possible thing. So the best thing is to say, hey, look, if you commit crimes, you're going to get caught. And then that kind of changes the societal incentives and the culture and everything else. Totally agree.

[Ben Horowitz]

Are we doing sort of the wrong thing by making it not clear that you're going to get caught or saying that? Sort of making it the deterrence not 100%, you know, as clear as it should be? Well, sort of arbitrarily doing long prison sentences instead.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I mean, I think that like if you have great technology, if you've got a kind of a comprehensive flock deployment, then what happens is like you don't have to advertise it. No, because like the streets are watching. They know what to quote JC like that's going to happen. But yeah, if you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations because you like, like it's a pretty, I mean look, if I can become a criminal and make like 10x what I can work make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, you know, like, and then in my neighborhood it's not even like there's no social stigma with it. In fact, like you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy and it's just too much. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, on that note, what do you say to people who say, hey, we weren't advocating for defund the police. We were saying redirect that money to, you know, what was it, group therapy or sort of, you know, mental health, you know, or other services that are more preventive. What would you say to that argument?

[Marc Andreessen]

It's just like a misunderstanding of incentives, I think. Right. Like incentives drive culture. If you get rid of law enforcement, then look, we don't have a strong enough consistent and we're a heterogeneous society, ethical kind of structure to make people go, okay, like, you know, robbing somebody is bad or, or for sure, like selling drugs is bad or bookmaking or whatever the crime is. Like a lot of people don't even know that's a crime, you know, until they're much older and so forth. So like it's not viable to, you know, stop crime with a big incentive. Like, yeah, you can go talk to somebody as a social worker and say, hey, you shouldn't do that. But like if they go, well look, I have a very strong cash incentive to do it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

Then like how is that going to work? So you have to have. I'm not against social work, but you can't do it at the expense of crime enforcement, you know, law enforcement. And we saw that. I mean like we ran the experiment, it didn't work, you know, and I think people would say, well, we didn't hire enough social workers. But you know, like social workers can't deal with like a robbery or murder or rape or like a violent crime.

[Ben Horowitz]

And product and these are not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

[Garrett Langley]

No, I was going to say, to this point, there is a. In some parts of the country, cities, whole cities, there isn't a stigma in doing something like stealing a car. And you don't just change that overnight with more social work. And I think, like, I've seen programs, at least, where, you know, their phrase is more, you know, at promise versus at risk programs, where it's like, if you don't want to get in this cycle, create that path, but you still actually have to fix the root problem, which is you should be held accountable if you steal someone's car.

[Ben Horowitz]

It was interesting you brought up the sort of Dr. Dre, you know, fuck the police. Now taking a photo with police because some people say, hey, hip hop at times is glorified a certain, you know, crime lifestyle. Are other people sort of evolving, like Dr. Dre has or how is sort of the community, you know, over time? You thought about sort of this, well.

[Marc Andreessen]

Look, I think that there. So fuck. The police had a real basis in it, in that there was like, if you look at the LAPD in that era, they, you know, and this was the drug war era, they were like, very, very, very aggressive. And it was, you know, brutalized first, like, ask questions second, you know, kind of culture of that police force. So he was making a real comment on a real thing, you know, an ice cube and so forth. But the answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing, right? Like, that's the right way to police. You need. And I give you an example. So what the Vegas police said, you know, kind of if you look at it before the drone program, before Flock, Okay? So if you don't have Flock, what happens? You get a call. There's a 1988 Toyota Corolla that was stolen, and it's blue, and it's driving this way. Okay? So then a guy gets pulled over. Not the right guy. I'm getting pulled over for the police. They're highly suspicious, they're nervous. And I'm like, whatever. I'm a black man, so I'm already, like, trained to be wary of this. And so now you can have an incident, whereas. And if it's a flat camera, you know, that's the guy. That is the guy. And so now you're not sending in one police officer because, you know, it's the guy. You're sending in a team. You're going to apprehend them safely, you know, at. You're gonna take your time. Cause, you know, like, you don't have to move on to the next one, it's a totally different situation. And then you can start to build relationships in the community because you're not like, falsely arresting people and that kind of thing. And so if you look at, you know, Vegas has the highest murder clearance rate in the country, well over 90%. Why is that? You talk to them. It's because anytime a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. And in most cities, they don't talk to the police. And so by doing community policing, they're able to get that information, they're able to clear the murders, they're able to make the community safer. And mostly, by the way, people should understand this, the victims of crime are poor people, by and large, you know, and so when you go defund the police, we're not going to enforce law. Da, da. You're basically terrorizing the poor community.

[Ben Horowitz]

And this is what's called the Ferguson effect. Right? Like, crime actually went up.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, no, of course. Of course it did. And it's, you know, people just don't think these systematic problems all the way through. They. They just go to the very first thing. Like, police are bad. Yeah, well, like, the system hasn't been working. So let's fix the system as opposed to vilify any individual. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Garrett, can you say more about why sort of the. I don't know if the clear clearance rate or just the sort of rate at which we catch, you know, murders or solve crimes has. Has been dropping. And, you know.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, well, I think I'll provide one positive reason why clearance rates are down, and the rest is very negative. On a positive side, our expectations of a society to arrest someone have gone up. Which is. Which is good. Right. I think a. The number of people who you hear about getting released 10 years later because now we have DNA or 10 years later because now we have video events. Like, that's actually a good thing. Right. It should be harder to put someone in jail for life. Yeah, that's one reason. Right. Like, that's a good thing. Like, some of that's from tv. You know, you watch nciss. Nciss, and you're just like, there's cameras everywhere. Kinda.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So that's the one. The second is, and Ben mentioned this witness cooperation is gone. I mean, what's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So no one shows up, which is a huge problem societally. We've given up on pretending that we're gonna help you. So that's the second issue. Third issue is a pretty Big mix shift in crime. So if you think about the 60s, 70s, 80s, majority of crime was domestic. You would kill a partner, you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend. So it was not randomized crime. Now, the majority of homicides are random. It is a drug deal gone wrong. It is a gang rivalry over territory that is the predominant type of crime. That is way harder to solve. Because if it was a traditional type, you go, okay, let's check the family.

[Marc Andreessen]

Great.

[Garrett Langley]

We're done. Case closed. Fourth one. The amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way, but faster than both skill set and technology has kept pace. So even though let's pick on Vegas, Vegas has hundreds, probably thousands, tens of thousands of cameras. You gotta go search them. You gotta go put it together. Like, that doesn't just. AI is.

[Marc Andreessen]

Nobody's watching the camera.

[Garrett Langley]

No one's watching them. Right. And we can look at recent events where there have been these shootings on college campuses. And they're like, why don't they find them fast? There's thousands of cameras. I'm like, the technology's not there yet. Now Flock has some tools to help with that, but we're not deployed everywhere. And the last one, which we hit on was just staffing. We talked about early retirement. So even though let's pick on Atlanta. Atlanta is. Was at a low, was at 60% staffed. They're now up to 75, 80. That gap is all 21 year olds.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years, but. So your seasoned, experienced detectives have all retired. And so it's this compounding effect where it doesn't look pretty good. And that's why, you know, outside of Vegas, the international average is around 47% clearance rate. So you have a coin flip for murder.

[Marc Andreessen]

You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.

[Garrett Langley]

Flip a coin. Flip a coin. And you gotta imagine if you're. If you're, you know, upper quartile, you shouldn't get away with it forever.

[Marc Andreessen]

Wow. Yep.

[Garrett Langley]

Sorry to bring the mood.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

The I do love your sort of teach for America but for policing idea, for people who are listening, who are inspired, like, what would it take for that to get off the ground? Like.

[Garrett Langley]

Well, if you remove the, like, debt grievance part. Actually, not that that much. I think the biggest change is if you look at today and I don't, you could debate whether this is important or not. You typically are looking at almost 52 weeks of training before you get out in the field. That's too slow.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

You know, I think Teach for America does probably what, like a four or eight week program? I don't actually know, but it's probably pretty quick.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, you're college educated, you're going to figure it out. Yeah. Policing has a different expectation. So I would continue to see more either civilian jobs, which some agencies are doing, where they're just creating different entire departments for civilians. And then in that case there's no academy. You also don't have a gun, which is fine. Right. But I think that's actually like, it's actually not much to pull it off. I think it just takes a major city, most likely needs to be a major city to say I'm going to create 200 entry level jobs requires a college degree. It's two year commitment. And you know, I think that's pretty doable. I'll talk to a mayor about it.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And I do think that as police forces get much higher tech, I think it gets much more interesting too for college graduates and people with higher education and so forth, because it just changes the nature of what policing is. You know, when you have full intelligence, then I can't overemphasize how much safer everybody is. Like police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped like 75% when we first put the cameras and the drones in place. Just because you're not in this weird unknown situation where you don't know, you know, if they have a gun, you have a gun, there's not enough police around. All that kind of thing just makes for extremely dangerous situation. And you know, we have a, and this is how you end up with this like militarized police situation, which, you know, is not a very sustainable idea.

[Ben Horowitz]

Let's go deeper on Vegas as a, as a case study. Ben, what has most surprised you in your, in your work with Vegas or what do you think other cities can learn from the work that you guys are doing?

[Marc Andreessen]

I think that the most surprising thing is to me is just like how much the actual community likes it. Like, we've got criticism in the press and whatnot. Of course, you know, surveillance, Big Brother, like Ben's a penguin, all that kind of thing. But the community, you know, everybody who lives there and Vegas is kind of a unique city in that, like it's got crime, tourism. Yeah. People fly in. Yeah, let's do some crime and then fly out and all that kind of thing. And then there's like a lot of people go bananas in Vegas. So it's, it's way beyond any criminal motivation. That's like, mental health and that kind of thing, or mental health combined with, like, hard drugs combined with, you know, Vegas. So. So there's a lot of that. And. But for the people who live there, you know, the. All the hospitality workers, you know, the people who are working for tips and all that kind of thing, the fact that, you know, and we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right, you know, the right culture, you know, adding the technology to that has kind of made the community go, wow. Like, I am. I'm proud to be here. I feel safe. I know that if a crime gets committed, and we always say in the. Like, you can commit a crime in Vegas. You can't get away with it. And people really, really appreciate that. I've gotten, you know, so many people come up to me from all over the city saying, hey, thank you. We really see the difference and appreciate what you're doing and so forth. So I. I didn't think it would be that visible that fast.

[Garrett Langley]

I think the other thing, too. And you. I don't know if you actually know this, but the model of what Vegas is doing is caught on more nationally, where this public and private partnership is picking up speed because the pace of government innovation is quite slow.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, has mutual incentives to be safer. So I think about, like, who's the largest supporter of the Mooresville Police Department? Lowe's. Because Lowe's is based there.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And they have thousands of employees that live there. And so to. For Lowe's to spend a million dollars, it's very small for them, but can transform that police department. And, like, more cities are waking up to, like, there's a better way to run a city.

[Marc Andreessen]

So this is so important, because if you look at the Vegas pd, It's like, well, they've got, like, I don't know, thousands of officers. They've got, you know, a huge budget and this and that and the other. But can they make the marginal investment in technology? Absolutely not. It's very, very difficult. It's extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. You know, they don't want to have to lay off people to do it.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it's mostly headcount, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, and it's. Yeah, it's mostly. It's almost all headcount. And so by just, like, adding, like, less than a percent to the police budget, you can completely transform the police force. It's pretty amazing. And, you know, it's very rewarding work. I mean, just like, Little things. So we had a tremendous attrition problem in the 91 1. 911 is a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. It's all this kind of thing. And you know, they, everybody was quitting. They five minute call waits for a 911. Imagine waiting on hold for five minutes on 91 1. And you know, I, I was like, well, what's the problem? And they're like, well, you know, like the work conditions are hard. Like there's no ice machine. Like that was literally that. So I was like, fuck that, I'll buy that. So I bought an ice machine, an espresso machine, we put in a gym. And now the call weights are less than 30 seconds. And so, you know, just like that. T investment can change everything.

[Garrett Langley]

But I think to your point, in like in Atlanta, I'm on the police foundation board. I think we contribute about 30 million a year to the police department.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And I'll never forget this is a couple months ago, the head of the like SWAT team came in.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And was like, I would like new equipment. I'm thinking, how bad can it be? And he walks in and it's like, I mean you would be embarrassed. It's like your job is actually to go into fire, like line of fire. It's like he was like, I would like a million dollars to get all new equipment for our SWAT team. It's like this is very logical, but it is hard. When you're a city, you have no flexibility in your budget. You have no ability to react.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's a. Yeah. And cities in general. Right. Are under tremendous budget. You know, most of them have run programs for years, borrowing from the future. They're highly in debt. You know, they've got big pensions to pay off. So it's really hard to change a city budget.

[Ben Horowitz]

It seems like relatively small amounts of money for these companies or individuals can make a massive difference. Is this repeatable in cities, you know, beyond Vegas and like in San Francisco? How many companies would pay money to make it safer for their employees to come into the office every day?

[Garrett Langley]

I hope a lot.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. As soon as people see it, they want to do it. Like, people just don't know that's possible. They're like, what? I can give money to the police.

[Garrett Langley]

If you look at all of the latest innovations In San Francisco, 100% private funded.

[Ben Horowitz]

Really?

[Garrett Langley]

100%. Now they're choosing to stay as quiet as they can, but I know, yeah, look, we don't want a repeat of Penguin Bin. Yeah. Well, it's going to cold.

[Marc Andreessen]

If I was done eating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well.

[Garrett Langley]

People will hate you. It is interesting for anyone listening, you should go tour the San Francisco department's Real time crime center. It's powered by Flock. And I guarantee you will walk away and you will say, where do I sign a check to give?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Because you want a drone in your neighborhood, you want more cameras in your neighborhood. Like, this is the way to do it.

[Ben Horowitz]

How much do we have to pay for the XI homeless program when he comes?

[Garrett Langley]

It's a million dollars.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. Right, right. They literally raise taxes. This is such a tiny amount of money compared to those sorts of things. Wow.

[Garrett Langley]

And then just to close the loop on it, what we typically see too, and this is the same in Vegas, is the expectation is like the first year, two years are covered, and then the city has to decide, do you want to keep it? And you roll it into a budget because with enough notice, they can afford all these products. It's just hard to get started. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished. And Flack hasn't been, you know, exempt from that because of all the great work that you've done, you know, solving a huge. Is it like 20% of do about.

[Garrett Langley]

A million arrests this year?

[Ben Horowitz]

Year. So what are the criticisms that you get for.

[Marc Andreessen]

And I just want to point out arrests of the right person.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like this is such a big thing in America. Like the number of people who, you know, particularly if you live in the wrong neighborhood, if you look the wrong way and so forth and get like arrested for the wrong crime or arrested or totally innocent, has been just like a massive problem, because just one of those is a complete tragedy. So the fact that they've arrested a million of the correct people with like a perfect AI match is really, really significant. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

It is a. It is a cultural shock to a police department when you go from subjective based policing to objective based policing, like Ben's describing. So look, I think we get predominantly criticized for privacy, which I find falsely focused. I don't think there's any privacy erosion in Flock. I think Flock puts a spotlight on trust issues. And so I'll give you a good example.

[Marc Andreessen]

And by the way, the Flock cameras are all in public spaces.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

So whatever you're doing in public, somebody probably has a phone and is really invading your privacy.

[Garrett Langley]

As I say, the ironic part is when we do get criticisms, people that are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, do you realize if the Federal government wanted to find you a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do it. I will just get a cell phone dump and I will know your exact location in real time, by the way.

[Marc Andreessen]

Which is what they do.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes, but it's way more effective. That's so, you know, not only are we going to solve that, so I think for the privacy thing, it's quite false. The trust is real, though. And so if you go to some communities, they do not trust their police department. And that's what this highlights. Because if you don't trust your police department, you don't want them to have guns, you don't want them to have technology, you want them to go away. And so there are some communities where that trust is just. It's just deeply fissured and we're not going to fix it. Like, I don't think that's our job. We're not. We're just highlighting it. So typically when we see critics, you know, they call it privacy, but that's just a cover for. I don't trust the police to do their job effectively. And so what we try to do, at least in our tools, is build those levers so that if you're in, you know, Piedmont, California, and you can go to their transparency page and see why are they using Flock, how are they using it, what are they doing? Like, that's actually. I think that's good in building more and more trust.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. It seems like some people are scared about a world in which there's so little trust in the police that basically everyone is getting private security. You know, all this neighborhood.

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, that's the irony of defund the police. It's defund the police for poor people, privatize the police for rich people.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. Which, you know, has failed in many countries.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

And that's not a good idea, by the way.

[Garrett Langley]

No, no, no.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. And say more about why that is.

[Marc Andreessen]

The crimes are committed, like 98% against poor people. Like, that is who are the victims of crime. And so you take away the public funding of police for poor people, then you basically end up with a completely degenerate society. You basically turn whole neighbors into. Into the third world, which we, by the way, have in the United States in a really major way. And, you know, you just have to put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to raise kids in that environment. It is crazy that that happens in this country. It's just absolutely insane.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. I mean, if you look at the core premise of America, it's economic mobility. I Want to do better than my parents, I want my kids to do better than me. You have to have three things to do that. You have to have food.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Garrett Langley]

And to Ben's point, on privatizing, like, you look at one of the biggest issues in poor communities, it's a lack of sourced food. Second is, you have to have a shelter. Okay. Third is you have to be safe. If you don't have a bedrock of safety in your life, nothing else can be done. Your entire mind becomes occupied by, can I actually walk to school? Will I make it to 18 years old? 21. And so if you look at that, you go by privatizing, you remove a core tenet of economic mobility, which is what you see politically. Politically, where we start to say, I don't believe in the American dream anymore, but it didn't work for me. And that's. I think the fundamental risk is actually like that, that we have a generation of kids who don't think America will work for them. And that's a. I think that's actually a huge problem.

[Ben Horowitz]

It's also you mentioned, you know, 98% is against poor people. It's also done by a very small percentage of people who commit all the crimes, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yep.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so what do we do with that percentage of people? Maybe, you know, people talk about criminal justice reform sometimes. They talk about basically not putting, you know, criminals in prison and letting them free, I guess. What is the steel man of, like, how do we solve for this? What do we do to address this?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, look, I think that one, if you're getting. So there's the separate conversation of prison reform. And look, the way the prison system works and the incentives in it in the United States has a lot of issues, you know, principally that it's not. We've gone completely away from rehabilitation. And some of this comes from time based sentencing and other things. And so our recidivism rate is over 70% in the United States and countries that do, like a better job, it can be, you know, much below 40%. So we are throwing away, like, there's certain people who are psychopaths and we're never gonna reform them. But there's a big. Most people in prison. I have this conversation with my friend Shaka Sengora, who's in prison for 20 years. Most people in prison are actually betas. So they're people whose idiot friend had the idea to go rob the local drug dealer or whatever, and then they get caught up, and then they're in prison. Now the problem is those people who could be productive citizens once they get to prison, become trained to be much harder criminals. And so, you know, that's something that we definitely. One, it'd be a huge cost savings for the country. Two, it would be, you know, much better for society and much better for people who get arrested. But like that, I would just say that's an independent problem of law enforcement. And I think the problem with mixing those two is, you know, I guess the prison system needs reform and needs to be improved. And, you know, but we still have to keep people safe. And so I think you have to address those a bit independently. You can't. You're not gonna solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law like that. Just. You just make the. You punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is. I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do. You basically then create an incentive for nobody to be productive for, you know, your incentive for murder, incentive for robbery, incentive for rape, all that kind of thing.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, why don't you say more on the. On the policy side in terms of are there certain cities where certain policies are much more effective that others should learn from or.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think on the. To Ben's point, just to close that up too, I mean, there's evil in the world, and flock nor any of us are going to fix that. And so we will always need some place to deal with them. Then the question is to the 99% of criminals today who are not evil and they're more capitalistic or opportunistic criminals. So I think to your point, like, there are some interesting activities, particularly around nonviolent either juvenile or young adults, where putting them in prison is the worst thing to do. They will go from nonviolent to violent in months. They will get stuck in it for their entire life. And so we're seeing more and more cities say, there's a better way to do this. You know, you can go to two places, three places, right? You can go to work, you can go to school, you can go home. It's way better than jail. It's cheaper for the city. It's actually now teaching them to become a productive member of society. And so I think for us, that's probably the most important kind of policy change we're starting to see is less of a mindset that, oh, we should throw people in jail. I think the other thing we're looking at, and we actually. We had a great conversation with the DA here in San Francisco at Jenkins of just like there also needs to be some technology and either flocks in a builder or someone should to make that part of the process go faster. So I was in Shelby county in Tennessee, Memphis, and there's thousands of people waiting for their trial. What do you think's happening in that place? I mean, they're becoming criminals. And so there's also an effort of like, we actually need to speed up the judicial system. And I don't think more humans is the answer. So also seeing more and more cities adopt technology to speed that up.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, actually, so in Vegas they have just to show you how like fixable this problem is, they have this. So there's an anti recidivism program called Hope for Prisoners which basically, you know, teaches prisoners coming out of jail how to get back into society and then it helps them get jobs. The Vegas prosecutor will. If you're like an 18 year old kid and you commit a first time offense and it's not violent, they'll send you, they won't prosecute you, they'll send you to Hope for Prisoners and you go through the rehab. They are close to zero percent recidivism on that program. Just because, you know, a lot of the times it's like, well, how do I get people become criminals sometimes? Because that is a career path. And so if you create an alternative career path, nobody wants to go to jail. Nobody, you know, like, unless you're insane or like a real psycho, that's not the path people want to be on. It's just a path they end up on. And so, you know, creating other avenues is really good, but like you have to also disincentivize the criminal career path. Like those go together.

[Ben Horowitz]

I. Delancey street restaurant also another example. Is that an, is that a successful example?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, no, of course, yeah, definitely, definitely.

[Ben Horowitz]

Where it's. Yeah, it's a restaurant. And they take people who've previously been in prison and give them sort of, you know.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, no, like I think that businesses, you know, hiring people particularly out of. And I think Delancey street hires a lot of people out of juvenile hall. You know, taking kids out of the system early is very, very productive. It's like once you've been in prison 10 years or 20 years, it's really hard to adapt back into society. It's a very, it's. You're going into a whole different world.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it gives them a lot of dignity. You know, they tell the story to people. So it's very moving place. What's interesting because there's, there's sometimes I'd call it a form of gaslighting where they say, what are you complaining about? Crime is down. Like, look at all the numbers. Why do you feel unsafe? That's just, you know, a clip you saw on Twitter by some right wing person, you know, why are you feeling unsafe walking the streets of San Francisco? What do you say to. What's the right way of thinking about that?

[Garrett Langley]

It's funny you mentioned that. There's an elected official, the state representative of a certain state and I will disclose information. And they were a very loud antagonist of Flock and sadly she was like a lot of political figures are. She was the victim of a target attack. Her house was shot at. She's a massive fan of Flock now because that person was arrested within minutes.

[Ben Horowitz]

Wow.

[Garrett Langley]

Because there's a Flock camera on her street. She called 911. They're like, yeah, we got the guy, he's in jail. And he had been posting online about, you know, she's this, she's that. And so there is a bit of like, oh, we want to defund the police, just not in our city.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Garrett Langley]

And that's the main.

[Marc Andreessen]

Well and then a lot of the politicians who want to defund the police have massive private security.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, if you've got three guys walking around here all the time, you feel fine. But I also think like for me at least our expectations of safety should only go up. Just like we expect information at our fingertips. Why shouldn't we feel safe?

[Ben Horowitz]

Everywhere we go they say like, hey, living in a city is dangerous. You know, that's what you signed up for.

[Garrett Langley]

That's the only. I've only gotten into one argument with an antagonist who I said, you know, I just don't think crime should exist. And he, and he was like, I think it's just a part of living in a big city. And I was like, that seems horrible. Like it's like trash too. Like, I don't know. I think like clean streets, like these are not unreasonable things to ask for.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. It seems like a very odd perspective. But I, you know, I like particularly if you're a young person, I could.

[Ben Horowitz]

See well they worry about overly, you know, and you know, putting people too, too many people in prison or for the wrong crimes or they worry about a militarized police.

[Garrett Langley]

All those seem like reasonable concerns.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that's the deal.

[Garrett Langley]

I guess. I guess the thing for me is, you know, who's going to decide how many homicides is okay, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And is it okay like you or your family or your friends, you know, is that okay with you? And then most people would say no to that. It's just, like, fine. It's like a fine thing for the other guy. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

What I think, to bend to your point, too, the number of times we've been in debates where you've got a privileged person in a community articulating a desire for less policing, yet the person who actually needs it sitting there saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, time out. I actually want more. I want all the technology.

[Marc Andreessen]

Town halls look like that.

[Garrett Langley]

And that's what every town hall looks like. You shouldn't be making decisions for other people.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. I'm so empathetic. I want you murdered.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

That's the.

[Garrett Langley]

It's the safest thing for you.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. It's so crazy. Well, the other thing on crime statistics is, you know, like, I think it's pretty widely known that, like, a lot of crime stats have been faked, underreported, et cetera. And then if you're not prosecuting crimes, particularly in San Francisco, we had this where they don't get called in. Like, if your car got broken into in San Francisco and you called the police, they would be like, what do you want us to do? Like, we're not going to prosecute it, so people just stop calling. And the real measure of this is the surveys that they've done in almost every city on, have you been a victim of a crime? Versus the actual official crime statistics go in the opposite direction. And so, you know, over longitudinal data. So I just think, like, it's. It's a narrative that's supported by, like, fake numbers.

[Garrett Langley]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it's also the. The stuff that's also unreported is just, do you feel safe walking, you know, in inner city? Do you feel safe with your kids, you know, walking at night? And anyways, and.

[Marc Andreessen]

And by the way, the reporting on that did change after 2020. So, like, literally, the practices of how crimes are recorded, the. How crimes are prosecuted changed. And so people go, well, like, the trend line is correct, even if the numbers. No, it's not. It's not correct.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And what I love about what you guys are doing at Flock is that you're giving the technology so that, you know, cities and states can choose where they want to be on the spectrum, basically. Talk more a little bit about that because different. Different places have different values.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. I mean, so. So there's probably two. There's two big levers that a city can pull. So one is retention. So we were. Before Flock was Started, there was other companies in this space, and they would historically store location data in perpetuity. And my philosophy, starting the company was like, that seems more of a risk than an asset because it's just a lot of data. And so we store it for 30 days, but you can flex that up and down. So in New Jersey, they store it for five years. That's the state law. That's not our choice. That's just the law. California, there's a max of 90 days. We have some agencies in California that store it for seven days. I mean, you could store it for a day. Now, the efficacy is probably linearly correlated by the retention period because, like, how often do you call a crime the same day it happens? It actually not every time you're away, your car's stolen, whatever it could be. So one is data retention, and the second is data sharing. Like, what other police departments do you want to work with? Criminals don't really care where cities start and stop, but cities do by design. And so you can control where you share. So in some states, like California, the data can never leave the state. In Virginia recently adopted a similar bill. Illinois, Colorado, more states are saying, hey, you know, we. We trust our state. I think that's an okay approach. I worry about, you know, Ben maybe, you know, do criminals ever leave California to Nevada? Like, I think they do. So, like, it's. It's.

[Marc Andreessen]

By the way, so this. This is one of the things we ran into on the Tupac case, by the way, was the LAPD did so much stuff to foul that case in Vegas, which is why that murder went unsolved for whatever it was, like, almost 30 years.

[Ben Horowitz]

And why they do that?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt, and the. Well, there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac. And, you know, thankfully, we kind of reopened the cold case and we caught the guy. But it's, you know, like, when you think about it in terms of the actual victim.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

And how bad it was that, like, one of the great artists in the half century ended up being portrayed as, like, this weird criminal victim of a crime because we never solved it. Like, that's what happens when you don't share information. Like, that's the. That's a real issue.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, but see, I mean, for us, you know, we've got some agencies, you know, some of the most liberal cities in the country, huge fans of flock. They tweak it to their likings, and I think we just get back to. It's not our job as a company to write the law, decide what laws are enforced. Immigration is not enforced in California. I don't care. That's up to Californians. I live in Georgia, and we have different expectations of what's criminal, what's not criminal. And there is a difference between local, state, and federal. And we just try to stay out of it and say, good luck, everyone.

[Ben Horowitz]

But we're here to support.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, look.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then I think a bigger fish to fry, you know, if you're certainly Garrett. And I think sometimes as a society, it's really hard. Like, this is one of the challenges with democracy is some of these problems are very complex. And, you know, like, crime and punishment is systemic, like complicated issue. And it's hard for people who are really digging into the problem to design the right system. And then once you throw it into politics, you know, anybody says anything and it gets all convoluted and this and that and the other. So it is, like, really tough to deal with that. And I think that's why we, you know, that's why we don't have a much better system than we have.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, but I think that too, Ben, to your point is when it happens, though, that complication becomes very simple. When you have strong leadership with a backbone, normally in a mayor and a da, city council and a sheriff, where they're like, I'm gonna arrest you if you commit a crime in my city.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yep.

[Garrett Langley]

You have to say that out loud. You have to say it and do it well.

[Marc Andreessen]

But then the problem is you're gonna get arrested and the prosecutor's gonna prosecute you and the judge is going to be like, enforce the law. Yeah. Which is. It's a much harder combination than you might think, you know, and there have been like, there's a huge push to not criminal, to decriminalize crime, essentially in this country. And I look like it's still going on. And it's, you know, there are still these, you know, prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not convicting people. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And is that for ideological reasons or do we have a big organized crime problem in this country or what is.

[Marc Andreessen]

You mentioned earlier, a big disorganized crime problem?

[Garrett Langley]

Well, I will say, though, the sheer sophistication of some criminal groups is actually astonishing. There is definitely low level crime, but you've got. It's become somewhat politicized, but there are truly a large number of Eastern European and South American gangs operating large scale businesses, and I call them businesses because while they commit crime, they don't run sloppy. And so I'll give you an example, like in logistics space. So Ben and I are two buddies from Eastern Europe. We go buy a freight forwarder, a legitimate company. We start receiving semis full of product, and guess what? They just disappear. And then after about a month, we shut the company down and disappear. And we've taken tens of millions of dollars of goods, and then we flip it on Facebook, marketplace and all secondary places. And it's clean. No one gets shot. And everything looks clean on paper. And like, this is obviously not easy to like, you have to be sophisticated. But like, this is large, large scale, and it works.

[Marc Andreessen]

And by the way, so this is what happened. You know, I have when the crime went really crazy in San Francisco, I had a long conversation with mayor breed about it. And one of the things that. So in San Francisco, right, like the whole political movement was people are hungry. You can't arrest them for shoplifting. And so for soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up, right, shutting down the big mall. Like, there's no shopping in San Francisco whatsoever anymore. And so all the citizens got punished. But, like, it wasn't hungry people. It was like organized crime systematically selling the goods secondhand. It was that kind of thing. And so you get now the people that they deployed were low level criminals, right? Like, you can just pick, have a kid go rob the thing for you, and you pay him.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

But that's not what's going on. It's not that the kid is hungry. It's that the kid is now a career criminal working for an organized gang, probably from South America. So, you know, like the side effects of these off the cuff, nobody thought it through. Crazy ideas are, like, highly consequential.

[Ben Horowitz]

Garrett. Talk about what the world looks like in a world where Flock achieves its goal. Like, what's the future of policing? You know, Flock camera on every block, like, talk, talk about that.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. I think the word been used was intelligence.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And so much of that shift is starting to happen. I would add to the intelligence. Precision.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And like, I'll paint for you a picture of a recent success story. That to me is the future. And it just hasn't happened in every city yet.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So there's a individual who leaves the hospital mentally unwell and shoots someone in a drive by, just driving by and start shooting people. This is a real story because all the police departments in the city worked, like in the neighboring cities worked together. They put out a hot list entry for, hey, we're looking for this vehicle. Armed, dangerous, mentally unwell. That vehicle pulls into the largest commercial center for one of the cities. It's a big mall. The mall is also a flock customer. So the police department gets a ding on that camera and says, hey, we found this guy. No, it's paused. Traditional response is you deploy SWAT and it's gonna take about 15 minutes to get everyone ready. They're gonna come in hot and someone's gonna die. It's not clear who, either a citizen, an officer, or the suspect's gonna die, but let's assume someone's gonna die. And then just as not as important, but just as a matter of fact, that mall is also gonna see a dramatic decline in attendance. And it could bleed to probably the end of the mall. It's not good too, for that situation, bad. That's unpause. What happened? Sitting at a comfortable desk like we are here, a real time crime center operator clicks a button that says, launch drone. The drone is at the mall in about 40 seconds from about a half mile away, we can zoom in, find that the individual has a tattoo. We pulled that because we have a product called Nova that when an LPR hit comes through, we can say, oh, wow, this person's been arrested six times. Is there any of your. Oh, there is interesting information. This person has a very distinguishable forearm tattoo. So we spot the tattoo halfway. This guy has no idea we're following him. We don't see a gun. Two plainclose officers walk up. The whole time, they know they've got overhead protection. They're being helped, just like you would in the army. They take them down. No one has any idea. And they then present this to city council. And city council was like, we need drones everywhere. We need drones everywhere. It's safer. It's more precise. There's a level of intelligence. And so when I look at this police department, they've got all their data integrated, they have all their sensors integrated. It's just happening. And I think for us, when we think about a kind of agentic layer on top of that, where now you can start to reduce some of your staffing problems. But some of these jobs, no one wants to work the night shift. No one wants to. Like, some jobs are just like, not fun. There's a way to do a software. So I think that kind of intelligent, precise policing is where we want. I think the net effect of that, to Ben's earlier point, is officers spend more time with their community. Yeah, Less time filling out paperwork, less time Writing reports. More time engaged.

[Ben Horowitz]

Just a quick last one story. Do you have a couple stories of you actually saving, like, a baby?

[Garrett Langley]

Oh, I mean, we helped return over 450 missing children this year.

[Marc Andreessen]

Oh, my God.

[Garrett Langley]

And that's the. No, it's not funny, but aha. Where it's like, people are like, oh, we should, you know, ban Flock. And I'm like, until your child is stolen. Because I've got three kids, and I want to know that if anything goes, happens wrong with them, flock is there.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And this, like, you get carjacked and your baby's in the backseat and they take the baby. I mean, like, that kind of thing.

[Garrett Langley]

We know it happened. I mean, there was a case down in San Diego this year where Divin's Point. It was at a mall. Hops in, kid in the back, like, obviously wasn't. That wasn't a part of the plan. Became a part of the plan. And like, thankfully, you know, they've got a lot of Flock cameras in San Diego and. And we were able to get the individual. But that happens. Doesn't happen every day in your city, but it happens every day in the country.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, Garrett, you're doing heroic work, and one of the most inspiring things about working A Z is working with you. So thank you for the work that you do.

[Marc Andreessen]

Thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Thank you.

[Podcast Host (a16z)]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to, like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z substack.com thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.