Austin's Crime Tech Controversy: A City Disarmed by Politics

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]The reason why they had a hard time catching them was because of they had flock cameras in Austin, but then they shut those cameras off for political reasons.

[00:00:09]>> Correct. Yes. Yeah. So Please explain that. Yeah, so these guys are driving around in cars and yeah, they're switching cars, whatever. And they're they went to like a dozen locations and like five, you know, and tried shooting shooting at buildings and people and houses and and all kinds of stuff. And so Okay, so you got these guys running around. So they there's a system called Flock, which is one of our companies.

[00:00:24]And and what they do it's kind of like in the movies you you take all the municipal cameras and traffic cameras and everything and you feed them into an AI AI and the AI is able to first find a license plate in in real time. So you can you can find that. But but second, you can actually find a car even if you don't have the license plate. You can find like distinct markings of the car.

[00:00:40]It'll on the car it'll track the car.

[00:00:41]And so this thing is deployed. It's this it's sold to city governments. It's used all over the country. It solves crimes every every day we get reports on, you know, carjackings with kids in the backseat and their lives get saved cuz you know, they they track them down. So a lot of a lot of a lot of tons of cities have this and and they love it.

[00:00:55]In cities like Austin with the intense politics, you know, they they run into backlash on on privacy and and surveillance and so Austin had Flock and then turned it off.

[00:01:05]And as a consequence they were not able to find these guys for I don't know whatever several days.

[00:01:09]And then what happened that late breaking news today is these guys drove into some adjacent town you know, up against Austin and and and Flock is was live in that town. And so Flock tagged them the minute they drove into that that town. And then they they caught the guys. Subsequent to that the mayor your your mayor in Austin of your mayor and your chief of police gave a press conference and said we really need to rethink this cuz it's it's it's crazy to have the ability to solve crimes and stop crimes and not be able to use it.