If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah. Well, we're throwing people away, right? 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. 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, and then in my neighborhood, it's not even like there's no social stigma with it. In fact, you're looked up upon if you're a criminal. It's just too easy. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.
Outside of Vegas, the national average is around 47% clearance rate. So, you have a coin flip for murder. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.
Flip a coin. The irony is when we do get criticisms from people that are less familiar with technology, I laugh because I'm like, do your eyes. 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, which is what they do.
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.
Garrett, welcome to the podcast.
So, this group here is heavily invested in eliminating crime. Garrett, obviously you 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 we were taking a multifaceted approach and asked you Garrett to sit on a committee to help identify what are the different levers or what's the comprehensive strategy to eliminate crime. What would be some of your main advice?
Let's break it down in terms of people, products, and policy. For 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? 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 analyst, there's a ton of roles you can have in a police department, we'll retire student debt.' So instead of just giving away for free, actually go work for your government for two 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 skill set issue.
So that's the people side. That's the first thing I'd do. I'd have a national law enforcement act for staffing.
Right. And also raise the status of police out there. So how much of the people issue is the fact that we went from a very pro, police are heroes, every new show as a cop show, to complete vilification of the police, defund the police, abolish the police, abolish cop shows. How much of it is cultural versus just a shortage of people?
It's entirely cultural. Because you think about it, nothing has changed in the last 30 years that would indicate some percentage of people who were born and wanted to serve has changed. The 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, early retirement skyrocketed during both the social unrest and then COVID, and they've never bounced back.
Worst possible time. So do you think, Ben, to your point, the only way I see to do a kind of cultural reset is to make it financially impossible for people who are otherwise burdened by debt to go help their communities.
Yeah, I think that's an actually very important and underrated idea. Because one of the things that we've seen is that because of the shortage, many police departments have lowered their standards. The criticism of the police was okay, you had some psychos who joined the police force, they couldn't get them out for whatever reason, and then they do some heinous thing and it taints the whole police. Well, now because there aren't enough people, they 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. It was funny, or not funny, but 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 targeted, they wanted to kill that guy. That was a homicide.' And I was like, 'Oh boy.' But then you look 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, etc. 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 is. I think we just have to be looking forward, careful about 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.
Agree. And I think you're right when you look across the board. In the last year I've only been to one major city who seems to be making a dent on staffing. But it's like they've gone to such extremes. They'll buy you a house. You get a take-home car. There's literally millions of people that could do this job. I don't think it's a cultural issue.
Yeah. A big thing in Vegas that we're doing is trying to, with Flock Safety and with some of the other technology we bought and the Cybertrucks and so forth, to improve the image for recruiting because that's such a big thing. We have the highest population of veterans in Las Vegas in the whole country. We have plenty of people who could be great police, but we have to continue to improve the image.
It's really funny you mentioned the Cybertruck because I know there was some criticism online. My parents' hometown where they still live, maybe six years ago bought four Teslas for their fleet. The chief was like, 'Every single 18-year-old wants to drive this car. This is why I'm doing this.' And he was heavily applauded in that community because he's a very logical marketing guy. These are a bunch of 18 and 20-year-old men. They like shiny toys, a cool looking truck.
Yeah. If your choice is driving a Toyota Camry or a Cybertruck, what makes it feel cool? The Cybertrucks have been great for recruiting despite the criticism that I got. TechCrunch portrayed me as the Penguin, like I'm a crime boss in Las Vegas making donations to pay off the police to do my evil bidding. Because Andreessen Horowitz is not a good enough business, I need to be in the crime ring in Vegas. But people love them. Since we got the trucks, the number of requests for them appearing at community events is off the charts because they look so cool. When we did 'Paid in Full,' Dr. Dre, famous for the song 'Fuck tha Police,' saw the Cybertruck parked out front and took a picture with the cops in front of it at his request.
Yeah. That's gross. So that's people. Then products. I think Vegas is a good example. You got to go crime by crime. If you have a gun violence problem, which Vegas has some, you need gunshot detection to know, majority of gun violence does not build a report. If I shoot you, I'm not going to call 911 myself. You're not calling 911 either. So that's a problem. You have drones, like Vegas has a great deployment of drones. San Francisco does as well. You need cameras. So you've got all these sensors. What's missing historically is this AI layer and this orchestration layer on top to say, 'Wow, I've gone from no data to an abundance of data. How do I make sense of it?' And then this third piece that we care a lot about is how do you 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 your money is being used. That's the product side. And then policy is you have to hold people accountable. We've seen the social experiment in parts of the country. You need to actually prosecute the crime. 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.
Yeah. One of the things that people don't think through when they think about crime is that you don't have that many choices. You have a choice of lots of crime, or if you're going to prevent crime, there's the Singaporean model which is very harsh capital punishment, or intelligence. 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 much more likely to get caught. There's an old Chinese saying that says certain punishment means no punishment. That is the only way that you can actually achieve a reduction in crime in the US, better intelligence. People say root cause, if we get rid of all poverty, well sure, if you create a utopian society which nobody's ever done, and the people who have tried it have been much more brutal and killed many more people than societies that don't go for utopia. In reality, you just have to deal with the situation as it is. By the way, nobody pays more attention to how policing works than criminals, more than anybody. They know exactly what the policies are, what the technology is, when police change shifts, all that kind of thing. So if you do have great law enforcement, then you're very likely to discourage crime.
What was that quote that you mentioned just before?
The Game had a song where he said, 'Real gangsters hit the streets when police change shifts.' Of course.
To your point, I'll never forget maybe in 2022, there was a rap song released in Southern California with reference to Flock and that had got Flocks to stay away. And I was like, we've made it. This is really important culturally.
Yeah. It's a key KPI to keep track of. If you grow up outside of the system and the most viable way to make a living is crime, then that is a career path. By reducing law enforcement you create a crime career path and it lets us avoid creating real career paths for people in that situation. So it's a cascading effect of just badness.
To your point, 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 prison's already very expensive. There's an economic cost of that person no longer being productive in society.
Well, we're throwing people away, right? With the minimum sentencing and everything, it's very hard to go to prison and come out, then you have this black mark on your life where you can't get an apartment, you can't get a gun, you can't vote, you can't get a job. 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. Are we doing the wrong thing by making it not clear that you're going to get caught, or making the deterrence not 100% clear, while arbitrarily doing long prison sentences instead?
Yeah. If you have great technology, if you've got a comprehensive Flock deployment, then you don't have to advertise it. The streets are watching. They know, to quote Jay-Z, that's going to happen. But if you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations. If I can become a criminal and make 10x what I can make in a minimum wage job, and in my neighborhood there's no social stigma with it, in fact you're looked up upon if you're a criminal, it's just too easy. It's a societal failure for everybody who's in that situation.
What do you say to people who say, 'We weren't advocating for defund the police. We were saying redirect that money to group therapy, mental health, or other services that are more preventive.' What would you say to that argument?
It's just a misunderstanding of incentives. Incentives drive culture. If you get rid of law enforcement, we don't have a strong enough consistent ethical structure to make people go, 'Okay, robbing somebody is bad.' A lot of people don't even know that's a crime until they're much older. So it's not viable to stop crime without a big incentive. You can go talk to somebody as a social worker and say, 'Hey, you shouldn't do that.' But if they go, 'Well, I have a very strong cash incentive to do it,' then how is that going to work? I'm not against social work, but you can't do it at the expense of law enforcement. We ran the experiment, it didn't work. People say we didn't hire enough social workers, but social workers can't deal with a robbery or murder or rape in progress. These are not mutually exclusive, you can do both.
To Ben's point, in some parts of the country, whole cities, there isn't a stigma in doing something like stealing a car. You don't just change that overnight with more social work. I've seen programs where their phrase is '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 have to fix the root problem, which is you should be held accountable if you steal someone's car.
It was interesting you brought up Dr. Dre, 'Fuck tha Police,' now taking a photo with police. Some people say hip-hop at times has glorified a certain crime lifestyle. Are other people evolving like Dr. Dre has, or how has the community thought about this over time?
'Fuck tha Police' had a real basis in that if you look at the LAPD in that era, during the drug war era, they were very, very aggressive, brutalize first, ask questions second culture. So he was making a real comment on a real thing. Ice Cube and so forth. But the answer to that kind of policing is intelligence plus community policing. That's the right way to police. I'll give you an example. What the Vegas police said, before the drone program, before Flock. If you don't have Flock, you get a call, there's a 1988 Toyota Corolla that was stolen, it's blue and it's driving this way. Then a guy gets pulled over, not the right guy. I'm getting pulled over by the police. They're highly suspicious, they're nervous. I'm a black man, so I'm already trained to be wary of this. And so now you can have an incident. Whereas with a Flock camera, you know that's the guy. 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're going to take your time because 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 falsely arresting people. Vegas has the highest murder clearance rate in the country, well over 90%. Why? Because anytime a murder is committed, somebody knows who did it. In most cities, they don't talk to the police. By doing community policing, they're able to get that information and clear the murders. Mostly, people should understand, the victims of crime are poor people by and large. So when you go defund the police, you're basically terrorizing the poor community.
And this is what was called the Ferguson effect, right? Crime actually went up.
Yeah. Of course it did. People just don't think these systematic problems all the way through. They go to the very first thing like 'police are bad.' The system hasn't been working, so let's fix the system as opposed to vilify any individual.
Garrett, can you say more about why the clearance rate or the rate at which we solve crimes has been dropping?
I'll provide one positive reason why clearance rates are down and the rest is very negative. On the positive side, our expectations of society to arrest someone have gone up, which is good. The number of people who get released 10 years later because now we have DNA or video evidence, that's a good thing. It should be harder to put someone in jail for life. That's one reason. The second is, and Ben mentioned this, witness cooperation is gone. What's the personal benefit of testifying in a homicide besides putting your own life at risk? So no one shows up, which is a huge problem. Society has given up on pretending like we're going to help you. Third issue is a big mix shift in crime. In the 60s, 70s, 80s, majority of crime was domestic. You would kill a partner. Now, the majority of homicides are random. It is a drug deal gone wrong, a gang rivalry over territory. That is way harder to solve. Fourth, the amount of evidence has gone up in a positive way but faster than both skill set and technology has kept pace. Even though Vegas has hundreds, thousands of cameras, you got to go search them, put it together. Nobody's watching the camera. The technology is not there yet. Flock has some tools to help but we're not deployed everywhere. And the last one is staffing. We talked about early retirement. Even though Atlanta was at a low of 60% staffed, they're now up to 75-80. That gap is all 21-year-olds. They have no idea how to solve a homicide. They will in 20 years. But your seasoned experienced detectives have all retired. So it's this compounding effect. That's why outside of Vegas the national average is around 47% clearance rate. You have a 53% chance of getting away with murder.
Sorry to bring the mood down. I do love your Teach for America but for policing idea. For people who are listening who are inspired, what would it take for that to get off the ground?
If you remove the debt grievance part, not that much. The biggest change is if you look at today, you typically are looking at almost 52 weeks of training before you get out in the field. That's too slow. Teach for America does probably a four or eight week program. You're college educated, you're going to figure it out. Policing has a different expectation. So I would continue to see more civilian jobs, which some agencies are doing, where they're creating entire departments for civilians, and then there's no academy. You also don't have a gun, which is fine. I think it's actually not much to pull it off. It just takes a major city to say, 'I'm going to create 200 entry-level jobs. Requires a college degree, it's a two-year commitment.' I think it's pretty doable.
Talk to a mayor about it.
Yeah. I do think that as police forces get much higher tech, it gets much more interesting for college graduates and people with higher education because it changes the nature of what policing is. When you have full intelligence, I can't overemphasize how much safer everybody is. 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 if they have a gun, you have a gun, there's not enough police around. All that kind of thing makes for extremely dangerous situations. And this is how you end up with this militarized police situation, which is not a very sustainable idea.
Let's go deeper on Vegas as a case study. Ben, what has most surprised you in your work with Vegas, or what do you think other cities can learn from the work that you guys are doing?
The most surprising thing to me is just how much the actual community likes it. We've got criticism in the press, surveillance, big brother, Ben's a penguin, all that kind of thing. But the community, everybody who lives there, Vegas is a unique city in that it's got crime tourism. People fly in, do some crime, and fly out. And then there's a lot of people who go bananas in Vegas. It's way beyond any criminal motivation, that's mental health combined with hard drugs combined with Vegas. But for the people who live there, the hospitality workers, the people working for tips, the fact that we already had a very good police department in terms of community policing and the right culture, adding the technology has made the community go, 'Wow, I am proud to be here. I feel safe. I know that if a crime gets committed, you can commit a crime in Vegas but you can't get away with it.' People really appreciate that. I've gotten so many people come up to me from all over the city saying, 'Thank you. We really see the difference and appreciate what you're doing.' I didn't think it would be that visible that fast.
I think the other thing, and I don't know if you know this, but the model of what Vegas is doing has caught on more nationally. This public-private partnership is picking up speed because the pace of government innovation is quite slow. Private enterprise, whether it's an individual or a company, has mutual incentives to be safer. Think about who's the largest supporter of the Morrisville Police Department, Lowe's, because Lowe's is based there. They have thousands of employees that live there. For Lowe's to spend a million dollars, it's very small for them, but can transform that police department. More cities are waking up to the fact that there's a better way to run a city.
This is so important. If you look at the Vegas PD, they've got thousands of officers, a huge budget. But can they make the marginal investment in technology? Absolutely not. It's very difficult, extremely bureaucratic. The budget is fixed. They don't want to have to lay off people to do it. It's almost all headcount. By adding less than a percent to the police budget, you can completely transform the police force. It's pretty amazing. It's very rewarding work. We had a tremendous attrition problem in 911. 911 is a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. Everybody was quitting. There were five-minute call waits for 911. Imagine waiting on hold for five minutes on 911. I asked, 'What's the problem?' They said, 'The work conditions are hard. There's no ice machine.' That was literally it. So I bought an ice machine, an espresso machine, we put in a gym. Now the call waits are less than 30 seconds. Just that tiny investment can change everything.
To your point, in Atlanta, I'm on the police foundation board. I think we contribute about $30 million a year to the police department. A couple months ago, the head of the SWAT team came in and said, 'I would like new equipment.' I'm thinking, how bad can it be? He walks in and it's like, I mean, you would be embarrassed. Your job is to go into the line of fire. He said, 'I would like a million dollars to get all new equipment for our SWAT team.' It's very logical, but it is hard when you're a city. You have no flexibility in your budget, no ability to react.
Cities in general are under tremendous budget pressure. Most of them have run programs for years borrowing from the future. They're highly in debt. They've got big pensions to pay.
Pay off, so it's really hard to change a city budget.
It seems like relatively small amounts of money for these companies or individuals can make a massive difference. Is this repeatable in cities 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?
I hope a lot. As soon as people see it, they want to do it. They just don't know that's possible. They're like, "What? I can give money to the police?"
So if you look at all the latest innovations in San Francisco, 100% private funded.
100%. Now they're choosing to stay as quiet as they can. But I know...
In San Francisco, look, we don't want a repeat of Penguin Biden, so...
If I was donating in San Francisco, I would stay quiet as well.
Well, hey, it is interesting. For anyone listening, you should go tour the San Francisco Police Department's Real Time Crime Center. It's powered by Flock. I guarantee you will walk away and say, "Where do I sign a check to give?"
Because you want a drone in your neighborhood. You want more cameras in your neighborhood. This is the way to do it.
How much do we have to pay for the Xi homeless program when he comes?
It's a million dollars. Right. They literally raise taxes for this. It's such a tiny amount of money compared to those sorts of things.
And just to close the loop on it, what we typically see, and this is the same in Vegas, is the expectation is the first year or two are covered, and then the city has to decide if they want to keep it and roll it into a budget because with enough notice they can afford all these products. It's just hard to get started.
Yeah. As we said earlier, no good deed goes unpunished, and Flock hasn't been exempt from that. Because of all the great work you've done solving... Is it like 20%?
We do about a million arrests this year.
