reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @KTmBoyle
reSee.it AI Summary
I'm grateful for Ben and Felicia's advocacy, which has turned Las Vegas into a testing ground for public safety technology. The outcomes have been impressive. We've shared these success stories, including insights from Sheriff Kevin McMahill on how tech is enhancing safety in our city.
@KTmBoyle - Katherine Boyle
Thanks to Ben and Felicia's advocacy and generosity, Las Vegas has become a testbed for public safety technology- and the results speak for themselves. We've been very public about these success stories at @a16z. Here's more with Sheriff Kevin McMahill on how technology is supporting public safety in Las Vegas.
Video Transcript AI Summary
On October 1, there were over 9,000 911 calls in just one minute, highlighting the challenges of emergency response. Garrett Langley shared a powerful story about how Flock Safety's technology helped locate a kidnapped baby in Atlanta, showcasing the impact of public safety technology. Sheriff Kevin McMahill discussed innovations in law enforcement, including the use of drones and gun detection technology, which have significantly improved safety and crime resolution rates in Las Vegas. Flock Safety operates in over 4,000 cities, solving about 22,100 crimes daily. The conversation emphasized the importance of community engagement and transparency in law enforcement, as well as the future potential of technology to enhance public safety and reduce crime.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: When 1 October happened in the first minute, we had 9,009 11 calls.
Speaker 1: Crazy.
Speaker 0: There's no call center in the world that can handle 9,009 11 calls.
Speaker 2: It is wonderful to be here today, seeing you all face to face, and to introduce our next panel. Because I truly believe that this panel embodies the spirit of American dynamism. Now I've known Garrett Langley for a very long time, back when Flock Safety was just a tiny company building v one of their products in Atlanta office. And I'm gonna share with you a story today because it is probably one of the most impactful stories that I have for my entire investing career. It was fall of 2020 at the height of COVID, and Garrett was going out for his first growth round.
And I was being the most annoying investor. We had gone back and forth for about a week on diligence materials, hardware, software. Let me get a revert of the model. Let me talk to your customers. And Garrett, being the pro he is, responded like this, just constant back and forth, and it felt like we were really jamming.
And then it was Saturday morning, and I sent a few emails and more data requests, and I didn't hear anything. Crickets. And hours went by, hours went by, and I just thought, oh my gosh, I've lost this deal. Like, there is no way that I'm gonna get to work with him, and I went to bed Saturday night thinking that it was over. And I woke up Sunday morning to the most shocking email I've ever received from a company, and I wanna paraphrase it for you.
Garrett said, I'm so sorry, but I haven't gotten back to your responses, but we had an emergency request from Atlanta PD, and it was an all hands on deck moment for the team. A baby was out for a morning stroll with his mother in a low income neighborhood in Atlanta and and was snatched from his stroller by a husband and wife team that was premeditating a kidnapping because they intended to raise this baby as their own. They were so premeditated and looking for a sitting duck that they brought 2 sets of clothing, boys clothing and girl clothing, and immediately changed the baby after they snatched him from his mother and drove off in a car. Now, law enforcement officials will tell you, in the first 24 hours, if you do not find a child who can't talk or a baby, the likelihood that you are going to find a child who has been kidnapped in a premeditated fashion is very low. But Garrett delivered some good news.
He said shortly after the kidnapping, flock safety cameras in Atlanta picked up the car and was able to follow that car across multiple counties and find that baby unharmed a couple hours later and bring him back to his mother and bring the perpetrators to justice. So when I received that email, I was expecting my first son, and so I just started bawling uncontrollably because there are so few exam or there's many examples, but so few examples like that where heinous crimes are perpetrated against humanity and against citizens, and where technology has helped be the solution in order to to bring people to justice and to make sure that babies go unharmed. And it made me proud to know Garrett, and it makes me extremely proud to be an investor in flock safety, and all of us in Andreessen Horowitz to be a major investor in flock safety. I'm also really proud of my partner, David Ullovich, who's led multiple rounds into block safety, and did so at a time where a lot of people didn't want to invest in public safety technology. It wasn't a popular thing to do, and it's because of him that I think we have a true public safety, not only practice at Andreessen Horowitz, but that there that that we have these companies such as PREPARED and Skydio, and companies that are working with multiple law enforcement agencies around the country to make communities safer.
We are also very fortunate today to have a special guest, sheriff Kevin McMahill of Las Vegas, who has been an innovator in this community for 30 years in law enforcement. He started his career in the US Army, and then worked his way up through, Las Vegas PD. In 2010, he was assigned one of the hardest assignments, the highest crime neighborhood in Las Vegas to be leader and to bring the crime rate down. And through his innovative approaches of working with community leaders, faith based leaders, and others, he was able to bring crime down in that neighborhood by 40%. He was also in leadership during the mass shooting in 2017 and has delivered many innovations since that mass shooting in Las Vegas to make not only Las Vegas, but other areas safer.
And in 2023, he was elected by a landslide election to be sheriff of Las Vegas. The world is getting less safe. Crime is rising, and it's not something that we wanna talk about. It's not something that we wanna think about. But it's because of public safety leaders, like the ones that are going to be on this stage, that we can have this important conversation about how technology can be used for good and to make our community safer.
So without further ado, I'm pleased to introduce Garrett, David, and sheriff McMahill.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Sheriff McMahill and Garrett for being with us. I'm gonna call you Kevin.
Speaker 0: Please do.
Speaker 1: It's okay? Okay. Look, let's just jump right in. Garrett, that was an amazing story that Catherine told us. One of the best parts of this job is getting emails from you about crimes that you've solved.
Things that you've stopped from happening are getting worse. Tell us do you have more stories you can share with us?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Most recently in, Wake Forest, they rolled out Flock, and within their first 24 hours, found 3 stolen cars, a missing child, and 2 automatic firearms on campus, which is alarming because, you would think a campus would be safer. I think the other one that was more recent, was just earlier this fall out in UCAL, Berkeley. And during freshman orientation, 5 individuals with semi automatic some semiautomatic Glocks stole this 18 year old's Jeep. Obviously, this was supposed to be the best day of this kid's life.
He's now going to college, and now he's had the worst day of his life. But one of the powerful things about flock is it's really about a network. So criminals don't care about city boundaries, but for some reason, law enforcement has had always had a struggle sharing data. So in this case, when the student called in 911, he said, look, my jeep's been stolen. These guys have guns.
The Berkeley PD is able to immediately put that into flock, and now everyone in the Bay Area has pretty much someone looking out for them. And within under an hour, that car gets off the highway in Palo Alto, who's also a flock customer. They get an alert. They know there's 5 individuals with semi automatic weapons in the car. SWAT team responds.
Those people are now in jail. And I think it's that kind of story that sadly happens every day. Thankfully, not in your community every day, but those are 2 kind of more recent, crazy stories.
Speaker 1: Sheriff, you were here during one of the worst mass shootings in US history, 6 years ago this month. Tell us a little bit about how how that day changed law enforcement in Las Vegas, how it impacts how you lead today, and even some of the technological changes that that have been implemented.
Speaker 0: Yes, so that day was a day, obviously, that nobody will ever forget here in Las Vegas. And for a reminder, 58 people died that day and 2 subsequent. 422 other people were shot and survived, after being shot with an AR 15, and 850 people were injured. You know, getting the information, that particular day, it took us literally 3 or 4 days. I didn't even know until the 3rd day that 7 of our officers had been shot.
That's how chaotic and how how much casualties that we were dealing with that particular day. You know, I will tell you that it it changed a lot. And we we began to teach around the country a variety of different things. Something as simple as instead of having all of your off duty paramedics respond to the scene, have them respond to the hospitals. Because we didn't know at the time that nurses can't run a main line, but a paramedic can.
So we had nurses doing paramedics' jobs, doctors doing nurses' jobs. So we really fine tune that and taught that all across the country. Technology, that has come from that is things like ShotSpotter being able to tell us, you know, where those are at. The technology continues to, evolve, in these companies as well as being able to tell us what floor they're on, what room it's coming coming from. But also a lot of this, this ability to sort of capture when somebody's carrying a weapon into one of our casinos.
So we have this technology now that we have deployed. I won't name the place, but we had one particular casino hotel that had become sort of a a haven for our gangsters here. They were having gang parties every single weekend. And, we had numerous shots fired, numerous people killed. Every time my cops responded over there, there was a big fight.
And so we we put these gun or gun detection technology in the elevator banks before they got on the elevator. And in one weekend, after we deployed it, we found 60 handguns that were gonna be taken into a casino hotel. That's how out of control it got. That place is probably one of the safest places that we have now. And so that ability to share that technology across the, the spectrum here in Las Vegas has allowed each one of these casino companies to talk to one another to keep us safe more safe as we move forward.
So that has really been a big benefit of that.
Speaker 1: Thank you. That's that's incredible about the, the elevator bank. Garrett, switching back to you. I think what I don't think people know is size and scale of the company today. Can you just give us some highlights of of just how how large lock safety is and, how big of an impact it's having?
Speaker 3: Yes. Definitely, we are one of the bigger, better, kept secrets, probably. I think if you're in law enforcement, you know exactly who we are, and you hopefully love us. Sheriff, in that in just
Speaker 0: Got my vote.
Speaker 3: But we're we're live in just over 4000 cities in America. So that's almost 70% of the population that's covered by by flock. And from efficacy, we solve about 22100 crimes a day, which is just around 10%. And so while we we will often pat ourselves on the back because we're at 10% of crime solved, it's like, well, without a detective, an officer, and a community, it all kinda falls apart. It takes 3 legs.
You gotta have technology, sure, but you gotta have the other 2 in lockstep.
Speaker 0: Do you mind if I jump in first? Please. Let me tell you one story about Flock that, really sort of resonated with me was I had a a shooting at one of my local high schools out the street, right out in front of the high school. And you can imagine that as the sheriff, and in any town USA, when you have a shooting outside of a high school, it causes you a lot of concern. Obviously, we're thinking active shooter.
In this particular case, another piece of our technology, the shot spotter technology, was able to detect that over 60 rounds had been fired, and we knew that there were 2 vehicles that had been shooting. Flock had not yet even gone live in metro, but we had had these cameras deployed out. We just hadn't flipped the switch to actually turn them on. So my detectives and and utilizing all the investigative skills that we had, we really had nothing, other than to find out that we had 2 cars with multiple people in them and multiple different calibers of weapons being fired out in front of one of our local high schools. And I was, quite frankly, frustrated as hell because we had no leads.
We had nothing to go on. One individual had been shot. A lot of times, people just get dropped off at a hospital with a gunshot wound, and they don't tell us anything about it. So we're trying to piece all this stuff together. So we got a hold of of you all and and Flock and turned it on, and and Flock was able to solve that crime for us before they'd even actually went out and done that.
And so what I wanna tell you about this is is we've created what we call the real time crime center at Metro. You're all invited to come check it out sometime. It's one of the most fascinating things. I'm not a technologist by any stretch of the imagination. I barely know how to turn my phone on sometimes, to be honest with you.
But I will tell you that this technology is changing the game. And with the advent of flock, we we are going to get to a place at some point where it becomes impossible to commit a crime because technology will help us resolve that. When you look at Las Vegas Metro today, we have over a 90% clearance rate on all of our homicides for 5 years in a row. You won't find that anywhere else in the United States of America. That's in part because of technology, in part because of great detectives and leadership that are actually making this work, but I want you to understand something about that.
When you go to other cities like Chicago as an example, 30% of their homicides are resolved. If you believe you can get away with committing the most heinous crime in any of these cities, you are going to continue to commit those crimes. Bad guys know that when you come to Las Vegas, because of our abilities, technology being at the forefront of it, you are going to get caught.
Speaker 1: Love that.
Speaker 3: Well said. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think people come to Vegas because it's a great place to come, and they feel safe here. And you've had a lot of a huge part of that. And you just talked about that a little bit. Talk to us a little bit about there's a lot of communities in Vegas. It's not just the Strip.
It's one of the greatest tourist destinations in the country. But it's a lot more than just just the Strip. Talk to us a little bit about and you've had a long career here as a patrolman, working your way up all the way to under sheriff and then being elected sheriff. Talk to us a little bit about how you change the way that you lead and encourage your officers to lead, both with technology and community engagement, and the different strategies in these different micro areas in the in the greater Las Vegas region?
Speaker 0: You know, one of the most interesting, parts about technology when we first started it, we started off with one crime camera. And, you know, I wasn't a big believer in it, but like any good leader that when you have people that are very, interested in getting something started and you just give them the opportunity to go do it. And I think one of the things that, you know, in the intro, they mentioned that I I had the opportunity to get assigned to the Bolden Area Command, which is West Las Vegas, our predominantly African American part of town. And what I learned when I started to work over there, it led in in every crime category that you don't wanna lead in. Robbery, homicide, sexual assault, gangs, you know, everything you don't want it to be in.
And as I went over there to to understand and realize that I had 13 homicides in the 1st 6 months, and I had a 0% solve rate. And the people in the black community were saying that you don't really care about us, because the police typically have a very low solve rate in those communities, have a higher level of distrust for the police. And so every opportunity that we've had to deploy these these, technological solutions into their communities, it was met with a very high level of distrust. And as we really spent the time about educating them, but also one thing that we're not very good at is really showing them the success. Right?
We don't like to celebrate this stuff, but we have to go out there and figure out a different way to talk to our communities about what this technology is doing so they don't think that we're spying on them, that they don't think that we're, you know, utilizing this technology for nefarious purposes. And once I have done that, I've been doing that since 2010, talking about this technology everywhere I possibly can within our community to groups like yourselves because this technology is, in my opinion, every piece of that technology is the equivalent of 3 police officers. It can get into places and see things and detect things that I don't care how good of a cop you are, you would never be able to see it. And, you know, I don't have the ability to show you a lot of this stuff right now, via video, but it can detect things that there's not a chance in hell. Any good cop worth their salt could have ever figured out without utilizing that technology.
So it's a really exciting piece for me.
Speaker 1: And your comment on the communities, just as a quick aside, when I first made the we've written multiple investments into Floxac H. But when I first made the very first invest investment, I actually called my sister who, has dedicated much more of her life to sort of, I would call them, I guess, social justice causes. And sometimes she's a good barometer for me of how I should think about things, that I might not think about in my normal frame of mind. And her initial reaction was like, oh, no, no, no, no. This is going to be surveillance that, you know, marginalized communities won't want this.
And so in part of the diligence, we actually called into some of these community leaders and tried to find out what what do people really think. And what they find out is exactly what you said, that actually it makes policing more objective. It makes the solve rate go way up. And in fact, some of the biggest, advocates for flock safety, in communities with high crime rates are those community leaders for more marginalized communities. And that was something I didn't expect, but we now see over and over again.
Speaker 0: And
Speaker 1: so on that on that note, Garrett, you know, how has been engaging with communities, across the United States and in all kinds of different from all kinds of different backgrounds, how has that impacted the way you think about your product road map? You're not just building a company, but you're building something that gets put into communities and has a huge impact. Talk to us about how that engagement has shaped your roadmap.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think to your point, the underlying shift that's occurring in law enforcement, historically, the way they operate is they knew what neighborhoods had crime. They would drive around in those neighborhoods looking for someone doing something wrong. So it's like, alright, suspicious people, suspicious activity. There's just, like, it's ripe for prejudice.
And the chief was describing to me how since they've rolled out Flock, they're too busy to do that. And he was he was excited. Right? He was excited because now, to Sherif's point, it's objective. That that car is stolen.
That car has a warrant. There's no debate about who they don't really care who's inside. They're about to go find out. And it was this interesting shift where now this law enforcement agency was not only more effective, they needed less people. They were also delivering a more equate a kind of equitable product to their community.
Because they could say, look. We don't have time to go fish anymore. All we do is wait for the ding in the car that says, hey. There's a stolen car down the street. Go get them.
And so I think for us, David, like, one of the things we've spent a lot of time on is, look, we have incredibly blue cities, incredibly red cities. We have purple cities. We've got from Berkeley, California to to Dallas, Texas to Dallas, Georgia, which is a a beautiful city, if you're ever in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. And all different political spectrums, but they all have the same desire, which is to be safe, and they want their kids to be safe. And so what we've spent a lot of time building is kind of 2 directions.
1 is how do we drive more transparency in law enforcement? Because to the sheriff's point, we've unfortunately trained law enforcement to be afraid of the media. Because the only time the sheriff gets phone calls is when something really, really bad has happened. And where we spend time is trying to coach and encourage chiefs and sheriffs to cover the the positive stuff too. Like, you're solving so much crime and making such a positive impact.
It's okay to talk about it. And when you have this backbone of transparency and auditing that you know there's gonna be a bad apple, that's fine. The the law enforcement's not perfect. No one's perfect. It's worth it.
And I think the second thing we've spent a lot of time on is, you know, we will go have and and the sheriff and I will have a breakfast. We had this back in November. And I'm like, sheriff, tell me the top three crimes you didn't solve this year. And, like, okay. That's what I'm gonna go build.
Because the data is the sheriff was alluding to is the only way to actually eliminate crime, which is our goal, is to solve it. And so what we have found is the only correlation between a drop in crime is an increase in clearance rate. So the reason why sheriff runs such a safe city is because he clears his cases. So for us, that's our kind of overall product strategy is show me a list of crimes that aren't being solved in a city, and we'll go build technology to change that.
Speaker 1: Sheriff, what about drones? What what role are drones playing in, in law enforcement? And, and then, actually, if if you if you hold your part of your answer, we're gonna talk about where that might go in the future.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I'm smiling because I I just I always laugh at at at this stuff because I I I've been doing this job 33 years now, and I just never really imagined where we were gonna find ourselves. And and I have to say, building off of what Garrett was talking about, one of the things that really attracted me to the technology of this, however, is the the the mindset that I have a duty and a responsibility. I have 6,000 employees. I'm the 7th largest police department in this country.
I have 58,000,000 visitors and 2 and a half 1000000 permanent residents. I have a responsibility to those officers to keep them safe also. And and let me tell you, in 2010, we shot and killed 25 people. Right now, year to date, we've shot 6. And I attribute that, not only to exceptional training and leadership, but to the ability to utilize technology effectively, so that we approach these armed individuals in a markedly different way than we ever have.
And so, now, this this drone piece that enters into it, we started off with drones, we were using them in SWAT operations. Fly a little drone through the door, they got defeated quite frankly, oftentimes by the bad guy, but get the drone through the door so we could have eyes and ears in for my operators, because I'm I'm sending human beings through a door with an armed subject. So I need to slow these things down and gather intelligence and do the things that will keep these men and women safe. And so we did all of that. And now, today, as we sit here right now, we have a drone as a first responder program, where I have, Can
Speaker 1: you can you explain what what DFR, what drone as a first responder, what that means?
Speaker 0: Well, you might wanna take a shot at that better than I can, but I can tell you what I know. Go for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. To to me, the really similar way to explain it is, humans are very good at a lot of things, But you gotta imagine you've got a 19 year old entering into a high stressful situation. They've got a gun, potentially. Someone else has a gun. The best thing you can do is deescalate as fast as possible.
It's much easier to do that from a drone where no one's life is at risk. I also think the thing that we keep track of on the DFR perspective is the average response time to a 911 call is inflated due to the number of unnecessary calls of service. Sending a drone is a lot cheaper. It's a lot faster. So you imagine sheriff's got 6,000, officers.
That number sounds really big. How many do you have actually on active patrol at any given time? A third?
Speaker 0: Half of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Half? So there's really only 3,000 that are actually serving right now. With a DFR program, the sheriff can effectively double his head count, triple his head count from an efficiency by having drones respond first, assess the situation, and then decide, is this nothing, you know, turn off the alert, or is this this necessitates a human reaction?
Speaker 0: So we have we have that piece of it going. We actually just rolled this out now. So we have a number of, units that are out there with the drones, and they'll launch, and they're they're responding to all the high priority calls for service, shots fired. We'll be on the other side, park the drone, throw the drone up. They go up.
They get real time intelligence to the first responders. And and it's just an incredible opportunity for us to keep our officers safe, but also reduce the amount of suspects that are in the they're gonna end up dying because of their own actions. And so, you know, the other big part is is that we have the responsibility for search and rescue here in Southern Nevada. Mhmm. You know, we we fly in our helicopters up in these these canyons where it's unbelievable how close they actually get with their helicopter blades to these canyons.
I'm talking literally half an inch, and, you know, it's a dangerous, dangerous business to be in, but we have a responsibility to save people's lives. And so there's an unbelievable, places to hike just within an hour here of Las Vegas, and there's a lot of activity up there. So we deploy those drones with the night vision, and, when it gets dark and we're able to locate these suspect or these victims that are up there, in ways without me having to put my officers in dangerous situations. And so that's another real great advantage for us as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The the drone first responder program, just to, explain a few more details. What's happening today is being launched from the back of police vehicles. But I think we're very close to a moment in time where somebody can call 911, and a drone will be automatically dispatched from the roof of a police department to immediately provide eyes on the sky. Is this is the house on fire?
Is it a 3 alarm fire? Is it a small fire in the kitchen? Immediately, as, you know, fire, medic, police are responding. And that that kind of situational awareness is unprecedented. And in regions like Las Vegas, it's great to have a few helicopters, but they can only respond to 1 incident at a time.
If you have 2 copters, maybe 2 at a time. That's a tiny fraction of the 911 calls you get. And being able to launch a fleet of drones that can cover an area very quickly over a wide area, is really gonna transform, the way we respond and keep both officers safe and communities safer, and that that's very exciting.
Speaker 0: I just have to highlight what you said here. I want you to imagine this. ShotSpotter technology detects a gunshot, somebody being shot in a neighborhood. The drone that's located on a business launches up overhead within 30 seconds. Back at the real time crime center, an officer is watching this, providing real time intelligence to those police officers who are now responding to go in to save lives and stop the suspect's actions.
That is an absolute game changer in my profession. I'm so excited about that part. I can't even Me
Speaker 1: too. That's true. That doesn't even need to be a 911 call. It's going
Speaker 0: to be it'll beat 911 every time.
Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. With more fidelity. Yeah. It's really an exciting time, I think as we introduce these advanced technologies into public safety.
And we'll talk about 911, in just a moment. All right. So we talked about community engagement. And I mentioned, you know, when I first made the first investment, I talked to my sister, to get her pulse check, which she told me I was going to be a terrible person. Now, of course, she thinks it's amazing.
You know, Flock is really and Garrett, this is really a testament to your leadership as a CEO because this could go any number of ways as a CEO of a company building, cameras with computer vision technology to find stolen vehicles. But you've really set the standard in public safety around privacy, protection, community engagement, data that you collect. Can you talk a little bit about how that works? And how do you answer to people that want to know about the sort of big brother concerns and surveillance state kind of concerns? You know, it's great to hear about all the safety, and obviously, we think that's the primary reason that's critical and worth it all.
But how do you deal with the people that ask those important questions too?
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think there's just 3 key points. I think the first is I've had the I think this is a benefit. I've probably met with a 1000 mayors in the last 5 years. And, like, we have an incredibly rich, diverse country.
It's great. We can be different, but, like, our differences are so small in the spectrum of people's point of view on the world. Like, we all believe we should be safe, we should believe we have some some sets of liberties. And I live in 1, which is Atlanta. And so the way we think about it is, like, I don't set the rules in Austin.
And so from a data retention, from a transparency, from an auditing, it's the Chief has a tough job in Austin. He has 7 days of data retention and he has to show up every single month and provide an audit of every single search that's conducted on his system. That's dramatically different than in Dallas or in Tulsa or in Oklahoma City where the the chief doesn't have to do that, and they have a 1 year data retention because that's what's appropriate for them. And and I'm sure the sheriff has his own set of rules that he feels is comfortable for his community. It's like we don't have to have the same thing.
We should all agree that we feel safe. So the first is, like, we put the onus on the community to self manage. Like, the city council, the mayor, they were elected. When the sheriff, in this case, was elected to protect his community, we should give him those tools. I think the second thing is people have this misconceived notion that, we are, like, getting closer to precog or we're gonna predict a crime has happened.
We don't do that as a business. So so the way we think about the business is creating a rules engine that allows people whose actual job as a detective, as an asset protection individual, to to to assess what is suspicious. Because I also think it's important to take a perceptive of, like, we've already given up the the traditional sense of privacy because we enjoy having Instagram and Facebook and the Internet. This is actually dramatically less, and we live in a pretty safe world, given those trade offs.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. One question on that, just as a follow-up, because I think maybe not everyone knows. It's not just public safety organizations and law enforcement organizations that buy flock safety. HOAs in neighborhoods and even corporations will buy it, to put it in their parking lots and things like that. Can you talk about how that dynamic works a little bit?
Speaker 3: If you look at most of our our our revenue concentration, it's pretty common that the community is spending more money on flock than the police department. So if I pull up the the Las Vegas map, you're gonna see the the sheriff's a 180 or so cameras, and they're gonna see all these other dots on the map. And you're like, oh, that's the Wynn Hotel. They added 4 cameras to cover their parking lot. The sheriff has access to those.
He's getting alerts. It's it's a a symbiotic relationship where the Wynn Hotel is saying, we wanna be safe. We know it is your job. We know it is not a reasonable thing to ask you to put these cameras here. And that's the same for neighborhoods.
It's the same for small business owners. It's this idea that if we work together, we can be much more powerful and successful.
Speaker 1: Sheriff, tell tell us a little bit, about the process you go through, to roll out new technology in Las Vegas, both on the officer training side and maybe the challenges you have there that that we can we can know about and help with, but but how you've evolved that officer training process, but also the community engagement process.
Speaker 0: So I I think it's interesting when you talk about privacy, as as Garrett mentioned. There really isn't a whole lot of privacy left in the world, in in the world that we live in today. And and people know that and understand it. What they really care about is whether or not the police department has access to this information. And so because they don't want us to be J Edgar Hoover's FBI, you know, building dossiers on people that are not doing anything.
And I completely understand that. I agree with that. I think it's really interesting, and I think probably the single most effective way for us was that we engaged all of our critics from the very get go. We bring them down to the real time crime center. We allow them to to physically watch what is actually happening with the technologies.
Probably the biggest, issue we had was along the facial recognition technology piece, and we we use facial recognition technology, but we only use it as a tool within an investigation, and we use it and we only bounce that facial recognition technology off of jail management system. So booking photos, people that have already been booked for a crime, and they have people understand that a lot better. Right? We're looking we're looking at Kevin McMayhill as having potentially committed a crime. There's a picture that looks like Kevin McMayhill.
We put it in. We verify it, but that's you can't utilize that as probable cause, and you can't actively utilize cameras to actually utilize facial recognition technology. So groups like the ACLU, NAACP, we've just rolled the red carpet out to them to see every piece of technology we have and explain in those those investigations how the technology was utilized to actually help us develop the leads that good gumshoe detectives then have to use to follow-up in those in those pieces. Because they they they wanna start at, it's not effective, and it's there's a nefarious use for it. Once we get them in and let them see it, then they become our biggest proponents of it.
And I don't have to spend a lot of time convincing anybody afterwards because they're out doing that themselves. Sure.
Speaker 1: One more question with you, sheriff, and then we'll close with Garrett. You know, we talked about what does the future look like for law enforcement backstage from 911 to, you know, I don't know, robotics and Robocop. You know, what what would you what would you wanna see, if you could ask for anything or things that you'd love to see, introduced into your your, into your, position, to keep communities safe?
Speaker 0: Well, you know, we have a robo dog already. Yep. So now we have this dog that we send in. Thing walks in. The guy can kick it over if he wants to.
The dog can get back up and keep doing. Gives us the ability to communicate. I I, you know, I think people like you are the ones that are gonna be exposed to the things that we need, and you all will help us determine how it is that we can utilize those. I think the advances in 911, probably right now, are the things that excite me the most. I'll give you one example of this.
I know we're running out of time. When one October happened in the first minute, we had 9,009 one one calls.
Speaker 1: Crazy.
Speaker 0: There's no call center in the world that can handle 9,009 one one calls. And imagine if you had an emergency aside from the mass shooting, we would have never even got to your call for hours or days even. So that ability to use AI and technology within that 911 call center to appropriately direct calls, to answer those calls in a timely manner, is a really exciting innovation for me as we move that forward. And I know we're all continuing to work on it, but, that's that's probably right now a short sighted answer for what you're looking for, but that's what I'm excited about.
Speaker 1: And Garrett, what any any closing remarks on the future road map of technology?
Speaker 3: The thing that I heard a long time ago, I think, from someone in this group was the future is actually already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And so in the case of flock, our our our future is that crime is no longer a problem. My kids are 5 and 3, and I'd like to think that when they're my age, they'll be like, wait. So you used to be, like, unsafe?
Like, you used to actually, like, have to worry about your personal safety? And the reality is, like, that's already happening. We we've got dozens of agencies that, like the sheriff, are at a 100% clearance rate on violent crime, and they are approaching a 100% clearance rate on nonviolent crime. I wanna go live there. And I think that's gonna get faster and faster on the on the more specific product side if you go to a place like, Elk Grove, California, for any of y'all in in Northern California or the Bay Area, they're in the future.
So in their real time crime centers powered by Flock, they get all their 911 calls. They have our DFR product. When a 911 call comes in, a gunshot detection, a stolen car, they have strategically placed about a dozen of our drones and docks throughout the city. They can get to any call for service in 30 seconds.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 3: Imagine a change in quality of life for that community where they know no matter what is happening, law enforcement can be there in 30 seconds. And I think that just, like, will fundamentally change the way we think about our relationship with law enforcement and our overall quality of life.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you both. Thank you, Sarah, for all the work that you do and for taking time out of your day to be
reSee.it AI Summary
Suffering often fuels greatness. Jobs, Ellison, Musk, Bezos, and da Vinci all faced abandonment or abuse. Clinton, Obama, and many leaders turned abandonment into drive. Deep suffering is vital for progress and achievement throughout history. Respect those in the arena.
@KTmBoyle - Katherine Boyle
Walter Isaacson on the link between suffering and greatness and those with happy childhoods: “We grow up with fewer demons but we grow up with less drive. We end being Boswell and not Johnson. We end up being the observer and not the doer. Respect those who are in the arena…” A few years ago, I learned that Jobs, Ellison, Musk and Bezos have one central thing in common: abandonment, estrangement or abuse by their fathers. Issacson writes the same about Leonardo da Vinci: he was illegitimate in a time where that meant ostracism. Many political leaders — Clinton, Obama, etc— have similar stories of turning abandonment into drive. We are afraid to talk about how deep suffering often is essential for leadership and greatness —it is likely the common thread in creating real progress and achievement throughout history.