Flock Safety makes ALPR tech affordable for the masses

As the use of video surveillance continues to grow in cities across the country, one subset of the technology that law enforcement agencies have become increasingly reliant on as a crime-fighting tool is automatic license plate recognition, or ALPR for short. Not only does ALPR give authorities the ability to identify stolen vehicles traveling in and out of their jurisdictions, but it can also be used for other applications, such as parking enforcement and Amber alert investigations.

The technology also holds enormous potential for private communities looking to curb crime in their neighborhoods, however, the price of most of these solutions has put it out of reach for most homeowners’ associations (HOAs) and even some municipalities. Enter Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based ALPR provider that has experienced exponential growth since its founding two years ago by making the technology more affordable.

Flock Safety is the brainchild of Garrett Langley, the company’s founder and CEO, who came up with the idea for Flock after realizing how property crimes were largely going unsolved in his Atlanta community and wanted to do something about it. 

“When I called the Atlanta Police Department and asked them, What are we supposed to do? Why is this a problem? And they said, Well, we don’t have evidence to solve these crimes,’ Langley explains.

One of the ways APD told Langley they could have the evidence they need to prosecute would be if his neighbors purchased an ALPR solution. The catch: the unit itself would cost $25,000 with a nearly $250,000 price tag once it was installed and operational.

“I was personally flabbergasted because, come on, my iPhone has a better camera than this thing,” he says. “So, instead of spending a quarter of a million dollars, I called a buddy I mine I went to school with who majored in computer science – I was a major in electrical engineering – and I said, ‘hey, I have a hypothesis that if we literally stick an iPhone in a waterproof box, I bet you we can rebuild this technology but use software instead of hardware to really focus in on the unique components of machine learning and machine vision.’ And that’s what we did. We bought an old Android, not an iPhone, off of Amazon, soldered a big lead acid battery to it, soldered a big solar panel to it, stuck it in a waterproof box and low and behold we had the beginnings of what is now a fairly large company.”

Within several weeks after installing several of these cameras in their neighborhood, Langley said police were able to make an arrest. Today, more than 300 U.S. cities are using the company’s ALPR technology as well as thousands of residential neighborhoods, apartment complexes, malls, and even hospitals.

A Different Kind of ALPR Camera

According to Langley, there are three things that differentiate Flock Safety’s ALPR solution from others on the market, first and foremost being price. “We’re about one-tenth the price of a traditional ALPR camera. That is a big deal because that means you can get more cameras for the same dollar (spent),” he says.    

However, just because the Flock readers are a less expensive alternative to most of the ALPR products on the market today doesn’t mean that it’s a “cheap” solution.

“We don’t really talk about it as a cheaper option, it’s really a more cost-effective or ROI positive effort because you’re going to spend the same amount of money, you’re just going to get ten times the amount of cameras, so you have ten times the amount of evidence and solve ten times the amount of crime,” Langley says.

Secondly, because the Flock’s ALPR camera runs on solar power and leverages cellular communications, it doesn’t require the same amount of infrastructure that others do. Lastly, Flock’s proprietary machine vision software also helps it stand out in the marketplace.

“When a car drives by, we’re not just reading the tag, we’re also reading the state of that license plate, we’re checking the color, manufacturer, make, any dents, scratches, etc. We call this a vehicle fingerprint and providing that in a structural interface for law enforcement,” Langley explains.

After the cameras are installed, the company charges a fee of $2,000 a year per camera, which covers everything, including LTE cellular communications, cloud hosting, maintenance, software, etc.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Unlike many ALPR vendors that predominantly sell to large cities or commercial end-users, Flock’s go-to-market strategy consists primarily of deployments in HOAs and police departments.

In the greater Atlanta area, for example, police departments in the cities of Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, South Fulton, College Park, Hapeville, and Dallas have all purchased Flock cameras. According to Langley, about 40 percent of police departments in the state are using the company’s product, many of which have even attributed its deployment with significant reductions in crime.

Police in Cobb County, Ga., recently credited the use of 13 Flock license plate readers with helping to reduce crime in one of its precincts by 60% percent.  Police in the City of Marietta also now want to purchase the company’s technology following a trial in which crime was reduced by more than 30% in one of its problem areas.

“Cities really are doing total deployments. Our goal is to get a camera on every single street,” Langley says.  “Long gone are the days when a police department just buys one or two LPR cameras and puts them on a car. We’re seeing more and more agencies look at a 50-camera, 100-camera or even 500-camera deployment. Before Flock existed that was only reserved for the largest of cities and even then they couldn’t get the budget to do it. Flock has put more LPRs up in Atlanta than the Atlanta Police Department has, and Atlanta is one of the most dense cities in the world for cameras.”