--- title: "Flock’s CEO Blames Russian Bots for a Backlash Measured in City-Council Votes" description: "Garrett Langley cites a debunked drone-strike theory while Secure Justice counts 90 canceled contracts in August alone" author: "Luis Goa" published: 2026-10-27T13:53:39Z modified: 2026-10-27T18:41:10Z url: https://rews.cc/a/flock-s-ceo-blames-russian-bots-for-a-backlash-measured-in-c-20f95b language: en tags: ["surveillance", "police", "ai", "privacy", "bots", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Flock’s CEO Blames Russian Bots for a Backlash Measured in City-Council Votes *Garrett Langley cites a debunked drone-strike theory while Secure Justice counts 90 canceled contracts in August alone* By Luis Goa · October 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/flock-s-ceo-blames-russian-bots-for-a-backlash-measured-in-c-20f95b ## In brief - Flock CEO Garrett Langley told police chiefs anti-Flock protests are “not real,” citing unverified drops in social-media chatter - He attributed a claimed 50% chatter drop to Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian data centers, a theory fact-checkers found unsubstantiated - Secure Justice recorded 214 US cities/counties canceling Flock contracts since 2021, including 90 in August 2026 alone - Flock is cutting about 270 jobs (18% of staff) while its valuation rose to $8.4 billion in April 2026 - An Oklahoma federal judge called a Flock camera search “indiscriminate mass surveillance” and excluded the evidence Garrett Langley, CEO of license-plate-reader company Flock Safety, told a room of police chiefs that social-media chatter criticizing his company is down 95 percent since July, and that it fell 50 percent in a single week after Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Neither number has an independent source. Flock has not published a chatter index, a methodology, or a time series; the figures exist only in Langley’s telling, captured on leaked audio obtained by [404 Media](https://404media.co/its-not-the-bots-flock/). The drone-strike link is a borrowed claim, not an original one. On October 8, Ukrainian drones destroyed a data center roughly 250 miles from Moscow; within three days Ukraine had disabled two more, crippling operations at Yandex, the company that is roughly Russia’s equivalent of Google. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy then said the strikes had made it “a little easier to breathe” on social media, claiming less bot-driven “hate, division, and provocation” from accounts aligned with MAGA, Germany’s AfD and the UK’s Reform party. A Polish political scientist’s post claiming a 56 percent drop in AfD-linked bot activity was viewed millions of times before being deleted. [CBC](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/yankex-russia-ukraine-bots-9.7379086) and [Mother Jones](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/ukraine-drone-strike-yandex-russian-bot-farm-right-wing-maga-afd-reform-uk-conspiracy-theory-viral-rumor/) could not find evidence behind the underlying numbers; one researcher told reporters, “I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive.” Langley applied this unverified foreign-bot theory to a domestic business problem: people not liking his cameras. ## Same people, same signs Langley made the remarks Sunday at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Orlando, an event that drew more than 16,000 public-safety officials, during a fireside chat with IACP president David Rausch. “It’s anonymous bots, and so it is not real,” he said, adding that protests nationwide feature “the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.” He also told the audience his wife has advised him never to apologize, and that he would prefer not to give press interviews again. The protests Langley dismisses as inorganic have a paper trail: municipal votes, council minutes, signed terminations. Secure Justice, an Oakland advocacy group that tracks Flock contracts nationwide, counts 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 of them in August 2026 alone — a fourfold jump from July, or roughly three terminations a day that month. The group’s executive director, Brian Hofer, has been watching the curve bend upward for months. > Looking at that image, it’s gone parabolic! When you see that now 165 \[cancellations\] are just in the first almost eight months of this year... At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money. That number is going to get huge, fast. ## The money says otherwise Flock disputes the scale of the exodus with its own unaudited number. Spokesperson Courtney Terlecki told [TechSpot](https://www.techspot.com/news/113668-cities-dropping-flock-surveillance-cameras-record-pace.html) that new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by about 10 to one this year — a ratio the company has not broken out by contract value, camera count, or region, and has not published alongside Secure Justice’s city-by-city list for comparison. Two unverified numbers, pointing in opposite directions, is not evidence either way. What is independently reported: Flock is cutting about 270 jobs, 18 percent of its roughly 1,500-person staff, through a voluntary-separation program that ran from September 18 to October 2, with most departures completed by October 29, according to [Reuters](https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/exclusiveai-surveillance-startup-flock-safety-to-cut-several-hundred-jobs-amid-backlash-sources-say-4940031) and [Mother Jones](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/flock-surveillance-backlash-layoffs/). The same reporting says Flock may miss its revenue target this year, even as annual recurring revenue tops $300 million, up from $205.3 million in 2023. Investors have not priced in retreat: Flock’s valuation rose from $3.5 billion in February 2022 to $7.5 billion in March 2025 to $8.4 billion in April 2026, the last round adding roughly $200 million in new shares at about a 6 percent higher share price than the prior round. ## A pattern of denial The bot claim fits a pattern. Langley called 404 Media’s reporting on his cameras’ role in tracking a woman who self-administered an abortion “entirely false,” a denial the outlet disputes. He spent months calling DeFlock, the volunteer group that maps camera locations, a “terroristic organization… closer to Antifa than anything else,” before apologizing on X on July 17: “I made a mistake by referring to people in the DeFlock group as terrorists. I was wrong to say that.” That apology came after 50-plus cities had already canceled, and DeFlock’s Facebook group has since grown to [818,000 members](https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/07/17/flock-ceo-sorry-for-labelling-activists-terrorists/). Telling police chiefs weeks later that he now plans to never apologize again suggests the July climbdown was tactical, not a change of view. The institutions around Flock are not treating the opposition as fake, either. A federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara E. Hill, ruled this year that an ALPR search constituted “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and threw out evidence gathered through it — not binding precedent, but [the first ruling of its kind](https://gizmodo.com/judge-calls-flock-search-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-throws-out-evidence-2000821402). Congress has [four separate bills](https://rews.cc/a/four-bills-now-target-flock-s-license-plate-network-from-fou-546ae0) aimed at Flock’s data-sharing network. And a federal intelligence center recently told local police to [monitor Flock opponents](https://rews.cc/a/federal-intelligence-center-tells-police-to-monitor-flock-op-2bfe04) at city-council meetings — advice that only makes sense if the opposition is organized enough to be worth watching, which is the opposite of calling it anonymous and inorganic. Flock has not said whether it will release the chatter data behind the 95 and 50 percent figures, or the contract list behind its 10-to-1 ratio. Until one side publishes numbers that can be checked against the other’s, the only verifiable curve in this story is Secure Justice’s: 214 cancellations and climbing, three a day in a single August, a company laying off a fifth of its staff while its backers mark the stock up anyway. ## See also - [Institute for Justice ALPR contract-cancellation database](https://ij.org/institute-for-justice-unveils-new-database-tracking-cancelations-of-license-plate-reader-contracts/) — ij.org · Searchable database of jurisdictions that dropped license-plate-reader contracts - [Why the Yandex-strike bot-drop claim doesn't check out](https://thedispatch.com/article/ukraine-drone-strikes-yandex-russian-bots/) — thedispatch.com · Explainer on the origin and debunking of the Zelenskyy bot-activity claim - [Flock Safety's own announcement of its $7.5bn funding round](https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-funding) — flocksafety.com · Company's own statement on its March 2025 valuation and revenue growth - [Map of Texas cities ending Flock contracts](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2026/flock-camera-votes-map/) — houstonchronicle.com · Interactive tracker of Texas municipalities that dropped Flock, by date