Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, September 7th.

Today on Forbes, AI startup flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America.

In a windowless room inside Atlanta's Dunwoody Police Department,

Lieutenant Tim Fect hits a button and an insectile DJI drone rises silently from

the station rooftop. It already has its coordinates, a local mall where a 911 call has alerted

the cops to a male shoplifter. From high above the complex, Fect zooms in on a man checking his

phone, then examines a group of people waiting

for a train. They're all hundreds of yards away, but crystal clear on the room-dominating

display inside the department's crime center, a classroom-sized space with walls covered in monitors

flashing real-time crime data, surveillance and license plate reader camera feeds, gunshot detection

reports, digital maps showing the location of cop cars across the city. As more 911 calls come

in, AI transcribes them on another screen. Fect can access any of it with a few clicks.

20 minutes down the road from Dunwoody, in an office where

Flock's safety's cameras and gunshot detectors are arrayed like museum pieces,

38-year-old CEO and co-founder, Garrett Langley, presides over the $300 million in estimated 2024 sales

company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017,

Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built

a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares, and parking lots

across the U.S. They record not just the license plate numbers of the

cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features, broken windows, dings, bumper

stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve one million crimes a year. Soon they'll help solve

even more. In August, there was a plan for flolock's cameras to take to the skies mounted on its own

...