Security1 publisher3 min readPublished
VIDIZMO pitches police on running facial recognition across Flock and Axon footage
VIDIZMO pitched Johnson City, Tennessee police in May on facial recognition across Flock and Axon footage in one platform. Flock's pledge against face recognition covers its own devices; VIDIZMO's route starts with clips an agency exports itself.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video that the company will not add facial recognition to its devices.
- VIDIZMO's customer documentation describes bringing FlockOS data into three of its products: AI Live Insight, Nexus and AI Intelligence Hub.
- Johnson City police said in a statement that they did not take a call with VIDIZMO.
Compiled by The WatchSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Flock's pledge limits what runs on Flock hardware; once an agency exports plate reads and clips under its own access, the pledge does not reach what a third party does with them.
- exposure If an agency makes the import, people captured in its Flock or Axon footage could be named against that agency's own watchlist inside VIDIZMO's system.
- decision With Flock neither involved nor informed, per Khan, any limit on downstream face matching has to come from each agency's export policy or its local oversight body.
- contradiction VIDIZMO markets a Flock integration online while its CEO says the tool is unbuilt, so its sales material describes a capability the company says it does not yet have.
Langley's pledge, as quoted, is about "our devices" [1]. The route VIDIZMO describes begins after the data has left them. "An agency can import plate reads or clips that it has exported under its own authorized access," Khan wrote in an email to 404 Media [14]. "Flock has not been involved in or informed of this," he wrote [15].
What sits on the far side of that export is documented. According to 404 Media, VIDIZMO's platforms do facial recognition, behavior prediction, and racial and gender analysis on live camera feeds [2]. The face matching runs against a list the agency builds. VIDIZMO's documentation says the system takes a face seen on a live camera and "matches it against the people you enrolled in the Object Library, so the moment someone on your watchlist walks past a camera, the system names them" [17]. Its AI Live Insight page also claims to detect "situations" such as trespassing and "behavior" by individual people [18].
The Johnson City pitch added body cameras to the plate readers. "Flock Safety generates plate reads and clips continuously. Your investigators use that data on active cases. But that Flock data does not connect automatically to your Axon evidence system," the salesperson wrote to deputy chief Michael Adams [5][4]. The offer was to put "Flock Safety data, Axon body worn camera footage, and any other evidence source into one searchable platform," searchable "by face, vehicle, or object in seconds" [6][7]. DeFlock Johnson City obtained the email through a public records request and shared it with 404 Media [8].
On the public record, this is still a pitch. Khan said VIDIZMO has not started running facial recognition on Flock footage. He also said it has not built the specific tool that would export data from Flock's system, though the company advertises that capability online and already sells other facial recognition products [10]. VIDIZMO is a video analysis and database company several decades old, and it began offering facial recognition to police within the last six months [3]. Johnson City police said they did not take a call with the company [9]. The reporting does not identify any agency that has imported Flock footage into a VIDIZMO product.
The evidence supports half of the case against the pledge. Flock's promise, as quoted, does not cover what happens to footage once an agency exports it, and a vendor is openly marketing that downstream step [1][14][16]. It does not yet show anyone doing it.
Khan was direct about where he wants this to go. VIDIZMO "would love to do the integration," he said [11]. "It is completely in line with what we want to do," he said [19]. Of Flock, he said: "I think Flock is trying to get out of the way rather than trying to implement the technology right [correctly] by saying they will not do recognition" [12]. He said Flock should offer face recognition itself, in a way that "balances privacy, security, and the freedom that we enjoy in this country" [13].
What to watch
- Whether VIDIZMO ships the FlockOS export tool its documentation already describes, and whether any agency confirms importing Flock clips into a VIDIZMO product.
- Any change to Flock's customer terms on third-party processing of exported plate reads and clips, given Khan's statement that Flock was not informed.
- Further public records requests showing the same VIDIZMO pitch reaching other departments that run both Flock and Axon.