Reading Franklin in Full: What the Founding Father Actually Said About Safety

‍What Benjamin Franklin Actually Said About Liberty and Safety

Every few weeks, someone sends me the Benjamin Franklin quote. You know the one.

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It usually lands in my mentions, attached to an argument about why a community shouldn't be allowed to use cameras to solve carjackings or find missing children.

I used to scroll past it. Then I read the actual source, and I haven't been able to scroll past it since.

Franklin wrote those words in November 1755, in a letter from the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor. The frontier was under attack during the French and Indian War. People were being killed. The Assembly wanted to tax the Penn family's enormous landholdings to pay for defense. The Penns, sitting in London, refused. Instead, they offered a one-time lump-sum payment for frontier defense, on the condition that the Assembly concedes it had no authority to tax proprietary land. Pay once for safety, and surrender the right to govern, forever.

Franklin told the Assembly not to take the deal. "Essential liberty" was the legislature's permanent authority to tax and govern; to rule as elected officials and do what they felt was right for common defense. "Temporary safety" was the one-time payout being dangled in exchange for it. Read in context, the line isn't anti-government or anti-safety; it’s actually an argument for public defense, governed by elected bodies. It's a refusal to let a wealthy family buy off a legislature's right to govern with a short-term check.

This matters to me because I run a company that builds public safety technology, and Franklin is the single most-cited authority against the work we do. The implication is that builders of public safety tools are on the wrong side of history. The actual history says the opposite. Franklin was arguing for legislative authority, public accountability, and a community's right to fund its own defense. That's the side we're on.

The honest debate is worth having. What data gets collected? Who can access it? How long is it kept? What oversight applies? Those questions deserve serious answers, and we work on them every day. We publish transparency reports. We build deletion timelines into the product. We give communities control of their own data. We welcome the rules governing how public safety technology is used.

But the debate should be honest. A misquoted Founding Father is not an argument. It's a vibe.

The Facts About Flock

Franklin understood, in 1755, that liberty and safety aren't opposites. A free society that can't protect its people from violence doesn't stay free for long. He'd recognize that today. So do most people, once the quote stops being a slogan and starts being read.

At Flock, we build technology that helps communities solve crime, find missing people, and recover stolen cars. We take the questions about how that technology is used seriously. We believe those questions deserve clear, evidence-based answers.

Those answers should start with outcomes. In 2025 alone, Flock technology supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and incidents. In jurisdictions where Flock is deployed, an estimated 20% of solved cases involved Flock. More than 10,000 missing people were located with assistance from Flock technology, averaging more than 27 every day. More than 40% of customers report that Flock was involved in recovering at least half of the stolen vehicles in their jurisdiction.

Conversations about public safety technology should be grounded in facts, results, and community impact. The record shows that these tools are helping investigators solve cases, helping families find missing loved ones, and helping victims recover stolen property. Any discussion of the future of this technology should begin with an honest assessment of the outcomes it produces today.