What We Heard at IACP 2026: Leadership Feedback Shaping Flock’s Next Steps

Most conference booths are built to be looked at. Flock’s booth was built for conversation. Over the week at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) annual conference, we engaged roughly 500 agencies through our Coffee & Compliance stations at our booth and the events we hosted. Nearly every one of those conversations started the same way: with a question from a law enforcement leader doing the work in the field.

A booth designed for conversation

The booth used a circular layout so anyone could join from any direction. At the center were demonstrations of real-time crime center workflows, including Drone as First Responder mission examples led by participating agencies.

From there, attendees could:

• Sit down with our Legal team to talk through statewide legislation;
• Ask direct questions about our security posture;
• Join our product team for hands-on demos of what’s new, and give live feedback that goes straight to the people building it.
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Across the aisle, Flock Aerodome extended the conversation with more Drone as First Responder workflow demonstrations, our Alpha drone on display, and DFR leaders sharing case studies and their view of where the industry is headed.

Transparency and community partnership

Many of the conversations we had at the booth came back to one question: how do you build community confidence in a technology well before it reaches a council agenda? Chiefs and senior leaders shared what works, and a few themes came up repeatedly. 

The strongest community conversations start with clear answers to three questions: what the technology is, why the agency uses it, and how it is governed. Councils tend to ask about policy, audits, and public transparency, so agencies with a written policy, an audit practice, and public reporting in place before the meeting get to lead the conversation. 

Local outcomes and community case examples make those answers real, and thoughtful explanations of how the technology works proactively address confusion. Agencies that treat council as a long-term partnership, with every meeting building on the last, tend to earn lasting relationships.

Leaders also talked about making the technology conversation a routine part of community life. Tours of the real-time crime center, live demonstrations, community events, local media, and social channels all give residents a regular look at the work, and time spent walking through a case workflow can often answer more questions than just a slide deck can.

Built with law enforcement, feature by feature

In his fireside conversation with IACP Immediate Past President David B. Rausch, founder and CEO Garrett Langley described how a feedback loop helps shape Flock products: “We meet with a chief or a sergeant and ask, ‘What problems do you have?’ And then we go build it for them.”

Some product improvements came straight from the field. An agency asked for “search by vehicle color,” and Garrett shared that the feature helped investigators narrow results in a homicide investigation by searching for red trucks, not just trucks. Another agency asked for state identification on plates to cut down on wrong-vehicle stops, and the team built it.

“Every step of the way, law enforcement is so good at articulating the problem: ‘If you could build this, I could solve more crime.’ As an engineer, it’s really fun.”

Building with responsibility

Garrett shared several changes that came directly from conversations with customers:

• In-product training controls. “We will now allow agencies to mandate training in the product, so you can only gain access once you complete it.”
• A deliberate pace. “We’re going to build products more slowly... third parties will test our software, and we’ll have a fairly long implementation period to make sure it does what we say.”
• Easy where it should be easy, hard where it should be hard. Garrett described a goal for the whole industry: “Make easy things easier and hard things harder.”

Partners for the long run

Garrett closed the session by thanking the chiefs in the room and sharing what their work means to the Flock team. Every day, the people at Flock hear stories from agencies about the cases they’ve solved and the communities they’ve served.

“It’s a privilege... to hear your stories every day,” he said. “The work you do brings the company to tears. The only message we want to get across is how proud we are to be partners, and we look forward to a very long partnership.”

The roughly 500 conversations we had at IACP will keep shaping what we build next. Visit our Trust Hub to learn more about how Flock approaches transparency, accountability, and responsible use, and reach out to your Flock team with feedback anytime. The conversation shouldn’t stop when IACP ends.