Mission Ain't-Possible
What happens to a company when folks realize its purpose is disconnected from reality?
Flock Safety makes the license plate cameras you've probably driven past or heard about on the news. They’re hung on poles at intersections, in shopping center lots, at the entrance to subdivisions. Police departments, sheriffs, and homeowner groups can buy 'em. The cameras feed a shared network accessible to thousands of organizations and agencies.
That network is experiencing a whole lot of pressure right now. More than a hundred cities have shut off their cameras. In August the company cut its default data retention to seven days and added lockouts for suspicious searches. Clients keep walking away. Fairfax County, where I live, and neighboring Arlington, VA have both pulled back. Fairfax paused new installations while the Board of Supervisors reviews the program. Arlington went further, voting to pull all 41 of its cameras. Our neighbors in Alexandria don't seem to want them at all. The mayor doesn't see a role for Flock in her city. This is happening all over the country.
Most coverage I've seen tries to establish whether Flock is good or bad. That's not my thing. But organizational purpose is, and Flock's purpose statement is four words long. "To eliminate crime. Full stop."
What does a mission like that do to the company using it?
Turns out, quite a lot.
Impossible missions have a good track record
Logically, the mission isn't remotely possible, but that's not the issue here. Plenty of organizations have run on missions they could never reach, and done well.
Alcoa's CEO told a room full of investors that the only number he cared about was workplace injuries. The target was zero, and... they absolutely missed it. But injury rates fell to a fraction of the industry average, and the company was worth about five times more when he left. Another case? Sweden set a goal of zero road deaths in 1997. Deaths didn't hit zero. But they did fall by about half while traffic grew.
So an unreachable target can work. But there's a difference between Flock and the two examples.
The other two could actually impact the thing. Alcoa controls its own factories. Sweden builds its own roads. Flock doesn’t own or control crime. Flock can't even prevent someone from running a red light. It sells cameras into a world where crime and bad weather both exist, and it's equally ineffective at ending both.
The others had independent and trusted validation. Injury reports. Crash counts. Anyone could see whether things were moving in the right direction. Flock claims it helps solve 10% of reported crime in America. But the number is from a 2024 press release about a white paper written by Flock, which didn’t include any 10% claim and was published without peer review. Flock also reported monthly "detections," which it later clarified are plate matches, not solved cases.
The others made a specific person accountable for failure. At Alcoa, every injury became a management failure that the plant manager had to explain to the CEO within 24 hours. In Sweden, a road death became a design failure that the road agency had to answer for. Before, it was the driver's fault. Both missions changed what the organization could shrug off, forcing each to hold someone accountable. Flock made someone accountable too, but it was the customer. In the company's own words, "customers own the data, decide who can access it, and choose who they share it with." Officers in Georgia were caught misusing the system this year, and their departments were the ones who had to hold them accountable. The company with "eliminate crime" on its front page put accountability on the people who bought the product.
A quick look through Linden’s Lens: think, say, do
Every organization (and person) has three things going at once. What it believes. What it tells the world. What it actually does. When any two of those match, I call that aligned. When all three match, it's structural integrity. I've found most organizational trouble first shows up as a gap between two of the three.
A mission statement is communication, what the company tells the world. The easiest thing to compare it with is action, what the company does.
Flock's actions are easy to see. It sells and grows a searchable network of cameras. Some of that helps police solve specific crimes, and might make people think twice before committing one, but none of it eliminates crime. Flock doesn't produce crime levels, so no action it could take would ever match the words.
What about their beliefs? This one's harder to validate. As I see it, either Flock's leaders believe elimination is the real goal, or they believe the real goal is growing the network and the mission is the marketing that helps make that happen. From outside you can't tell which. But we can infer.
A company’s actions are the best evidence of what it believes. If Flock's leaders believed the mission, you'd expect to see a crime number they'd let someone else check, and protective limits set early so their clients’ people can’t use the product to commit crimes. We’d also expect to see Flock leadership taking responsibility for criminal misuse.
We’ve seen none of that. The year after calling an anti-Flock group a “terroristic organization”, the CEO conceded the statement was a mistake. He later also apologized publicly to someone criminally stalked through the exploitation of Flock cameras, on the same day the company announced that police searches would need a case code by year end, with an emergency bypass the agency reviews itself. And instead of preventing misuse of his network, he has pointed the finger at the government over the fact that misuse isn’t clearly defined as criminal.
From the outside it doesn’t look great. Self-provided unvalidated claims. Anti-exploitation limits added too little and too late. Accountability dodged. We may not know exactly what Flock leadership believes, but their actions imply that it’s not centered on the thing they claim.
So... their thinking, saying and doing don’t line up. Plenty of companies run this way for years. It just means the top of the structure has a crack in it, and those cracks travel.
Even if they did believe the mission, they never established the metric they’d use to show progress, leaving them free to pick whatever numbers make them look best in the moment. No one can hold Flock to account, making the mission nothing more than marketing copy.
And marketing copy at the top of an organization isn't harmless.
Walking Linden’s Bridge: The Purpose layer
In past issues we walked through five layers of Linden’s Bridge that hold an organization up. Awareness at the base. Then Purpose, Rules, Systems, and Execution at the top. Each layer has to be present inside the ones above it, or the pressure starts eroding the bridge.
Done right, a purpose provides enough direction that when there’s a choice between two good but conflicting options, it drives the choice. Flock’s stated mission isn’t doing that, which means there’s either nothing guiding decisions, or there’s an unstated (operative) purpose that’s incompatible with what they’ve said.
Read plainly, “full stop” draws a line saying that no other line matters. The operative purpose is always the one to trust.
The cost of a mission you don’t believe in
In Linden's Bridge, the layer above Purpose is Rules. Rules turn purpose into decisions. Who gets to search what. What triggers a review. Where the blame lands when something goes wrong. Rules require specificity.
Alcoa did exceptionally well with this. The CEO got briefed within a day and was handed a plan for preventing the next one. Not punishment, but progress. The impossible target became a policy that improved employee decision-making. "Eliminate crime" is comparatively empty. It doesn't tell a sales rep where to stop, an engineer what to log, or a data access reviewer what counts as suspicious. So Rules get filled with other stuff, perhaps sales numbers and customer retention, because they’re measurable and not in conflict with whatever Flock’s operative mission might be. They end up running the company in opposition to its stated purpose without ever defining what’s truly driving them.
Then the pressure arrives. When the Fairfax board asked for "greater assurances," a company with meaningful rules driven by its stated purpose could have pointed at them. "Here's what we won't do, and here's who checks." It’s not clear if Flock had anything productive to say on the matter. And their own "Full stop" suggests the opposite. To a county supervisor worried about how the tool might be misused, those words read as "there’s nothing we won't do."
The same four words land differently for different audiences. A police chief hears resolve. The resident at the podium hears a threat. An employee hears that rules are meant to be broken.
What I'd tell them
First... I don’t hate Flock. I dislike and distrust the organizational structure, and see that it needs to be fixed. It’s not the people, it’s the system.
The problem - and the fix - seems to start with the organization’s purpose. No marketing campaign can fix what’s happened.
It’s fine to have ambition. Many organizations do. But aim it at a thing you can actually produce or control, commit to a validated and auditable performance metric, and get specific about what lines you will never cross. The operational mission could be something like "help police responsibly solve specific crimes faster, inside limits we publish and an outside party can audit." Then let Rules bind to that. The recent apologies and product updates help, but they arrived as damage control. This needs to happen before people realize it’s needed, not after.
If you leave "full stop" in place, it suggests that every difficult decision will be won by the one who fights the hardest. Full stop is license to do whatever it takes, even if what it takes could result in scandal. From the outside this looks like an organization that hasn’t proactively put limits on itself or the way its offering is used. That’s pushing clients out the door, more because of citizen backlash than user complaints.
I’d advise doing the legwork. Figure out the purpose, the one that can actually guide employees to make choices they’d be proud to share publicly. And embrace it. Build incentives and guardrails to keep employees (and clients) on the path, and tools that make the right choice the easiest (or only) one. And open up lines of communication within the organization and with clients. If the response to valid concerns, problems, or criticism is punitive, Flock won’t have the awareness it needs to establish a solid foundation and begin responsible growth.
If you think they should hear it, feel free to send 'em a copy, or send them my way.
