VIDIZMO Pitches Facial Recognition on Flock Camera Data to Police

A third-party vendor is telling police departments it is willing to add facial recognition to footage gathered by Flock Safety cameras, even as Flock says it will not build the capability itself. VIDIZMO, a decades-old video analysis and database company, advertises the ability to export footage from Flock's FlockOS real time crime center product into its own platforms, which perform facial recognition, behavior prediction and analysis of race and gender on live camera feeds.

An email to Tennessee police

In a May email to Michael Adams, deputy police chief in Johnson City, Tennessee, a VIDIZMO salesperson wrote that the company's product could run facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data inside one searchable platform. The message said Flock data does not connect automatically to an agency's Axon evidence system and that VIDIZMO's Intelligence Hub closes that gap, letting investigators search by face, vehicle or object at the same time. The email was obtained through a public records request by DeFlock Johnson City and shared with 404 Media. The Johnson City police department told 404 Media it did not take a call with the company.

What VIDIZMO says

VIDIZMO chief executive Nadeem Khan told 404 Media on a video call that the company has not yet run facial recognition on Flock footage and has not built the specific tool that would export data from Flock's system, although it advertises the capability online and already sells other facial recognition products. He said the company would love to do the integration and argued that facial recognition is the way the world is going. Khan said Flock is trying to get out of the way by refusing to offer recognition instead of implementing it correctly, and that VIDIZMO must offer alternatives because it is a small company without venture capital.

The company's documentation describes uploading individual faces as objects into a library and adding them to a watchlist that triggers tracking and recording when a camera detects them. VIDIZMO also tells police they can filter faces by age, gender and race, listing seven categories: White, Black, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern and Latino Hispanic. The company says the filters help agencies that have a description of a suspect.

The limits of a company's promise

Privacy expert Chris Gilliard, author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the product appalling and said decades of research show that sorting people by race, age and gender is neither possible nor desirable. He added that what Flock says about its own capabilities matters less than the infrastructure it has built, because another company can and will assemble another layer of surveillance on what has already been established. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has said the company will not add facial recognition to its devices. Flock and Axon did not respond to a request for comment.