The Flock Safety Falcon camera is helping to solve crimes in St. Louis. (Source: Flock Safety)

Falcon AI Proving to Be Strong Crime Tool in IDing Vehicles Via Flock Camera Networks

An Atlanta start-up that created an AI-driven camera network is helping police solve crimes in St. Louis at a faster rate than expected when they put them up around the city.

Falcon AI has introduced a couple of different algorithms that are proving to be as good as advertised if not better.

An in-depth article from stltoday.com explains the assistance that The Flock cameras are providing. These cameras are driven by AI that reads license plates, takes major data points from videos or cars in the crime scene area, and correlates them for law enforcement so quickly that officers say it’s hard to imagine.

The example in the article was about a bus driver who was shot at night in St Louis:

:In the hours after Metro bus driver Jonathan Cobb was shot on Dec. 3, detectives started with a broad lead: The shooter drove a red or maroon PT Cruiser. Cobb was shot and critically injured seemingly at random that night while ferrying a bus full of passengers in the Normandy area.”

Flock allowed police to search for every PT Cruiser matching the description that passed a growing network of Falcon cameras in the St. Louis suburbs in the Metro shooting case. Those leads resulted in the arrest of Isaiah L. Houston within three days of the shooting. He faces multiple felonies accusing him of shooting Cobb and firing at another Metro bus just 10 minutes earlier.

The AI was able to search a city full of videos and search a database for that particular type of automobile, and then report to the police its findings.

”We had a case where someone was just shooting up buses full of people,” said Maj. Ron Martin, assistant chief of the North County Police Cooperative who also served on the Major Case Squad on Cobb’s case. “I don’t think that gets solved nearly as quickly if you don’t have Flock.”

This software is widely used in Missouri and other states. The company has competitors, including Genetec and Motorola’s Vigilant solutions, but around St. Louis, Flock appears to be the fastest-growing. The startup says it gained 75 local Missouri customers over the past few years, including 22 police agencies.

The company aims to have Flock cameras in every city in the U.S. Launched in 2017 by Atlanta entrepreneur Garrett Langley, the company raised $380 million from venture capital investors and grew to a valuation of $3.5 billion, according to a February announcement from the company.

Today, Flock is operating in about 1,500 communities nationwide and records data on more than 1 billion vehicles each month.

Falcon AI has also announced something they are calling The Raven.  It is an Audio Crime Detection Algorithm. you can get a sample of how the Raven operates in the video below.

read more at stltoday.com