Flock Safety opens largest U.S. manufacturing site in Smyrna, touts drones and public-safety partnerships

Flock Safety on Thursday formally opened what company founder Garrett Langley described as its largest manufacturing facility in the United States in Smyrna, Cobb County, Georgia, joining local and state officials for a demonstration of teleoperated drones and remarks about jobs and public safety.

The facility — described by speakers at the event as a 100,000-square-foot production site that the company said will “one day employ over 200 hardworking Georgians” — represents an expansion of Flock’s manufacturing and aviation work in Metro Atlanta alongside the company’s license-plate-recognition cameras used by local police, officials said.

“Today, we are officially opening our largest manufacturing facility in the country here in our hometown of Atlanta, Georgia,” Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, said. Langley framed the company’s work as combining people, technology and policy to make communities safer and pointed to recent state-level measures he characterized as “tough on crime and … pro for business.”

Governor Kemp, Governor of Georgia, and other speakers emphasized the economic and public-safety aspects of the expansion. “This hundred thousand square foot facility will one day employ over 200 hardworking Georgians,” Governor Kemp said, adding that Georgia’s efforts to grow aerospace and manufacturing helped attract firms like Flock. The governor and other officials described aerospace-related growth in the state since 2015.

Lisa Cupid, Cobb County Chairwoman, connected Flock’s technology to recent local policing results and listed municipalities she said the technology serves, saying the company’s systems were “actively making Cobb County safer every day.” “Just last week, when an alleged kidnapper tried to grab a child in Walmart of Kennesaw, police used flock cameras to identify and arrest the suspect,” Cupid said. She also credited Flock cameras with arrests in homicide cases in Cobb County.

Stuart Van Hooser, Cobb County Police Chief, described multi-year use of Flock’s license-plate-recognition cameras and cited department measurements: “We immediately dropped entering autos by 67%. We measured it after 6 months,” he said, and said pistol-whipping incidents fell “by 52%.” Van Hooser called Flock an “amazing partner” as he approaches retirement after a 35-year career.

Katie Kirkpatrick, CEO of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, and Smyrna’s mayor (unnamed in the transcript) highlighted the public-private partnership and regional workforce connections to schools such as Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State that officials said supply talent to local manufacturers.

At the event Flock also demonstrated a teleoperated drone. Garrett Langley described the drone as capable of being piloted remotely from a real-time crime center and shown on a screen that, he said, displays “every helicopter, every airplane, every drone, anything flying north of 200 feet in the area,” which he said enables flights beyond visual line of sight. Duncan, identified in the transcript only by his first name, was introduced as the operator who would fly the drone from a laptop.

No formal votes, ordinances or regulatory actions were recorded at the event; remarks were promotional and demonstrative, and officials and company representatives framed the expansion primarily as economic development and an extension of an existing law-enforcement technology partnership.

The event combined a product demonstration with statements about jobs, manufacturing capacity and crime-fighting results; officials said they expect continued collaboration between Flock and local law enforcement as the company scales production in Smyrna.