‘Whatever you want Ben’: Inside Ben Horowitz’s cozy relationship with the Las Vegas Police Department
Reading Time: 7 minutesWhen Skydio, a young maker of drones in San Mateo, California, sent a customer proposal in 2023 to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, its chief of staff, Mike Gennaro, forwarded the email to VC Ben Horowitz.
‘Which deployment are you looking to do?’ Horowitz wrote back.
Horowitz then sent money to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) police foundation to purchase Skydio drones for the department.
It was a win-win, seemingly. Skydio was able to tout its relationship with the LVMPD, while the department received a new tool to fight crime. In a blog post detailing the partnership, Skydio praised the LVMPD’s choice to adopt its X10 drones as being ‘driven by the ambitious vision of making Las Vegas the safest community in America.’
They did not mention Horowitz, despite the fact that the VC’s relationship with the LVMPD runs deeper than just funding the Skydio drones.
Horowitz isn’t alone in this approach to supporting police. Soliciting donations to police foundations to cover the cost of specific equipment purchases is an increasingly popular and controversial approach taken by some of the largest departments around the country.
‘It’s horrifying from a good government perspective, from a nonprofit [and] ethics perspective, and just really has become such a major part of how novel police technologies are advertised and marketed,’ Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said in an interview.
Fox Cahn and others also said donations can set up companies for ongoing contracts where taxpayers foot the bill. And they say it can tilt the playing field. In Skydio’s case, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department owned products from at least three other drone companies before Horowitz’s donation, a prior public records request revealed.
Horowitz argued in his post that the public sector often has ‘trouble budgeting’ for new strategic technology, so ‘by donating the technology, I am able to give LVMPD a running start.’
His approach was praised by David Ulevitch, a general partner at a16z, which backed Skydio. ‘What @bhorowitz and Felicia have done in Vegas is a masterclass in philanthropy and impact,’ Ulevitch wrote. ‘I hope it catches on in cities across America as a model to bring great technology to public safety and bootstrap the process.’
Paying for Prepared911, Flock Safety and more
For Horowitz’s wife Felicia, California in 2020 was beginning to look too much like her past. The two had lived in the affluent Bay Area town of Atherton, California, for years. But Felicia had grown up outside of Los Angeles, in Compton and Carson, California, where she ‘saw many of her friends murdered,’ Horowitz said in his blog post.
Between Prop. 47, a 2014 California policy that reclassified some felonies as misdemeanors, and politicians’ short-lived pledges to slash police budgets, Felicia felt she was watching her home state deteriorate in real time. ‘The new policies — defund the police, don’t prosecute crime — are destroying the communities where I grew up,’ she was quoted saying in The Wall Street Journal. ‘If you want to genocide black people, the California policies are a great blueprint.’
Felicia wanted out of California and Horowitz was intrigued by Las Vegas. The city, he told a Substack publication, promised ‘the Raiders, amazing restaurants, and world class entertainment.’
Horowitz purchased his Las Vegas residence, and his business partner, Marc Andreessen, reportedly bought a $36 million vacant plot nine minutes down the road. By early 2023, the emails show Horowitz had begun making personal suggestions about products to the police department and was soon writing checks. The couple donated $800,000 for new computer terminals and $120,000 for the gym, tossing in money for new ice and cappuccino machines, he wrote in his post.
He also started connecting Vegas police with a16z portfolio companies. In addition to Skydio, he donated $400,000 for the police department to acquire technology from Prepared, an a16z company that uses AI to help with 911 calls, and an unspecified amount for surveillance cameras from Flock Safety, another a16z company. Horowitz also set up introductions for secure communications startup Kodex, and Earnin’, which helps employees access their pay before payday, the emails show.
The LVMPD didn’t just blindly accept his donated technology, though, according to the emails.
Horowitz told Gennaro in an August 2023 email that he would make a donation for the department to acquire technology from Toka, an a16z-backed cybersecurity company. But police leadership had concerns. The startup was slow to provide pricing information and there were questions about whether Toka’s technology would work well with some of LVMPD’s cameras, according to the emails.
LVMPD leadership wanted their internal business and technology governance board to review the tech before even receiving a Toka demo and warned there might be a ‘lengthy’ clearance approval process.
How Horowitz guided the Skydio deal
In a 2023 email to chief of staff Gennaro, Brad Cupp, then-Las Vegas police sergeant, reflected on the X2 Skydio drones. He wrote that they showed a ‘tremendous amount of promise,’ but ‘fell short of what we needed operationally.’
In the same email, Cupp wrote that the Skydio team had listened to LVMPD’s feedback, creating a new drone that ‘has the potential to truly be a game changer,’ he wrote. ‘I’m hoping you will be able to assist upgrading all or part of our fleet of Skydios.’
Gennaro forwarded the message to Horowitz, asking for help. A few months later, Skydio officially announced their new drone, the X10, and sent over a proposal to LVMPD for drones and drone docks — a landing pad for drones stationed throughout the city — in hopes that Horowitz would donate the equipment to the police force.
This potential deal took on a newfound importance after the company stopped selling consumer drones that year, betting its future on government, defense, and law enforcement. This meant all of their inventory would have to meet a higher standard: police drones usually need longer battery lives and better cameras, as well as additional technology like thermal sensors.
Horowitz, however, expressed surprise at the large scope of Skydio’s proposal to the LVMPD, especially its suggestion to put docks on schools, according to the emails.
‘I thought that we just wanted this for the 11 neighborhoods,’ Horowitz emailed Gennaro, the ‘we’ referring to the police department and himself, as the one footing the bill. ‘They bid the schools too. Is that what we asked for?’
Gennaro explained that more drones were necessary in higher-crime neighborhoods, though much of the email was redacted, including his response to putting docks on schools. Gennaro ended the email by deferring to his donor’s judgment.
‘We can adjust however you see fit,’ he wrote. An unnamed representative of the LVMPD’s public information office said that no drone docks have currently been installed in LVMPD’s jurisdiction.
Three months later, when Horowitz pitched Gennaro on another a16z portfolio company, Kodex, he included a caveat: ‘If it’s a good idea, I am happy to help, but let’s not let the company know that,’ Horowitz emailed. ‘We don’t need another Skyd.io proposal lol.’
Horowitz’s increased proximity to the LVMPD has had other ripple effects for the companies he’s invested in. Around the same time that Skydio publicized its partnership with the LVMPD, Sergeant Cupp, who had evangelized the company’s drones internally, left the department for a new gig, according to his LinkedIn profile: Program manager at Skydio.
‘You are going to get caught’
Andreessen Horowitz held its 2023 LP Summit — an event for the people who invest in the firm’s funds — in Las Vegas. The city’s sheriff, Kevin McMahill, donning his police uniform, sat onstage between Flock Safety founder Garrett Langley and a16z’s Ulevitch. McMahill couldn’t hold back his glee as he spoke about using a16z-backed technologies.
‘Every piece of that technology is the equivalent of three police officers,’ he said of Flock’s products, adding: ‘Bad guys know that when you come to Las Vegas, because of our abilities — technology being at the forefront of it — you are going to get caught.’
McMahill also touted LVMPD’s commitment to transparency during the talk. But he didn’t mention the opaque tool the department used to acquire these technologies: police foundations.
These foundations are often set up as tax-exempt nonprofits, and give private citizens and corporations a way to donate money that can be used to buy things for police departments. Their use has exploded in recent years, with police foundations in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Atlanta generating millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Transparency, or lack of it, is a primary concern advocates like Feeney have with the use of police foundations.
To wit, Horowitz used his personal foundation to donate $2 million to the Las Vegas police foundation in 2023. But his foundation’s tax filing vaguely described the ‘purpose’ of the donation as ‘support of police.’
The Las Vegas police foundation, meanwhile, doesn’t publish a full rundown of its donors. And while it maintains a website that lists some of the programs it funds, it does not mention the a16z companies, nor does it say how much money goes to any one effort.
What little they do disclose lags behind the real-world deployment. The most recent public filings for either foundation only cover activity through as late as June 2023.
‘Welcome to the wonderful, dystopian land of Police Foundations,’ Fox Cahn, the surveillance advocate, said.
Fox Cahn added that, often, the donations can set up companies for lucrative ongoing contracts with the police force, sidestepping competitors. After an initial donation, ‘they can then try to both sell the [police] on a follow-up contract but also then use the fact that [police] are deploying a technology for advertising,’ he said.
‘It becomes really just impossible for voters — for the public – to hold people accountable,’ he said.
Horowitz has justified his involvement with the LVMPD by pointing to dropping crime rates in the city — which he says is happening thanks, in part, to his donations. In his post, he claimed that 911 calls are being answered faster and that, thanks to Flock Safety, 17% more suspects are being arrested.
Sheriff McMahill is a believer. At the LP Summit, he recalled a shooting where all they knew was there were two cars with multiple weapons firing. The case seemed hopeless until he used Flock Safety technology, which includes gunshot detection and license plate recognition software, which was able to give them more information on the scene and help them to catch the shooters.
‘This technology is changing the game,’ McMahill declared to the crowd of a16z investors. ‘We are going to get to a place at some point where it becomes impossible to commit a crime.’
Ref: techcrunch
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