Activists opposed to police use of license plate readers attended a Cleveland City Council committee hearing on Wednesday ready to argue against a proposed contract extension with Flock Safety. But the expected presentation by city officials about the technology was postponed.
Last week, a city spokesperson told Signal Cleveland that Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond would discuss the police department’s use of the technology before council’s Safety Committee on Wednesday. The scheduled presentation drew the attention of activists.
On Monday, Mayor Justin Bibb told council in a letter that instead of trying to renew the contract through the city’s Board of Control, his administration would now seek council’s approval through legislation.
Council plans to introduce legislation for extending the contract on June 1. Council Member Mike Polensek, chair of the Safety Committee, said council will schedule a special committee meeting in mid-June to hear Drummond’s pitch.
Bibb’s letter to council previewed at least some of the arguments that Drummond may make. Bibb wrote that license plate readers have been important for investigations into violent crime, vehicle theft and missing persons.
He also said that losing access to the technology would hurt police recruitment and create a “regional enforcement blind spot” — many cities in Cuyahoga County are also using Flock license plate readers — and this would lead to “more dangerous outside-agency pursuits through our neighborhoods.”
Activists concerned about immigration-related searches
Before the presentation was postponed, members of Flock No CLE, a coalition of groups that oppose the use of license plate readers, held a press conference just inside the front doors of City Hall.
City officials need to “be clear-eyed about the authoritarian context they are navigating,” said Bryn Adams, one of the group’s leaders.
License plate readers capture images of all vehicles crossing their paths and store them in searchable databases that law enforcement agencies can share with each other. Signal Cleveland obtained logs of searches of Cleveland’s database and found almost 250 by outside agencies that involved the words immigration, ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security or customs.
“We know that law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have made thousands of searches of local law enforcement [license plate reader] data for immigration purposes,” said Rebecca Garcia with Avanzamos Unidos, a group that advocates for Ohio’s Latine community.
On Wednesday, Jamil Hairston, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety, said that the city worked with Flock in November to restrict immigration-related searches of Cleveland’s database. The ones that show up in the records that Signal Cleveland obtained were not actual searches, he said, but the result of a mix-up involving a new Flock drone program that the city is testing for the divisions of fire and emergency medical services.
“At the time of Flock setting up the back end of that, they mistakenly attached the network of the drone program with the Division of Police,” Hairston said. As a result, he explained, some nationwide searches of license plate readers showed up in the Cleveland logs, but no data was shared.
Adams was skeptical of this explanation.
“That sounds like PR spin from Flock — or they’re incompetent,” she said. “What’s worse?”
