Cleveland City Council voted to give police six more months to use 100 license plate reader cameras from Flock Safety.
The contract extension likely won’t end Northeast Ohio’s debate over the surveillance technology. Cleveland’s cameras are just a fraction of the more than 1,700 license plate readers across Cuyahoga County, according to court records first reported on by Cleveland.com.
Stationed on streets and at intersections, the cameras capture images of every vehicle that drives by. Flock’s artificial intelligence can recognize cars’ license plate numbers and other identifying features, such as color and brand, providing police with a searchable database of the city’s traffic.
Law enforcement argues that the cameras, known as automatic license plate readers or ALPRs, are useful tools in investigating crimes ranging from robberies to homicides. Critics see government overreach that places the traveling public under the eye of police surveillance.
The Safety Committee added several amendments. It cut the contract from a year to six months, reducing the cost from $250,000 to $125,000. It also added language prohibiting Flock from disclosing Cleveland’s data to outside law enforcement agencies or others, unless compelled by a search warrant.
The final legislation passed July 15 also shuts off the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center’s access to Cleveland’s Flock data.
Police also must set up an online portal and file quarterly reports to City Council about how they are using ALPRs.
Read on for more on how the surveillance debate has played out in Cleveland.
Who has access to Cleveland’s Flock camera images?
Cleveland has “disabled all outside agency searches” of its license plate reader system, Police Chief Dorothy Todd told City Council members last week.
After that move, only Cleveland police and participants in the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center — an information-sharing partnership involving local, state and federal governments — could access the system, she said.
Signal Cleveland asked City Hall for more details on who specifically can access Cleveland’s Flock data.
At council’s July 15 hearing, Assistant Safety Director Michael Herb said that outside agencies could only access Cleveland’s Flock data through the fusion center if they made a formal request for it. He said the center was staffed by analysts from the Cleveland police, Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office and county safety department.
The fusion center describes its work as enhancing “inter-agency communications, criminal and intelligence analysis, and information sharing among Federal, State and local stakeholders, and the public and private sectors.”
Council moved to close the fusion center’s access to Cleveland’s Flock data.
Previously, the city was part of Flock’s nationwide database. That meant that Cleveland’s data was included in nationwide searches by law enforcement elsewhere in the country.
For instance, Houston and Dallas police made up 9% of the nearly 8 million searches that combed through Cleveland’s data between January and mid-May, an analysis of search data by Signal Cleveland found. January search data released to City Council shows searches by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a federal law enforcement agency.
Some of the most common searches overall include motor vehicle thefts, assaults and robberies, another batch of data shows. The city automatically retains each Flock image for 30 days.
What about immigration searches of Cleveland data?
Cleveland started blocking searches with immigration-related key words in November 2025, the city has said. Before that, nearly 2,000 immigration searches combed through the city’s database in 2025, Cleveland.com reported.
Another 168 immigration searches appeared in subsequent data, but City Hall said that was because a fire and EMS drone system was linked to the license plate system. The drone network isn’t linked anymore and no images were shared, according to Flock.
Flock says it allows its customers to limit who can access their data and what sorts of searches can be performed. On the other side of that coin, law enforcement agencies can opt to share their Flock data more widely, including with immigration enforcement.
“In a place like Texas or Florida, where they work with federal immigration authorities, absolutely,” Joshua Thomas, Flock’s communications director, said at a City Club of Cleveland panel last week. “They have decided to do that.”
There’s another way that a law enforcement agency could try to access Flock data without being signed up for the system: with a subpoena or a warrant.
Flock has received subpoenas or warrants before, Thomas said. In those cases, the company tells the law enforcement agency to seek that information instead from the city that holds the data in question, he said.
What concerns have Flock’s critics raised?
Opponents of ALPRs argue the technology violates people’s privacy, giving the government too much power to follow the travel of regular motorists. They’re concerned that police could misuse ALPR data, or that it could end up in the hands of President Donald Trump’s administration, particularly immigration enforcement.
“The city should just not collect data about everyone’s daily movements without a warrant,” Clark-Fulton resident Tessa Xuan told City Council members last week.
If the federal government gained access to ALPR data, “it would give President Trump another tool to pursue his goals of detaining vulnerable immigrants, cracking down on political dissent and securing more power for himself,” she continued.
Brenda Bickerstaff, an activist and private investigator, told council members she was “on the cusp” about the Flock contract. She said she has seen clients exonerated by surveillance camera footage — and has seen people wrongfully accused by police. She urged the city to be transparent about how police use ALPRs.
“Now you say you got safeguards,” Bickerstaff said. “But this is the thing. Who is safeguarding, watching the information and the data? The police department. And you guys know I don’t trust you.”
Jen Golbeck, a professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, argued that the safeguards Flock offers for cities to block unwanted searches provide the “illusion of solving the problem.” The problem is bigger than that, she said at the City Club of Cleveland.
“The problem is that you are constantly surveilling people who are just going about their daily lives,” Golbeck said. “I should be allowed to move freely and not be surveilled and not have police in all these different places tracking my movements.”
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, tallied 22 cases in which police officers were accused of using license plate readers to track former partners or others improperly. The institute has sued over ALPR surveillance and opposes renewing Cleveland’s Flock contract.
Asked about such cases, Thomas replied that Flock has tools aimed at catching misuse. The company maintains an audit trail of how the system is used, he said. A feature called audit assistance “is proactively looking for any sort of nefarious use,” such as officers searching the database while off duty, he said.
How has Cleveland-area law enforcement used Flock?
Police and prosecutors have used Flock cameras to investigate homicides, drug trafficking, car thefts and other crimes, according to a list prepared by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office.
O’Malley argued that license plate readers make police work stronger — and that they can be used to rule out suspects, too.
Often, investigators use it alongside other technologies. For instance, in a 2023 fatal shooting at a vacant gas station, detectives used traditional surveillance cameras, Flock cameras and cell tower location data to zero in on a suspect.
Authorities used the technology to follow suspects’ travel patterns in a drug trafficking case that led to the indictment of 37 people, according to the prosecutor’s list. Law enforcement also tracked suspects’ cars in a different drug case in which seven people were charged.
“Flock cameras were utilized throughout the investigation to identify and track vehicles associated with members, corroborate investigative intelligence, and assist investigators in establishing movements of key suspects,” the prosecutor’s list said of the seven-person drug case.
Public safety officials prepared a memo for City Council saying that closure rates for cases such as burglary, assault, felonious assault and robbery increased after the city adopted Flock license plate readers. The rate rose from 15.5% before Cleveland implemented Flock to 18.7% after.
But officials offered a caveat in another memo. They cautioned that it would take much more research to come up with the number of cases that were solved because of Flock. The limitations of police record-keeping would make that research difficult, the memo said.
“The Department cannot provide a precise number of ‘crimes solved by Flock’ or ‘arrests made because of Flock’ without developing a clear methodology and conducting a significant review,” the memo said.
Todd, the police chief, told council members that Cleveland has also used Flock in criminal investigations of officers themselves. She cited alleged abuse of overtime pay as one such scenario.
“When our Internal Affairs investigates somebody, a complaint of misconduct — or criminal misconduct — involving a member of the Division of Police, Flock has been used,” she said.
How do courts view the license plate reader systems?
At least two federal judges recently upheld the use of ALPR cameras. They found that the systems were not so pervasive that they infringed on travelers’ privacy. But the rulings left open the possibility that the technology could someday cross the line drawn by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In northern Ohio, U.S. District Judge J. Philip Calabrese denied a request to suppress warrantless ALPR evidence in a robbery case first noted by Cleveland.com. An ATF specialist had used license plate cameras from two companies, Flock and Leonardo, to search for the defendant’s car.
Calabrese held that searches of two ALPR databases did not constitute a “dragnet” search under the Fourth Amendment. But “that day might well be on the horizon,” he wrote. He suggested that the Supreme Court ultimately should take on the constitutionality of ALPRs and other new technologies.
“On the one hand, a car’s license plate and exterior appearance belong to a category of vehicle-related identification in which an individual has no reasonable privacy interest,” Calabrese wrote. “On the other hand, the ability to track drivers continuously and retroactively raises the specter of a surveillance state.”
In Virginia, U.S. District Judge Mark Davis ruled in January that Norfolk’s license plate reader system did not violate motorists’ Fourth Amendment rights. Two Norfolk-area residents had sued. The system captured pictures of their vehicles hundreds of times over a four-month period, according to the ruling.
Although Davis ruled in favor of the City of Norfolk, he noted that he agreed with other judges that, “as the number and capabilities of ALPR cameras expand, the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way.”
Both cases are being appealed.
This story was updated with information from City Council’s July 15 meeting, including more details on the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center.
