Cleveland has a spotty record of keeping the public in the loop about how it uses police surveillance technology.
Five years ago, a report by the Community Police Commission and outside experts warned that transparency and public oversight were needed as the city started to rely more and more on technology tools — cameras, license plate readers, drones — to police the city and solve crimes.
The commission recommended a complete inventory of the surveillance technologies and clear policies governing their use. It also called for the creation of a privacy commission to advise city leaders and “ensure the community is well informed and involved in the adoption” of surveillance technologies.
Neither recommendation was implemented. Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration did briefly spin up a police technology advisory committee, but it was quietly dissolved after only a couple of private meetings in 2024.
Some Cleveland residents are now pushing back on the use of the license plate readers made by Flock Safety. The Flock No CLE campaign, like similar efforts across the county, is raising concerns about immigration-related searches of license plate data and other abuses of the technology. Dozens of cities, including Dayton, have cut ties with the company amid citizen backlash.
Flock says that its license plate readers help solve hundreds of thousands of crimes every year. Mayor Justin Bibb has said that surveillance technology “gives us more intelligence, gives us more data to keep our streets safe.”
The city has shared little evidence on how often Cleveland police have used license plate readers to solve crimes. Earlier this year, it gave Signal Cleveland two examples, both homicides from 2024. It did not respond to a recent question about data showing effectiveness.
On June 17, Cleveland’s Department of Public Safety will ask a City Council committee to green light an extension of the city’s $250,000-a-year contract with Flock, which expires at the end of June.
Here’s some of what Signal Cleveland has learned – through public records and interviews with city officials and Flock representatives – about the city’s use of license plate readers and what remains unclear.
Search data provides a more detailed picture of license plate reader access
License plate readers are cameras that capture images of every passing vehicle. Those images are transmitted via cellular networks to a database and stored for 30 days. Law enforcement agencies can share access to their databases with each other. Flock says that its cameras are used in more than 6,000 communities across the country.
Explained: Learn more on how license plate reader technology works.
Signal Cleveland analyzed nearly 8 million searches of Cleveland’s camera network. The data, provided to Signal Cleveland by the city after months of back and forth, gives the most complete picture so far of how Cleveland officers and law enforcement agencies across the country are tapping into Cleveland’s network and the reasons why.
The records — which Flock calls “audits” — cover late December through mid-May, with a four-day gap in early April that the city has not explained.
For most or all searches, the data includes:
- In ID number for each search
- The organization searching the images
- The date and time the search was submitted
- The time window covered in that search
- The number of “networks” searched
- A brief reason for the search
The data does not include any license plate numbers searched or other identifying information about the vehicle or person being sought.
For searches by Cleveland Division of Police personnel, the original set of data the city released sometimes (but not always) included the name of the officer conducting the search. Another set of records released later does not include any officers’ names, even for cases where it was included in the old data.
A city spokesperson told Signal Cleveland that the name redactions were the result of a change made by Flock. But a Flock spokesperson said that the company recently began automatically redacting names only in records of searches by outside agencies, not in records of searches done by the organization that owns the database.
Signal Cleveland asked the city spokesperson again and is waiting for a response.
Who’s using Cleveland’s Flock network?
Flock users have total control over direct access (like, for example, between Cleveland Police and CMSD). But to use the statewide and national search options, users have to open their own databases to all other users.
Cleveland officers, and Ohio agencies in general, make up just a sliver of the searches run on Cleveland’s database. The logs show that between January and mid-May, there were nearly 8 million searches of Cleveland’s Flock system. Many were for identical or nearly identical search ranges and reasons. Of those, 14% came from departments in Ohio, and about 80,000 — roughly 1% — were made by Cleveland police.
Ohio came in second for states with the most searches of Cleveland’s cameras, beaten out by Texas and trailed by Florida in a distant third. The Houston and Dallas police departments alone made up 9% of the total searches.
Within Ohio, the Columbus police department ran almost 80,000 searches of the Cleveland database — 15,000 more than Cleveland police. Few of the Ohio searches came from departments in Cuyahoga County. (Cleveland.com recently reported that there are more than 1,700 license plate readers in use across the county.)
‘Other’ is a common reason given for searches by Cleveland police
The Flock system requires searchers to select an offense type from a dropdown menu. It also gives them the option of filling in a reason.
Police from across the country most frequently said their searches were related to drugs, closely followed by motor vehicle theft. Cleveland police searches were most often related to motor vehicle theft, followed by weapons offenses. The third most common reason listed was “Other.”
Cleveland police policy requires “reasonable suspicion” of a crime to access information via search. But currently it only requires recording a “reason or purpose” for searches that get a “hit.” Flock users are prompted to enter a reason when they submit their search, before they know if it will return any results.
Cleveland police categorized their search reason as “Other” far more frequently than police from other departments who searched Cleveland’s network. Only about 1% of searches overall were labeled “Other.” Cleveland police, however, designated the reason as “other” in over 6,000 cases, or 9%.
Flock representatives said it’s up to departments whether they let searchers choose “Other” as an offense type.
The details provided in the “reason” by searchers were often unenlightening. In about a third of cases, Cleveland cops listed the reason as “Other – invest,” presumably short for “investigation.” Another 218 were marked “Other – other.”
Cleveland police included the term “STANCE” in about 500 cases, including over 350 that were categorized as “Other – STANCE.” The city said those searches refer to the Street Nuisance and Crime Enforcement detail, which Mayor Justin Bibb announced in November to address vehicle break-ins and “other quality-of-life crimes.” The announcement said most of the people the task force arrested early on were juveniles suspected of car break-ins.
Ten searches in the entire data set included the term “protest” in the search reason. Three of those searches came from the Cleveland police, all labeled “Other – no kings protest.” A city spokesperson told Signal Cleveland that officers conducted the searches “after observing two vehicles engaging in suspicious behavior by circling the No Kings protest occurring downtown” on March 28.
Is Cleveland allowing immigration-related searches?
The initial data the city turned over included 168 searches with the term “immigration” in the reason given for the search. The updated data set did not include any of those searches but still included some searches that listed terms like “ICE” or “Department of Homeland Security.”
According to a city spokesperson and Flock, Cleveland began blocking immigration-related searches in November. Searches appeared in the audits because, at the time, the city’s license plate network was connected to a network for a new, separate drone program for the divisions of fire and emergency medical services. No images were shared, and the drone network is now separate, the Flock spokesperson said.
Flock officials said their EMS drones have cameras powerful enough to see a license plate clearly if the drone operator zoomed in on a vehicle, but they don’t include features for reading them digitally.
However, Flock’s online marketing materials for its Aerodrome drone software say that the drones can provide “license plate recognition with real-time hotlist hits during flight.” When asked, a Flock official said he wasn’t familiar with the handout and would have to seek additional information.
The filter to block immigration-related searches, which Flock installed last year, should include search terms like “ICE” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Last week, a Flock spokesman could not immediately explain why 12 searches labeled “Drugs/Narcotics – ICE STORM” from the sheriff’s office in Florence County, South Carolina, appear in the data in late February.
A South Carolina news story about an operation by the same name in 2025 said ICE STORM focused on traffic stops but was conducted in tandem with ICE.
The technology news site 404 Media has reported that some local law enforcement agencies have run immigration-related searches on behalf of federal immigration agents. In at least one case, federal agents submitted a search to Flock using a local police officer’s login, thus bypassing local policies blocking those agencies from searching networks in cities like Cleveland.
Flock officials said the company added options for departments to block immigration-related searches last year. When they open the system, users must acknowledge a pop-up notification saying they can’t run immigration-related searches in certain states or searches related to enforcing abortion bans in others.
Officers using misleading or false search terms could violate their own agencies’ policies and face termination, the Flock spokesperson said.
