On New Year’s Day 2024, someone gunned down a 23-year-old man in Mohican Park off Triskett Road on Cleveland’s West Side. Detectives investigating the crime discovered that a nearby video surveillance camera had recorded a U-Haul truck fleeing the scene. They entered the truck’s license plate number into a national network of cameras that can read plates.

A camera in Buffalo, New York, snapped an image of the truck, and the system alerted Cleveland police. In a matter of days, officers from both cities worked together to arrest the driver and passenger and return them to Cleveland. They were indicted on murder charges, convicted and are serving prison sentences of 15 and 19 years.

The camera network is maintained by a company called Flock Safety. The Cleveland Division of Police purchased 100 Flock license plate readers in 2022 for $250,000, and it is now one of more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies using them, according to the company.

The Cleveland Department of Public Safety cited the 2024 murder case as an example of the value of plate readers. Safety officials have been less forthcoming about the flip side of out-of-state access — that it works both ways.

In January, law enforcement officers from across Northeast Ohio and as far away as Texas and Florida tapped into the database of images captured by Cleveland’s license plate readers for a wide variety of reasons, according to a report obtained by Signal Cleveland through a public records request. The report was originally prepared for City Council by the Public Safety Department.

It provides a rare glimpse into who is accessing photos of cars and trucks that Cleveland’s pole-mounted license plate readers are snapping and storing every day. 

In the past year, at least 30 cities have deactivated their license plate readers or ended their relationships with Flock due to local concerns about possible misuse, according to NPR. Some police departments have run searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, in one case, to track a woman suspected of having an abortion.

Cleveland has never received such a request from ICE and would not comply if it did, a city spokesperson told Signal Cleveland. But “valid questions” from concerned Clevelanders were a factor in deciding to “pause” a proposed $2 million contract for Flock Safety’s gunshot detection technology to replace ShotSpotter, the spokesperson said.

Indecent exposure?

License plate readers are cameras that capture images of every vehicle passing through their field of vision. They use machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) to alert police when they detect a vehicle that’s been added to a “hot list” because it was reported stolen or its driver is connected to a crime.

All images, not just those of vehicles on the hot list, are stored in each police department’s searchable database. The departments can share access with each other.

The report requested by City Council shows the date and range of every search of Cleveland’s database in January, which law enforcement agency initiated it and the stated reason. There are about 230 entries, though  many show identical or near identical search ranges and reasons.

Police from 15 other cities in Cuyahoga County accessed the database, as well as a few from neighboring counties, Columbus and the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

Out-of-state requests came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Kansas. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service also logged in several times while investigating a robbery.

Reasons given for searches included “Hit and Run” (Cleveland and Beachwood), “Indecent exposure/Lewd” (Albany, New York) “Missing/Endanger Person/Runaway” (Bedford), “Wanted Person” (Harris County, Texas), “Drugs/Narcotics” (Marshall County, West Virginia) and “Homicide/Death investigation” (Cleveland and Columbus).

Some of the entries say simply “invest” (Cleveland, Euclid and Lyndhurst).

‘When everyone contributes, cases get solved’

Flock says that its license plate readers are used in 49 states, generating more than 20 billion images per month. The company encourages sharing with promises like the ability to “track suspects across counties and state lines” and “when everyone contributes, cases get solved.”

A policy for using the readers approved last year by the Cleveland Community Police Commission allows Cleveland police to share access with “other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes.”

Flock’s software settings allow varying levels of sharing. A memo that accompanied the report to council indicates that Cleveland police must approve all “sharing relationships” and “can revoke this access at any time.”

Cleveland participates in network functions called Nationwide and Statewide Lookup. That allows other agencies “to see only whether a specific license plate has been detected” by another agency’s system. This does not require prior approval.

“These information-sharing relationships are critical components that help solve violent crimes and take murderers off our streets,” the city spokesperson told Signal Cleveland.

The ‘hot list’

A Cleveland police lieutenant explained the “hot list” at a Community Police Commission meeting last year.

The hot list — also called the vehicle list and hot file — is updated daily with data from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a data base of law enforcement activity from across the country. Vehicles associated with arrest warrants obtained by Cleveland detectives get to the hot list through the NCIC. A vehicle can be added before a warrant is obtained with approval from a lieutenant. That typically only happens in murder cases, the lieutenant said.

When a vehicle on the hot list is spotted by a license plate reader, patrol officers are notified.

“You’ve got to understand that these LPR hits are happening constantly” in the patrol cars, the lieutenant said. “Most of them are going unanswered.”

Officers focus on hits related to felony crimes and “escalating misdemeanors,” which include domestic violence and gross sexual imposition.

The lieutenant speaking at the meeting and the recent memo both state that all images are permanently deleted from the database after 30 days.

“We don’t even have control over” the automatic deletion, the lieutenant said. “We cannot, even as a law enforcement agency, ask for it, we can’t subpoena it, it’s gone.”