In a marathon summer meeting, Cleveland City Council voted to extend the city’s contract for Flock Safety license plate reader cameras and to place a moratorium on data center developments.
A divided council voted 9 to 6 on Wednesday to retain the city’s 100 Flock cameras for another six months. The decision on the legislation — sponsored by Mayor Justin Bibb — capped months of debate about license plate readers.
Safety officials have said the cameras are an important investigative tool, while opponents described them as an infringement on residents’ privacy.
Council voted in larger numbers to pause data center developments until the fall, with 14 in favor of the moratorium and one against. The delay is meant to give City Hall time to craft zoning rules for the centers, which provide the computing power for artificial intelligence.
Those pieces of legislation — which both deal with the advance of artificial intelligence in the city — were two of the higher profile items on the agenda for council’s July meeting.
The Flock legislation prohibits the company from sharing the data with governments or other third parties. Police must also set up an online transparency portal and provide quarterly reports to City Council on license plate reader use.
The final version of the legislation also cuts off the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center from access to Cleveland’s Flock data.
Cleveland will continue to use its 100 cameras for at least the next 6 months, at a cost of $125,000. Meanwhile, the city plans to solicit bids from other license plate reader companies.
Flock approved in split vote
Flock’s license plate readers do more than read license plates. Using artificial intelligence, the system can recognize a vehicle’s color, brand and other identifying features such as roof racks.
Police can search plate numbers or vehicle descriptions to see whether the car in question has driven past a Flock camera. Cleveland retains each Flock image for 30 days, officials have said.
Before Wednesday’s vote, some members said Cleveland shouldn’t leave tools like license plate readers on the sidelines in fighting crime in the neighborhoods. Others raised concerns about Flock data falling into the hands of outside agencies, including federal immigration enforcement.
“Our city is overrun with crime,” Ward 1 Council Member Joe Jones said. “We need to use every tool possible. This is a no-brainer for me. And if council members don’t want the [Flock] cameras and vote against it in their neighborhoods, Mr. Chairman, can you please put them over in my community?”
Ward 14 Council Member Jasmin Santana said her neighborhood was split on the topic. In a survey she conducted, 48% of respondents opposed Flock cameras and 43% supported them, she said.
Santana described torn feelings of her own. She said she wanted to address crime in her neighborhood, but didn’t trust that President Donald Trump’s administration would not be able to access the data.
“My vote today is really not against public safety,” she said. “I’ve been here eight years and have provided every tool and voted for every tool to support the Public Safety Department. “But I am just not comfortable to saying yes to Flock at this time.”
Santana, Nikki Hudson, Tanmay Shah, Kris Harsh, Stephanie Howse-Jones and Austin Davis voted against the Flock extension.
Council President Blaine Griffin and members Michael Polensek, Kevin Conwell, Kevin Bishop, Richard Starr, Brian Kazy, Charles Slife, Joe Jones and Deborah Gray voted in favor.
Questions over data sharing
Flock has said that local law enforcement customers themselves can decide whether to share their data with federal agencies.
Cleveland began blocking immigration-related searches in November, Police Chief Dorothy Todd said. Last month, the city limited access to its Flock database even further, allowing only Cleveland police and the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center to tap into the data.
Northeast Ohio’s fusion center is one of dozens of such law enforcement partnerships around the country. On its website, it describes itself as working on “information sharing among Federal, State and local stakeholders, and the public and private sectors.”
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s website, “fusion centers provide the federal government with critical state and local information and subject matter expertise that it did not receive in the past.”
Assistant Public Safety Director Michael Herb said during Wednesday’s committee hearing that the fusion center fields information requests from law enforcement in a six-county area. The center is locally owned and staffed by analysts from Cleveland police, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office and the county’s public safety department, he said.
Herb also said that outside agencies can’t log in to Cleveland’s Flock data through the fusion center and would have to make a formal request to access it.
Council amended the legislation on Wednesday to shut off the fusion center’s access to Cleveland’s Flock data.
Data centers paused — but not for long
Cleveland will briefly try to hold off the boom in AI data centers, which appears to be just reaching Northeast Ohio area after taking hold in the broader Columbus area.
Council whittled the moratorium down from its original proposal of nearly a year. Now the pause on data centers will last for three months. Council has the option to extend the moratorium for three months more.
While the moratorium is in effect, city staff plan to draft data center regulations. Those would go to council by the fall, Utilities Committee Chairman Brian Kazy has said.
“We have a very robust group of people that we’re talking to, including developers, including labor, pro-data center people, anti-data center people,” Kazy said on Wednesday. “We’re not excluding anybody, including just random emails that I’m getting from people, we’re just forwarding them on.”
The delay is meant to apply only to standalone data centers, not in-house centers that companies may maintain for their own use.
Data centers, which can require large amounts of electricity, are unpopular with the general public. But they have their supporters among the Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council, which packed a committee hearing on the moratorium in June.
Cleveland rejected a permit application for a proposed 150-megawatt data center in Slavic Village earlier this year.
