The City of Cleveland wants to keep using a network of cameras across the city to monitor drivers’ license plates amid increased scrutiny from some Cleveland City Council members, the public and privacy advocates.
Cleveland Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond will testify Wednesday before a council committee about why the city should renew its soon-to-expire, $250,000 contract with Flock Safety, which makes the cameras and software the city relies on to track license plates.
Drummond’s presentation comes amid heightened local and national attention on license plate readers, which capture images of all vehicles crossing their paths and store them in searchable databases that law enforcement agencies can share with each other.
Activists in Shaker Heights recently revealed that other agencies had conducted almost 300 immigration-related searches of that city’s database in three months earlier this year.
Dayton recently suspended its use of license plate readers after discovering “egregious violations of policy,” including more than 7,000 immigration-related searches. Dozens of other cities have cancelled or not renewed their contracts, according to NPR, amid a variety of privacy, security and misuse concerns.
Members of Flock No CLE will be at Cleveland’s Safety Committee hearing Wednesday when Drummond testifies, said member Bryn Adams. The group, which formed last year to oppose a proposed expansion of the city’s contract with Flock Safety, last week started circulating an open letter calling on the city to “bring Cleveland residents into the conversation about the tools and technologies being used in our name.”
“We are told that Flock is an indispensable tool for solving crime,” the letter states, “but the reality is, functioning democracies don’t use dragnets to collect information indiscriminately on their residents.”
Cleveland images searched for immigration cases
Cleveland has 100 license plate readers in high-traffic areas across the city.
That makes Cleveland one of more than 5,000 communities across the country using the cameras, generating more than 20 billion images per month, according to Flock Safety. The system uses machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) to alert police when a camera detects a vehicle that’s been added to a “hot list” because it was reported stolen or its driver may be connected to a crime.
Officers can also search databases based on plate numbers or descriptions of vehicles (make and model, color, body damage, even bumper stickers). Flock Safety says, and Cleveland police confirm, that all images are purged from the database after 30 days, unless they’re part of an investigation.
The system’s software settings give police departments control over sharing access to their databases. But they must share theirs in order to search others’ images. And they do that a lot.
Earlier this month, in response to records requests from Signal Cleveland, the city released a few months’ worth of audit logs showing who accessed Cleveland’s image database, when and for what reason. The logs showed more information than the stripped-down version that the city provided to city council in February.
The overwhelming majority of searches were conducted by other law enforcement agencies, as close as Cleveland Heights and as far away as California. The Houston and Dallas police departments and California Highway Patrol were by far the biggest users of Cleveland’s database. Each searched it tens of thousands of times, many times more than even Cleveland officers did.
The logs showed almost 250 searches from outside Cleveland that involved the words immigration, ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security or customs. It’s impossible to tell from the records if these searches were initiated on behalf of federal immigration officers, a practice first reported last year by technology news web site 404 Media.
Drugs, stolen vehicles and fugitives were the most commonly stated reasons for searches of Cleveland’s data base. More than 60,000 were labeled simply “other.”
Are license plate readers helping Cleveland police solve crimes?
The most common reasons cited by Cleveland police for a search were motor vehicle theft, weapons offenses and robbery. “Other” was eighth, stated in around 1,200 searches.
The logs from Shaker Heights show that, on March 28, Cleveland police ran three searches of that city’s database labeled “other – No Kings protest.” A spokesperson for the Cleveland Department of Public Safety told Signal Cleveland that officers conducted the search “after observing two vehicles engaging in suspicious behavior by circling the No Kings protest occurring downtown.”
Signal Cleveland sent Cleveland several questions about how it monitors internal and external searches and what steps, if any, it has taken to prevent or respond to misuse. The answer to all of them was the same: “This information will be addressed publicly at Wednesday’s Safety Committee hearing.”
The city has been cagey with information about how useful license plate readers are to solving crimes. Earlier this year, it gave Signal Cleveland two examples, both homicides from 2024. Last week, it did not respond to a question about data showing effectiveness.
