This summer, Cleveland Metropolitan School District officials told Signal Cleveland that only its security officers and Cleveland police could access the data collected by the 201 Flock license plate readers on school properties.
But that wasn’t true. Law enforcement agencies — more than 500 of them — from across the country searched district data more than 130,000 times before the district quietly revoked access in July. The time frame of those searches is still unclear.
District safety officials are now asking the school board members to approve a one-year, $603,000 contract with Flock Safety to keep the system running. During a presentation on Oct. 13, they told the board that new controls were in place and that the services were essential for combating break-ins and car thefts that have plagued district properties over the past year.
“We are paying attention, we are doing our due diligence, to make sure that the data we have remains with us and who we share it with, which is the Cleveland Police Department only,” Chief of Innovation and Student Experience Trent Mosley said at the meeting.
In response to Signal Cleveland questions in June, the district emailed responses from Chief Safety and Security that said only Cleveland police had access to the cameras and data and that the cameras were not available for nationwide search by other agencies in the Flock network. But that was incorrect, Jon Benedict, a spokesperson for the district, wrote following the meeting. At the time, Dodson was working on limiting access to the cameras, Benedict wrote, but that was not finalized until July 6.
CMSD board chair Sara Elaqad requested the audit in April after community members raised concerns about the use of the license plate readers for immigration enforcement. Community members and CMSD teachers raised privacy concerns about the cameras, which record each license plate that passes by.
“There’s a reason we’re looking at this so closely today,” Elaqad said at the meeting. “Frankly, I agree with many of the concerns that have been raised. That’s why I requested the audit of Flock.”
As a part of the presentation, board members learned that 92% of the searches of CMSD data were by non-local law enforcement agencies. Mosley also said that an internal audit showed that none of those searches were for immigration or reproductive rights related reasons.
The district has not released the audit and has denied multiple requests from Signal Cleveland for the same type of search data examined in the audit that Cleveland police have already provided.
Mosley and Dodson also shared how CMSD and Cleveland police are using Flock. From July 7 through Aug. 28, after outside access was turned off, the two agencies searched CMSD Flock data 16,047 times. The vast majority of those were conducted by Cleveland police but CMSD security staff ran 60 of searches of their own. Car-thefts and robberies were some of the top reasons for searches with 41% of all searches falling into one of those two categories. The single most common reason given for a search was “other” with 30% of searches logged in that category.
CMSD Flock cameras cover the parking lots at 62 schools. The district first signed a contract with Flock in the 2023 school year and has renewed it annually since then.
Cleveland has a substantially smaller Flock contract that costs the city $250,000 for 100 license plate readers. At the meeting, Moseley and Dodson said that they asked Flock for a lower price per camera, but the company told them that wasn’t possible.
The district’s current contract expired in mid-July but the company allowed CMSD to continue using the Flock system while the district figured out whether to renew the contract. The district has asked the board to vote on the new contract at its Oct. 27 meeting.
