Twinsburg Police Defend Flock Cameras After Armed Carjacking Case

Our Take

Here's the pattern that keeps repeating in city council chambers across the country: police roll out the one dramatic case that justifies the system, and the actual oversight conversation happens years after the cameras are already bolted to the poles. Twinsburg is a textbook example. Fourteen Flock cameras have been running in the city for over a year, and only now — 15 months after the contract was signed — is council finally asking questions about how it works and who can access the data. Credit to Jabbering With Julie and Northeast Ohio News for actually capturing that disconnect on camera, because it's rarely this visible.

The carjacking case is real and the sentence is real, and nobody disputes that. But one successful identification doesn't tell you anything about the other 364 days a year these cameras are logging the movements of everyone who drives past a Sheetz, a church, or a kid's school. That's the trade being made quietly in city after city: a permanent, searchable record of residents' travel patterns, justified retroactively by whichever case makes the best council-meeting anecdote. The contract review happening now in Twinsburg is exactly the kind of scrutiny that should have come before the cameras went up, not 15 months into a surveillance program already baked into daily policing.

If you want to know whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if your town is still in the 'contract signed, nobody's asking questions' phase, our take-action page has the tools to change that before it's too late.