How Flock cameras are used in Cleveland
The short version: Cleveland.com's local news segment pulls back the curtain on how Cleveland police are deploying Flock Safety ALPR cameras across the city.
Our Take
Credit to cleveland.com for doing what local newsrooms should be doing more of: pointing a camera at the cameras. When a city rolls out a network of automated license plate readers, residents deserve to see how it actually works in practice, not just the press release version police departments and Flock Safety like to hand out.
What we keep coming back to on stories like this one is the gap between "we're only tracking stolen cars and wanted plates" and the reality that every plate, on every car, gets logged, timestamped, and stored, regardless of whether the driver has ever done anything wrong. That data doesn't just vanish after a case closes. It sits in a database that can be queried, shared with other agencies, or swept up in a breach, and the public rarely gets a clear accounting of who's looking at it and why.
If you live in or around Cleveland, check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your own city council meetings, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of cleveland.com, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.