Cleveland City Council and police officials talk Flock Safety cameras

Our Take

There's something telling about a police commander's advice on mass surveillance: go dig through committee meeting footage and form your own opinion. That's not transparency, that's homework assigned to the public because officials would rather not make the case themselves in plain language, on the record, in a format anyone can actually find. If Flock Safety's ALPR network is as safe and effective as departments claim, that case should be easy to make in a press release, not buried in hours of Safety Committee video.

Cleveland is hardly alone here. City councils across the country are quietly approving or renewing Flock contracts with minimal public debate, treating license plate readers as a routine procurement item rather than what they are — a permanent, searchable log of where residents drive, when, and how often. That data doesn't stay local either; Flock's network sharing means Cleveland's cameras can feed into lookups from agencies well outside city limits, often with little public accounting of who's pulling records and why.

Signal Cleveland deserves credit for keeping a camera on this process at all, since most local outlets don't bother. Residents who want to see how many Flock cameras are already watching their neighborhood — in Cleveland or anywhere else — can check our camera map, and if you think your council should be doing more than pointing constituents to meeting archives, our take-action guide has concrete steps for pushing back before the next contract renewal.