Cleveland ended its Flock contract. The cameras are still on.

Our Take

More Perfect Union's reporting on Cleveland lays bare the core problem with ALPR surveillance: once the hardware is bolted to a pole, a city council vote doesn't actually turn it off. A 3-1 decision against renewal should have meant the cameras went dark on June 17. Instead, by the reporting here, Flock's gear kept humming along, quietly logging plates with no contract, no oversight, and presumably no clear legal basis for retaining or sharing that data.

This is exactly the accountability gap we track at DeFlock The USA. Vendors like Flock build business models around making their systems sticky — embedded in regional data-sharing networks, tied into other departments' feeds, and apparently resistant to simple off-switches even when the paying customer says no. If a city council vote isn't enough to stop surveillance, residents need to ask who's actually in control: the public, or the contractor.

Credit to More Perfect Union for digging into what happens after the vote, which is often where these stories get buried. If you want to see whether Flock cameras are watching your neighborhood, check our map, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action guide walks through how to organize before your own city signs — or fails to cancel — one of these contracts.