Anti-Flock Safety group protests against CMSD's $600k contract with the LPR camera company Saturday

Our Take

Credit to WKYC Channel 3 for covering the Flock No Cleveland protest outside CMSD schools — this is exactly the kind of local accountability reporting that surveillance expansion rarely gets. A $600,000 contract for license plate readers around schools should raise questions no matter how it's marketed: who sees the data, how long it's stored, which agencies get access, and whether a school district is the right entity to be running a surveillance dragnet in the first place.

School districts love to frame these deals as "child safety" measures, but ALPR networks don't just watch for threats — they log every car that passes, building a movement history on every parent, teacher, and student's family regardless of suspicion. That data has a well-documented habit of leaking into immigration enforcement, out-of-state abortion investigations, and other uses well beyond the original pitch. Once a district signs a six-figure, multi-year contract, there's little incentive to revisit the privacy tradeoffs later — the sunk cost does the lobbying for Flock.

Organized pushback like this is how these contracts actually get reconsidered, so it's worth watching how CMSD responds. If you want to see whether Flock cameras are already running near your own neighborhood or school, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a protest to get organized, our take-action page has steps for raising this with your own school board or city council.