Ginther shares pause in use of CPD's Flock cameras as a result of misuse concerns

Our Take

Credit to WSYX ABC 6 for getting Mayor Andrew Ginther on camera admitting what we've been saying all along: these systems get abused, and the only reason anyone finds out is when the misuse is so blatant it can't be buried. An officer allegedly querying a single plate hundreds of times with no case number attached isn't a glitch in the system — it's the system working exactly as designed, minus the accountability. Flock's whole pitch rests on "it's just for investigations," but there's no technical barrier stopping an officer from running a plate to stalk an ex, dig up dirt on a neighbor, or settle a personal score. The audit logs only matter if someone actually checks them, and in Columbus, apparently nobody did until it had already happened hundreds of times.

A "pause" is not an ending. Departments love to pause a program just long enough for the news cycle to move on, tweak an internal policy nobody enforces, and quietly flip the cameras back on. The real fix isn't a stricter honor system — it's getting rid of networks that make this kind of abuse possible in the first place. Every camera added to a Flock network is another node that can be misused by the next officer who thinks nobody's watching the watchers.

If you want to know whether your city has handed this same capability to its police department, check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you. And if your local officials are still defending these systems after stories like Columbus's, our take-action page has tools to push back before your department becomes the next cautionary headline.