Penalties for misusing Flock cameras?

Our Take

Credit to News 5 Cleveland for getting Attorney General Andy Wilson and the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio on record agreeing with what privacy advocates have said for years: Flock cameras get misused, and right now there's basically nothing stopping it. When the top cop in the state and the union representing rank-and-file officers both say "we need penalties for this," that's not a fringe concern — it's an admission that the honor system around these cameras has already failed.

But penalties after the fact are a band-aid, not a fix. Punishing an officer for running an ex's plate or feeding data to ICE doesn't undo the privacy violation, and it does nothing about the thousands of queries nobody ever audits because the logs are thin, the retention policies are vague, and departments mark their own homework. If lawmakers are serious, the conversation can't stop at "misuse penalties" — it has to include real audit trails, public reporting, and limits on who these networks share with in the first place. Otherwise you're just adding a fine on top of a surveillance system that was never properly checked to begin with.

Ohio residents who want to see how many of these cameras are already watching their own streets should check our camera map, and anyone ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in their town should visit our take-action page for next steps.