Columbus City Council meets to discuss Flock amid rising public scrutiny

Ahead of today’s City Council hearing scheduled to discuss Columbus’ use of Flock Safety automated license plate readers, the Safety Not Surveillance Coalition released a statement calling on the city to cancel all of its contracts with the company and to immediately cover all of the cameras and have them dismantled and taken down as soon as possible.

“We want people to be aware that the cameras do not solely target suspected criminal activity. … They collect data on every single vehicle that passes, including license plate numbers, timestamps, locations, and even distinguishing features such as bumper stickers or dents,” said Ava Borromeo of People’s Justice Project when interviewed by Matter News in June. (PJP is joined in the Safety Not Surveillance Coalition by the likes of Equality Ohio, DeFlock Upper Arlington, and 614 ICE Watch, among others.) “And we also want to emphasize the fact that Flock aids in the aggressive anti-immigration agenda that the Trump administration has continued to push.”

Since 2017, Columbus police officers have been barred from assisting in immigration enforcement owing to an executive order signed by Mayor Andrew Ginther that opposes “any effort to require the use of local taxpayer resources for the enforcement of federal immigration policy.” 

But a mid-July audit requested by City Council found that out of about 19.6 million searches conducted over a three-year period, a total of 15,577 potentially immigration-related searches had been made within CPD’s network, including external agencies that the department had one-to-one data sharing agreements with at the time. 

The audit results surfaced at a time when Columbus police and other departments nationwide are under increased scrutiny over their use of Flock cameras, with The Washington Post reporting this month that at least 50 law-enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of misusing the system, including instances of stalking. In Columbus, meanwhile, one officer used Flock to investigate a personal vehicle crash against department policy, the inspector general found. (Columbus police are currently reviewing the inspector general’s findings.) And in Reynoldsburg, two officers resigned amid an investigation into their alleged misuse of the Flock system.

Police have also been accused of using the technology to surveil protesters and to track women seeking abortions, with authorities in Texas conducting a search of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide in seeking a woman who they said had an abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Illinois and Washington.

“And so, the surveillance state just becomes more and more dangerous,” said Paul Shannon of DeFlock Upper Arlington, who added that he was drawn into anti-Flock activism in part by this type of state overreach, citing as one example the woman tracked across state lines by Texas authorities for having an abortion, a case that took on increased complexity in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court decision enabling states to criminalize abortion. “It just feels like we’re on the precipice of something more dangerous here.”

Gary Daniels of ACLU of Ohio echoed these points in a June interview, saying that when it comes to government surveillance, there are few instances when the parties involved embrace restraint. “Once there’s a foot in the door, rarely does anyone say, “Okay, we’re good here. We’re going to stop. It’s only for the purposes we told you about,’” Daniels said.  “No, it’s always that slippery slope that continues to be used for more things, different things. … I mean, it wasn’t long after some law enforcement agencies started adopting drones several years back … that these drone companies were like, ‘You want weapons on these? We can put weapons on them.’ So, we know where all this is heading [with Flock Safety cameras], with facial recognition technology and things of that nature.”

Even so, Columbus City Council member Emmanual Remy expressed a wait-and-see approach in a July interview ahead of the Flock audit release, framing the information requested by council, including the potential legal repercussions for terminating the city’s contract with Flock, which runs through Dec. 25, as part of a wider information-gathering process. “I don’t know that there’s been any serious discussion about pulling out of the [Flock] contract,” Remy said at the time, going on to share concerns expressed to him by CPD leadership and chief Elaine Bryant were police to lose access to the Flock cameras contracted in late 2024 for $228,000 and funded by a State of Ohio grant. (Flytown News recently published a fuller breakdown of Columbus City Council’s contractual dealings with Flock.)

In response to the growing public scrutiny, Columbus police launched an online Flock “transparency portal” in July, reporting the number of unique vehicle license plates read over the previous 30 days (927,279 as of publication), the total number of Flock searches conducted in that same timespan (5,080), and select CPD “success stories.”

However, Shannon of DeFlock Upper Arlington said that there are aspects of the data presented in the CPD portal that don’t capture the full nature of the city’s deal with Flock, including the site’s claim that the collected data is only kept for 30 days.

“When they talk about this 30-day retention period, that really ignores the contracts, which describe an irrevocable, universal license for Flock to feed the aggregated data into their machine-automated-learning products,” Shannon said. “So, the footage might be gone after 30 days, but the contracts state pretty explicitly that Flock gets to keep the aggregated data to do all sorts of AI stuff with it. … And I’m not sure City Council quite grasps the whole metadata, AI-training ecosystem of this.”

Shannon also recently helped to launch a website designed to make the Flock audit logs more accessible to the general public, extrapolating reams of data and presenting it in more easily digested form. The site breaks down, for instance, the reasons most often cited by Columbus police for accessing the Flock system, in addition to instances of immigration-related searches.

In combing through the data, Shannon said he was initially most interested in how police utilized the “reason” tab, particularly in those earlier data sets when this remained an open-source field. (He said it was changed to a drop-down menu selection in mid-December at the height of Operation Buckeye.) “And with the open-source, we could at least see which agencies gave a crap about providing a valid reason,” Shannon said. “With the drop-down menu, we get less of that insight into their psyche.”

Having never previously engaged in activism, Shannon described the formation of DeFlock Upper Arlington in halting terms, sharing how he first created a website, deflockua.org, and then posted about it to Reddit. “And within a couple of minutes, this fellow, Chris, reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I’m also concerned about this.’ And so, all of a sudden there were two of us, and we had a group,” said Shannon, who shared that he was compelled to act when he noticed a couple of Flock cameras being installed a couple blocks from his Upper Arlington home. “And once you notice them in one place, you kind of start seeing them everywhere, and that gets agitating.”

Shannon compared the usage of Flock cameras with having a neighbor who writes down everything they see you do, including walk the dog and bring in the groceries. “And there might not be anything interesting in there, but there’s nothing to stop them from … walking to the police and turning that journal in,” he said. “And that’s basically what Flock is doing; they’re journaling everything they see and then giving it to the police.”