Local Politics: A rundown of what the Flock is going on

July has been a busy month for Columbus as it wrestles with public response to its growing surveillance dragnet. The Columbus police department spent the month conducting an audit of three years of data from Flock, the automatic license plate reading camera system deployed across the city to help track cars potentially involved in crimes. 

There has been extensive nationwide criticism of Flock in the past year for its role in federal immigration enforcement, its broad lack of transparency and accountability, and the general growth of the national surveillance state. Dayton terminated its Flock contract in response to public outcry, and Kent rejected a Flock contract outright. 

On Aug. 10, the Columbus City Council will hold a hearing on Flock specifically with the goal of getting feedback from the public before it decides how to move forward. So, if you need a refresher on everything that has gone down this summer, let’s start from the beginning. 

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

In June, amid growing concerns by anti-Flock activists that Columbus’ cameras could be used by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, CPD said it limited nationwide access to its Flock data. The problem with data sharing is that other organizations that CPD may have one-to-one data agreements with are not bound by that executive order and may have data agreements with ICE that would allow it to back-door its way into Columbus’ data.

For that reason, City Council member Emmanuel Remy also requested that the department conduct an audit of its Flock query history to “see what information had been taken by other agencies.” Remy asked the department to come up with formal policies for Flock usage, which will also be investigated at the August hearing.

In mid-July, that audit 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. Interestingly, none of those searches came directly from ICE. 

But that isn’t to say that ICE is completely ruled out. U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security that operates under ICE, collectively made 3,962 searches on the network, 657 of which were potentially immigration related. Additionally, 608 possibly immigration-related searches were made by 287(g) agencies, a designation that allows local law enforcement to act as federal immigration personnel and execute immigration enforcement tasks.

WOSU reported in June that CPD had data sharing agreements at the time with four 287(g) agencies.

The audit also found, according to an executive summary shared with Matter News and first reported by The Columbus Dispatch, that of the total 15,577 immigration searches, 20 were searches by actual CPD personnel.

“All but 6 of those instances involve general assistance to Homeland Security Investigations,” the department stated in a footnote to an executive summary about the audit obtained by Matter News. “The remaining 6 records are from a single instance in February 2025 where an officer searched for a vehicle with “ICE” as the stated reason. Further inquiry pending.”

In its reporting, The Dispatch chose to withhold the officer’s name as they had not been formally accused of wrongdoing; a CPD spokesperson told Matter News on Tuesday that the officer’s name had not been publicly released.

In response to the ICE-related concerns raised by the audit, Ginther also ordered CPD to stop statewide sharing of its Flock data in July.

Columbus’ current Flock contract runs through November of this year, and council member Remy is hopeful that the August hearing will provide some clarity as to how to move forward amid these concerns.

“My team and I are still evaluating [what] we’ve learned from the audit and what better safeguards we need in place,” Remy said. “We can’t fully do that without hearing from the public at that hearing.”

On Friday, Columbus police launched a Flock transparency portal that lists some department policies on the usage of the technology as well as some usage statistics. The stated goal of the portal is to “ensure proper usage and guardrails are in place.”

The portal includes a full list of the agencies with which CPD shares data. There are 346 departments it maintains one-to-one data sharing with, as well as 77 it exclusively gives data to, and 138 from which it exclusively gets data. Of the four 287(g) agencies previously reported, none appear to receive data from CPD, and two continue to share their data. 

CPD Deputy Chief Tim Myers told the City Council in June that Columbus was actively operating 48 Flock cameras, with the permitting or installation of 28 more in progress, but that the total network extended to more than 600 available cameras. The portal, as well as the executive summary, continue to list success stories where this network has benefited local law enforcement in solving local crimes and finding missing persons. (The audit even showed that Deputy Chief Myers had been tracking ICE agents and their movements using Flock during an immigration detention spree in December called “Operation Buckeye.”)

Remy told Matter News that those uses should not be understated. 

“As I’ve said public[ly] before, I firmly believe Flock and other innovated technologies can help keep Columbus safe, but there must be safeguards in place,” Remy wrote. “Especially after what we’ve learned from the audit. We know Flock saves lives, returns missing children home and solves murders. But every citizen deserves to have their rights protected by the very same technology the City pays for to protect them from harm. If we can’t ensure that, then we can’t ensure the city will use the technology.”