Thank you to members of the Cleveland City Council Safety Committee for the opportunity to provide public comment on proposed ordinance 683-2026. My name is Sean McCann, and in addition to living on the near west side in Ward 7, I serve as policy strategist for the ACLU of Ohio. We have been proud to call our office in Midtown (Ward 5) home for a few decades now. I urge you to reject the city’s proposed new contract with Flock Safety.
Since its founding in 2017, this very well-financed and aggressively marketed corporation has been able to sign contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and other entities across the country, per recent estimates. Meanwhile, estimates place the number of active Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) at more than 100,000, though the actual figure certainly is higher.
Flock has constructed a nationwide mass surveillance network of ALPRs in just nine years of operation. This is remarkable and should give all of us serious pause. It is important to understand that we are not just talking about Cleveland’s 100 cameras operating in isolation and being used by Cleveland Police. Cleveland’s cameras are connected to all of Flock’s ALPRs, because nationwide data-sharing is turned on by default in a Flock contract. That easily overlooked setting allows for any Flock customer to conduct a search of another Flock customer’s data.
Advocates in Shaker Heights, for example, found that other Ohio agencies and out of state agencies conducted 273 searches of Shaker Heights’ Flock camera data specifically for immigration enforcement and protest surveillance purposes. Advocates in Cleveland Heights have uncovered a very similar pattern of searches. A number of out of state agencies—the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, for example—have what are known as 287g agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which means that they are authorized to carry out immigration enforcement actions on ICE’s behalf. Months after these searches were conducted and only after sustained grassroots advocacy, both Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights disabled nationwide data-sharing. City officials in Dayton, meanwhile, decided to suspend use of their cameras
entirely.
As members likely know, additional reporting from Cleveland.com revealed that a month’s worth of Cleveland’s data was subject to the same searches because of the city’s enrollment in Flock’s Drones as First Responders program, amid what the city described as a temporary Flock error in including the drones in its nationwide search network.
This is why Flock’s attempted assurances that they do not collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security are hollow—scores of agencies with Flock contracts are coordinating with the federal government in some capacity. For that matter, those agencies who do not coordinate with the federal government still should not have free rein to access Cleveland’s data.
Further, the city’s decision to opt in to Flock’s filter for the immigration search term has been mentioned frequently as a safeguard. However, it bears noting that this filter only prevents searches of Cleveland’s data that specifically were marked with the keyword “immigration.” Other Flock users can and do use other vague search terms (for example, simply the word “other”) to get around this purported “filter.” Our first and most urgent recommendation is that the city reject this ordinance and discontinue contracting with Flock entirely. However, if the contract is renewed, we urge the city to opt out of nationwide data-sharing. Officials from the Cleveland Division of Police confirmed we are opted into this setting at Safety Committee’s June 17 meeting. We have seen time and again the privacy risks this vast, shadowy surveillance network poses.
In addition, Cleveland must create a more robust data retention policy ensuring that any captured plate data is destroyed within 48 hours. Data retention policies in other cities and states vary. New Hampshire, for example, requires three minutes of data retention. CDP’s presentation indicates that the city currently retains data for up to 30 days. That is an unacceptable window. The longer the data is retained, the greater the privacy risk.
We are very sympathetic to the serious responsibility you all hold, as Cleveland’s elected leaders, to protect public safety and the massive challenges that responsibility poses. Fundamentally, though, companies like Flock are asking Clevelanders (and millions of Americans) to sacrifice any shred of personal privacy we have in exchange for a false promise of enhanced public safety.
Flock has and surely will continue to give you all sorts of assurances that they are balancing public safety and our civil liberties. The simple fact of the matter, though, is that they have created perhaps the largest and most sophisticated surveillance network in modern history. No government, and no private corporation for that matter, can be trusted with that immense power. No safeguards effectively can check that power in a system such as this.
Thank you again for this opportunity, and I am happy to address any questions members may have.
