Cleveland is considering extending its contract with Flock Safety, a company that provides license plate readers to help solve crimes. The city has been using Flock’s technology for several years, but some residents are pushing back against the use of the license plate readers, citing concerns about immigration-related searches and other potential abuses of the technology.
Background
In 2024, Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration briefly established a police technology advisory committee, but it was quietly dissolved after only a couple of private meetings. The city has shared little evidence on how often Cleveland police have used license plate readers to solve crimes, providing only two examples of homicides from 2024.
According to Flock, its license plate readers help solve hundreds of thousands of crimes every year. However, the city has not provided data showing the effectiveness of the technology. On June 17, Cleveland’s Department of Public Safety will ask a City Council committee to approve an extension of the city’s $250,000-a-year contract with Flock, which expires at the end of June.
How License Plate Readers Work
License plate readers are cameras that capture images of every passing vehicle. Those images are transmitted via cellular networks to a database and stored for 30 days. Law enforcement agencies can share access to their databases with each other. Flock says that its cameras are used in more than 6,000 communities across the country.
A recent analysis of nearly 8 million searches of Cleveland’s camera network found that many were for identical or nearly identical search ranges and reasons. Of those, 14% came from departments in Ohio, and about 80,000 — roughly 1% — were made by Cleveland police.
The Flock system requires searchers to select an offense type from a dropdown menu and gives them the option of filling in a reason. Police from across the country most frequently said their searches were related to drugs, closely followed by motor vehicle theft. Cleveland police searches were most often related to motor vehicle theft, followed by weapons offenses.
Original reporting: Signal Cleveland — read the source article.
