CLEVELAND — Flock Safety insists it can’t track people, but people fighting to get the technology out of the city of Cleveland and neighboring suburbs aren’t convinced, calling it mass surveillance.
Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel defended the technology after seeing News 5 reports showing community activists at Cleveland City Hall demanding the administration cut ties with the company.
“That data is funneled into massive databases shared across jurisdictions,” Cleveland resident Bishop Chui said.
The administration plans to introduce legislation on June 1 to extend Flock’s contract for one year.
“No, it’s not mass surveillance,” Lewbel said. "...We believe there is a lot of misinformation on how this technology actually works.”
Lewbel says the cameras take point-in-time snapshots of license plates, and the car’s make, model, and color.
“Once that picture is taken, there’s no way to know did that vehicle turn left, did it turn right, did it stop somewhere,” Lewbel said.
News 5 Investigators asked Lewbel if immigration or ICE can tap into the databases.
“No, it’s not possible. ICE, we do not have any contracts with ICE,” Lewbel said.
But what if agencies have a relationship with ICE?
“Again, that would be up to the agency they share with,” Lewbel said.
Lewbel said police departments do not need a warrant to search license plate reader data, as courts have said fixed-location readers do not violate the Fourth Amendment and do not require a warrant.
While Flock said it’s not aiding in mass surveillance, Cleveland audit logs reveal more than a million searches each month by police nationwide, including federal.
Between late December and January, 168 searches referenced immigration or ICE by agencies like the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Memphis Police, and Florida Fish and Wildlife.
The audit log showed similar searches for Shaker Heights cameras that hit thousands of camera networks across the country. Some departments didn’t put a reason for searches, listing “other” thousands of times.
Cleveland banned immigration searches last November.
"There are other filters we put in place, but right now, the big push, the big controversy is about immigration,” Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond said.
Cleveland also confirmed that, along with immigration, police also implemented a reproductive care filter on November 17, 2025, restricting searches of that nature on CDP's network.
The grassroots group Flock No says Flock's tech is fundamentally insecure and prone to abuse.
“ICE uses them regularly regardless of so-called guardrails,” Cleveland Heights resident Sheila Keller said.
Chui says Cleveland City Council has the power to choose how public dollars are spent.
“And that means choosing whether to fund corporations profiting by surveilling the very communities we’re trying to protect,” Chui said.
Flock Safety and the city of Cleveland say the immigration filter was on. The city says the data was a fluke because it was looking at Cleveland’s First Responder Drone, which can’t produce license plate results.
Shaker changed its Flock filters after its immigration search results came out.
Flock partners with more than 400 law enforcement agencies in Ohio, but does not disclose the number of cameras or specific devices used.
