A 3–1 committee vote should have buried it. On June 17, Cleveland’s Public Safety Committee rejected renewal of the city’s $250,000 contract with Flock Safety, the company behind roughly 100 license plate reader cameras scanning vehicles across the city. The contract expires June 29. Dead deal, right? Not quite. Council leadership revived it for a second hearing before a July 15 full council vote — and this time, a county prosecutor and a sitting judge are doing the lobbying directly.
Law Enforcement Brings the Heavy Artillery
The case for keeping the cameras now rests on a Christmas Day murder, a stolen truck, and letters sent to every council member.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mike O’Malley calls the cameras “invaluable,” according to Axios Cleveland. His headline case: the Christmas Day 2021 killing of Chris Vo. Two men later convicted drove a stolen truck into Lakewood, where an ALPR flagged the vehicle. Officers found guns, drugs, and a notebook containing Vo’s personal information — evidence that helped build the prosecution.
Judge David Matia sent letters to every council member comparing removing ALPRs to banning DNA technology. He dismissed opposition group Flock No as “a very vocal minority with a catchy slogan that is going to do great harm to community safety,” according to Signal Cleveland. O’Malley added that if council dislikes Flock specifically, officials should “get off your asses and establish their own home security systems,” per Axios Cleveland.
Since the committee rejection, Council President Blaine Griffin and Councilman Mike Polensek — the lone yes vote — have floated a compromise: let each of Cleveland’s 15 council members decide whether cameras operate in their ward. Polensek himself called the administration’s original pitch “lackluster,” suggesting sharper data might have prevented the initial rejection entirely.
The Receipts Critics Want to See
Audit logs revealing immigration searches and thousands of vaguely labeled queries are fueling demands for real evidence, not anecdotes.
Flock No wants deliberations “rigorous and grounded in empirical evidence — and not vibes based,” per their public statement on Action Network. That demand lands harder given what audits already revealed:
- More than 160 immigration-related searches over 30 days — which the city dismissed as a “data fluke”
- Thousands of monthly searches vaguely labeled “other-investigation”, according to Cleveland.com reporting cited by Signal Cleveland
At the committee level, Councilman Tanmay Shah flipped Judge Matia’s DNA analogy entirely, telling Signal Cleveland that Flock resembles “technology that was collecting DNA evidence on every single resident and storing it in a database run by a private company.” Flock No, meanwhile, dismissed the ward-by-ward proposal as “a pretty haphazard approach to policy making.”
The next committee hearing arrives before July 15. What Cleveland decides will signal whether mid-sized cities can meaningfully govern surveillance vendor contracts — or whether law enforcement pressure and ticking contract deadlines consistently overwhelm resident opposition before the deliberation even gets started.
