Shaker Heights Flock License Plate Controversy

Shaker Heights has changed what searches can me made of its Flock license plate readers after activists revealed outside agencies had made hundreds of lookups tied to immigration.

From December 2025 through April 2026, hundreds of thousands of searches were made of Shaker Heights’ Flock data. While the vast majority of lookups were for serious crimes, 273 were made citing “immigration,” and 130 for “civil/administrative” reasons.

“These are not criminal issues,” Caitlin Johnson, a member of Shake Off Flock, told Scene. “So, if they’re doing searches on behalf of ICE? I mean, we’re criminalizing something that never really should’ve been anyway.”

She added, “We don’t even know what these searches are actually for.”

Surveillance and data concerns have grown as Flock, an industry leader in camera and license plate reader technology, has come to cover wide swaths of the country with some 5,000 contracts with law enforcement agencies.

Besides allegedly using the tech to track abortion patients, cops have used Flock to “stalk and harass” neighbors in suburban Georgia, track exes and their new boyfriends in Kansas, and keep tabs on girlfriends in Milwaukee. Activists have also raised concerns about data sharing with ICE.

Experts have often pointed to Flock’s policy as why this is happened: to gain access to Flock’s National Lookup Tool, departments have to grant access to their city’s own cameras and readers. They can control what sort of searches are made and by what agencies, though many are unaware they have opted into searches and guardrails are weak: vague reasons for searches, including “suspicious,” are often provided with no elaborating details.

Which is part of the reason why, until last week, any department in the country could run plates through Shaker’s 18 active cameras for pretty much any reason. Records show hundreds of thousands of searches with a variety of explanations: “aggravated rob,” “suspect,” “invest,” “stolen,” and “suspicious vehicle” to name a few. Three searches by Cleveland police were even tied to the recent No Kings protests.

Among general worries, activists said Shaker Heights, by city policy, isn’t supposed to be enforcing any civil immigration law. Meaning any immigration or ICE searches of its Flock data should not have been permitted.

The city agreed in a statement to Scene.

“Shaker Heights Police do not proactively investigate immigration-related matters,” a spokesperson for the city wrote, “and will only engage when a federal court order has been issued related to a criminal matter for a person of interest.”

The hundreds of immigration-related searches were against policy, the spokesperson admitted, despite those searches being a “small percentage” of the overall use by outside agencies.

“Shaker Heights will not permit any jurisdictions accessing [our] data to conduct these searches going forward,” the spokesperson said, adding outside agencies will have to acknowledge the change before conducting any future lookups.

Shake Off Flock’s investigating begs the question of how many other police departments throughout Ohio are sharing non-criminal immigration data with agents or officers outside their own departments.

In April, Cleveland Heights underwent a similar crackdown on Flock data usage after residents lodged complaints. As did activists for Flock No, who harangued Cleveland for renewing its contract with Flock without clearly consulting with City Council. (Cleveland has defended its use after Dayton recently cancelled its contract with Flock.)

Shake Off Flock doesn’t think Shaker Heights did enough, however.

“Banning the word ‘immigration’ as a search term doesn’t make Shaker residents safer — it just obscures the problem,” the organization said in a statement. “Their platform still doesn’t require users to say why they’re searching a plate — we have no idea whether the thousands of vague searches in our audit logs are tracking immigrants or activists. The only way to truly protect our community is to cancel the contract.”