After eight hours of total deliberation and a mass of public scrutiny, Cleveland City Council made the 11th hour decision to keep the city’s 100 Flock Safety license plate readers recording in a 9-6 vote on Wednesday night.
That vote followed yet another marathon debate earlier that day, when the pros and cons of Flock—as a worthy police tool or tool of mass surveillance—were juggled against Public Safety’s own insistence Flock’s cameras were more of the former than the latter.
But Public Safety’s version ultimately won out on Wednesday, weeks after the city’s Flock contract went null. Council members Jasmin Santana, Nikki Hudson, Tanmay Shah, Kris Harsh and Stephanie Howse-Jones and Austin Davis were the six who voted no.
Flock, therefore, is here to stay. For now.
As worried about on Wednesday, through clear fatigue and further skepticism, is how exactly Public Safety will hold true on its vowed stopgaps and safeguards to convince Council and Clevelanders that misuse of the city’s 100 Flock cameras will be cut completely.
All while agents for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement continue to get a heinous rap. Just this week, Columbian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo were shot and killed in their cars during apparent stops for immigration-related searches. That’s 10 fatalities at the hand of ICE under Trump.
“What ICE is doing is deplorable and horrible; they’re the President’s federal hit squad,” Council President Blaine Griffin said on Wednesday. “All major cities are dealing with this kind of struggle. So, how do we make sure we protect people’s civil liberties?”
“I think we have to protect our citizens,” he added. “But we also have to protect our citizens.”
Reports that ICE agents were using Flock’s National Lookup tool, which gives access to tens of thousands of license plate readers, have fueled activist groups around the country urging city councils to scrap their relationship with Flock Safety, including groups in Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights and here in Cleveland.
Cleveland’s Flock cameras were accessed 2,000 times last year for ICE and immigration-related searches, Cleveland.com reported earlier this month. Cleveland police cut off ICE access and immigration inquiries in November, Chief Dorothy Todd reminded Council on Wednesday, and imposed audit tools that would bring to light misbehaving agents or officers. (Such as those, perhaps, stalking exes or aiding ICE.)
Todd and Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond hammered this point, all while urging Council see Flock’s 100 cameras as necessary to continue the city’s solve rate for violent crimes. Twenty-five of 53 murder cases in Cleveland this year involved Flock “in some capacity during those investigations,” Todd said.
“A lot of times the city cameras capture part of what happens,” she said. “It’s everything together that builds your case and makes for a successful prosecution.”
But Todd and Drummond’s team could not escape Council frustration, especially from those who gave no votes later that night.
And frustration that seemed to pain members of Council who found out that day that agents within the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center, a coalition of the region’s crime fighters, were able to gain warrant-less access to Cleveland’s cameras and their data (despite Todd’s insistence that out-of-department look-sees were disallowed last November).
Could the Fusion Center be on that no-access list?
Sure, Todd said.
“I don’t want anyone to think that we are trying to be hide something,” she added. “But we have no problem shutting off that access.”
Ward 13 Councilman Brian Kazy interjected. “See? This is just another example of how messed up the whole Flock system is with their sharing of data,” he said. “And it’s extremely aggravating.”
Those especially peeved seemed to be the council members stuck between two types of constituents: those who called on them to keep their ward as safe as possible and those who wanted Flock out of their neighborhoods at whatever cost.
That was the case for Ward 14 Councilwoman Jasmin Santana. Santana, who started a door-knocking safety campaign after her daughter was held up at gunpoint, surveyed her residents on the Flock issue. Forty-eight percent wanted Flock gone. Forty-three percent wanted them to stick around.
“It’s been a 50-50, back-and-forth debate in our neighborhood,” Santana shared. “What I realized is that people are not opposing the LPRs, right? Or cameras. It’s the fear of our data being shared.”
Todd then reminded Santana of when CPD shut off Cleveland’s cameras to the rest of the country.
But “it was an option before,” Santana said. “Because of social media, the news, people do not trust Flock. It’s not about public safety: they don’t trust Flock and they don’t trust what could happen with our data.”
Flock communications director Joshua Thomas said in a heated City Club talk last week that cities ultimately decide who has access to the almost immeasurable amount of license plate data—that is, people’s whereabouts. But Thomas seemed to skirt around the issue that rogue officers could mask their intentions when combing through the data of unsuspecting American citizens.
The city’s renewed contract with Flock expires on December 26. That gives City Council and Mayor Bibb (the person who urged the city to renew its contract with Flock) six months to decide to trust and keep Flock as a vendor or seek out other operators of LPRs more worthy of the public faith.
In the meantime, Cleveland’s officers will have direct, on-demand access (without permission from the courts) to the location of any Clevelander with a car and a license plate. Or a distinctive roof, bumper sticker and/or vehicle color.
Access that will likely continue to rile up anti-Flock activists and those on Council who support them. Those who feel public data should not be collected or filtered by private companies.
“It’s a candy box in a school playground and Flock is the one holding it,” Ward 12 Councilman Tanmay Shah said on Wednesday. “And they have no incentive to prevent access to this data—that is how they make money.”
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