Cleveland Heights Immigration Activists Worry Recent Resolution Not Enough to Curb Flock Camera Dangers

A recent trove of public records obtained by activists in Cleveland Heights have revealed thousands of searches of the city’s Flock camera data tied to immigration or area protests.

From April 2025 to April 2026, officers from across the country accessed the Heights’ 20 Flock license plate readers, or LPRs, and conducted 1,783 immigration-related queries.

Three-hundred of those searches hailed from Grant County, Indiana; 274 from a department in Crowley, Texas; and 172 from one in Cleveland County, North Carolina, records reviewed by Scene show.

Just 125 of those searches—with reasons ranging from “immigration overstay,” to “Immigration enforcement” or “Wanted subject”—were from Ohio agencies.

“And Cleveland Heights Police Department makes up less than one percent of those total searches,” Natalie Davis, an attorney and member of Cleveland Heights for Immigrant Rights, told Scene in a phone call.

“In March alone, the law enforcement agency that accessed Cleveland Heights data more than any other agency was the Houston Texas Police Department,” she said.

Davis and her immigration policy watchdog group has been active for the past year, sparked by ICE raids of the Cilantro Taqueria on Coventry Blvd., in January 2025.

But, since January, following an outpouring of information around Flock Safety and its interconnected network of 80,000 cameras, Davis and her colleagues have zeroed in on the service as the biggest constitutional threat to U.S. immigrants and an overall breach of privacy for everyone else.

Cleveland Heights for Immigrant Rights has zeroed in on Flock Safety as the key threat to immigration-related concerns in the past half year, its members told Scene. Credit: Submitted

Cleveland Heights seemed to listen. In February, the city said it disabled statewide and nationwide searches of its camera data; deactivated the possibility of searches tied to immigration or abortion access; and curtailed those who could have access from 2,000 entities down to about 150.

In April, Cleveland Heights City Council doubled down on this and passed a resolution lodging this new policy as law. Zero immigration-related searches, a city spokesperson told Scene, have been made by any outside agency with access to the Heights’ Flock data since those changes.

“The very transparency that allowed these concerns to be raised,” that spokesperson wrote, “is the same transparency that allows the public to verify that the changes we made are working and have had a measurable impact.”

“We remain committed to ensuring that our policies reflect our values, protect residents’ privacy, and provide meaningful oversight and accountability,” they said.

But, as two members of Cleveland Heights for Immigrant Rights told Scene on Thursday, that assurance doesn’t really mean much.

“The problem isn’t whether our local officials mean well, but what the system does: give access to many more agencies beyond Cleveland Heights,” Mike Corrandini, who’s practiced immigration law for the past 16 years, said. “And there’s no way to police that.”

Agencies “can type in any reason they want and there is no reason to verify the reason they’re giving is true,” he added.

Activists who’ve obtained these records, with the help of the ACLU, said they have no way of confirming why police in Texas or those from Florida Fish & Wildlife were combing Heights data. Corrandini and Davis believe many of them were initiative blanket searches of the entire Flock network, and those queries pop up on these local audits.

Cleveland Heights began its relationship with Flock in February 2020, when it bought 20 Flock Falcon license plate readers in a four-year deal for a combined $250,000. About a fourth of those cameras, records show, were placed at the gateways of parks: at Cain Park, Forest Hill Park, Cumberland Park and Dennison Park. The city renewed that contract in 2024.

Agencies can use a wide range of descriptors to look up potential suspects—car color, its make, model, bumper stickers or decals, its original contract reads. Per that April resolution, all data kept by those cameras must be deleted after 30 days.

Activists are still uneasy.

The only true resolution, Davis said, is to get rid of those 20 cameras altogether.

“I mean, it’s still surveilling citizens and residents of Cleveland Heights without their consent,” Davis told Scene.

“If it was shown to actually prevent the use of Cleveland Heights data and information from being used by ICE, or CBP, or other law enforcement agencies that are assisting ICE,” she added, “you know, I think that we would view that as a win.”