Shaker Heights has curtailed its relationship to the controversial surveillance tech company Flock Safety following a string of concerns raised by activists and residents that its license plate readers were dong more harm than good.
This week, the city released a revised, “tightened” contract between the east side suburb and Flock that, to activists’ chagrin, keeps Shaker’s 16 Flock cameras where they’ve been since February of 2022.
In the new agreement, camera data can’t be seen by other law enforcement agencies except with a search warrant; Flock must tell Shaker if or when data’s been disclosed or challenge in court any odd request; and Shaker gets access to any logs recording officer lookups.
If Flock reneges on any of this? Shaker Heights can opt out of the agreement without any penalities.
In other words, as Mayor David Weiss said in a statement, those cameras aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Flock LPRs have helped Shaker police solve a number of crimes including homicide, sexual assault, and aggravated robbery,” he said. “Flock also enabled our officers to recover a missing juvenile.”
“These LPRs have proven to be useful and effective law enforcement tools,” he said.
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.
Similar concerns were raised in Shaker. While the vast majority of lookups in Shaker’s database in recent months were for serious crimes, 273 were made citing “immigration” and 130 for “civil/administrative” reasons.
The latter being the primary concern of activist groups that have sprouted up this year. Those, like Flock Off Shaker, that feel the only way to truly curb immigration officers from tracking immigrants not wanted for a crime is to take down the cameras altogether. Not just revise policy.
“Whatever they’re saying, I really don’t care,” Caitlin Johnson, an activist with Flock Off Shaker, told Scene on Wednesday.
She pointed to two reasons: one, Flock has been caught masquerading searches (like one for an abortion provider in Texas) . And two, Flock’s network of 80,000-plus, AI-powered cameras are growing too fast for regulators to keep up.
“So, the point is, whatever safeguards they say they put into place, it’s not going to be enough,” Johnson said. “They only thing that’s going to work for us is to cancel the contract.”
Johnson said her movement isn’t dying down simply because of Mayor Weiss’ stern negotiations.
“We’re not gonna give them a pat on the back,” she said. “The preponderance of evidence is too great: Flock does not keep us safe.”
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