Community members across Cleveland and beyond are coming together to stop the deployment of surveillance technology in our city!

100 Flock automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, are currently installed on Cleveland's streets. This is an issue that affects everyone who visits, works, or lives in Cleveland. These AI-powered surveillance cameras capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car's location, date, and time. They also capture your car's make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.

In July, City Council voted to renew the city’s Flock contract for six months, despite the council’s Safety Committee voting against renewal in June. After that renewal lapses, the city plans to hear bids from other surveillance companies. They believe that residents will accept spyware on our streets as long as it’s not from Flock. We will not.

Prone to misuse and abuse, ALPR databases (from Flock, Axon, or any other surveillance company) violate our right to privacy and give officers free rein to track a person's movements without any judicial oversight. Partial audit logs show that the Cleveland image database has been accessed by out-of-state police tens of thousands of times, including hundreds of immigration-related searches and over 60,000 searches labeled vaguely as "Other".

While ALPRs are one major piece of the puzzle, the city is also looking to contract for gunshot detection technology as well as a drones-as-first-responder program. Some of this infrastructure is already in place: in April, the mayor went around City Council to renew Cleveland’s ShotSpotter contract, despite doubts that the devices do anything to help the city, and we learned in May that Cleveland EMS and Fire are already trialing Flock drones with no public discussion or input. Going forward, the city hopes to find one centralized vendor to provide all of these services under one contract – the better to spy on us!

Just like ALPRs, these technologies are an expansion of the surveillance state, and they grant dangerous amounts of power to our government: local, state, and federal. Their use is dehumanizing, ultimately turning people into data points under constant watch and suspicion, and disproportionately impacts vulnerable and marginalized communities.

You can use the following form to contact Cleveland City Council to urge them to oppose ANY and ALL adoption of surveillance technology in our city, and to remove this tech from our streets.

Flock No is a group of Cleveland residents who want to protect our privacy, ensure the safety of our neighbors and communities, and fight corruption in local government. For more info, visit www.flocknocle.com.