Remove Flock Surveillance Cameras and Do Not Renew the Contract

Scroll to the end for the Tl;Dr: 

We, the residents of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, are asking City Council to disable the existing Flock Safety cameras and refuse to renew the contract.

The reasons have nothing to do with party. Flock has lied to the cities that pay it. The company cannot keep its own system secure. And for as long as the contract stays in place, it leaves Reynoldsburg holding legal and financial risk the city does not control. Dayton, Ohio already suspended its cameras after learning some of this firsthand. There is no reason to wait for our turn.

 
Every car in Reynoldsburg is being logged
Flock cameras photograph every passing vehicle and feed the data into a national database that thousands of law enforcement agencies can search. No warrant. No probable cause. No notice to you. No meaningful audit. A single query can reach more than 83,000 cameras around the country. [ACLU, "Flock's Aggressive Expansions Go Far Beyond Simple Driver Surveillance," October 2025, aclu.org]

That is the government keeping a running record of where law-abiding people drive: to church, to the doctor, to a gun show, to a political meeting. The Fourth Amendment was written to stop this kind of warrantless tracking. A program that logs your daily movements without any suspicion you have done something wrong does not become acceptable because a private company runs it.

 
Officers across the country have used these cameras to stalk people
The Institute for Justice went through public records and news reports and found at least 18 cases of officers using license plate reader data to stalk and harass private citizens, most of them since 2024.

A former police chief in Sedgwick, Kansas ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 228 times in four months and tailed her in his patrol car. A former chief in Braselton, Georgia was arrested for using the cameras to harass people who were under no investigation at all. A Milwaukee officer searched two people 179 times and typed "investigation" as the reason every single time. [Institute for Justice, April 2026, ij.org; ACLU of Wisconsin, December 2025, aclu-wi.org]

In almost every one of these cases, the abuse surfaced because the victim figured it out and came forward. Flock's own auditing caught none of it. [Institute for Justice, April 2026, ij.org]

 
The audit logs were already close to worthless
Before running a search, an officer only had to type a reason. The system accepted "investigation," "suspicious," and even a single period. Milwaukee police logged "investigation" more than 1,000 times in 2025. Nothing in those logs tells you whether a single search was legitimate. [ACLU of Wisconsin, February 2026, aclu-wi.org]

Reynoldsburg is paying for a surveillance system with no working oversight built into it. That was the situation before Flock made it worse.

 
Flock quietly gutted the "tamper-proof" logs it sold the city on
For years Flock told cities that its audit trail was the safeguard that made the cameras safe. The company's marketing called every search "permanently logged and auditable" and a "tamper-proof trail of accountability." Flock's CEO wrote in June 2025 that every search "is preserved permanently in the audit trail." [Flock Safety, "The Power of Connected Intelligence," September 2025, quoted in Footnote4a, December 2025, footnote4a.org]

On December 11, 2025, Flock changed it. In an email to customers, a company executive said network audit logs would no longer include the officer's name, the specific plates searched, the vehicle fingerprint, or the open-text reason for a search. The change came from Flock, not from any police department, and the cities that depend on these logs were never consulted. [Footnote4a, "Flock Decides Cops Can't Be Trusted with Cop Data," December 2025, footnote4a.org]

So the "permanent, immutable" record that was supposed to justify the whole program is gone. A city can no longer find out who searched the data collected in its town, or what they were looking for. Reporting on the change documented other quiet edits along the way: the reason field became a dropdown of pre-approved options, and searches flagged as problematic were not logged at all. [Footnote4a, December 2025, footnote4a.org]

A company that strips out the one accountability feature it promised, without telling the customers who paid for it, is telling you exactly what its promises are worth.

 
Reynoldsburg says its cameras do not share data. There is no way to prove that is true
The city may point to a setting that keeps Reynoldsburg's data local. Two problems make that assurance hollow.

First, Flock's standard agreement has reportedly let the company share data with federal and other agencies for "investigative purposes" even when a department restricts access to its own officers. The ACLU has urged every community with Flock cameras to read the actual contract and look for the clause granting Flock broad rights over the data. [ACLU, October 2025, aclu.org; ACLU of Massachusetts, October 2025, data.aclum.org]

Second, and worse, the city cannot independently confirm what its own cameras are doing. When Mountain View, California pulled its cameras in early 2026, it had discovered that Flock switched on a "national lookup" feature without telling the city, and that a "statewide lookup" had been running on 29 of its 30 cameras for 17 months. Here is the part that matters for Reynoldsburg: Flock kept no records from the national lookup period, so nobody could determine what data had actually left the system. More than 250 agencies that never signed an agreement with Mountain View had been able to run an estimated 600,000 searches against its cameras. [Malwarebytes, February 2026, malwarebytes.com]

Now combine that with the December audit-log changes. If Reynoldsburg's data were being shared against the city's wishes, the city would have no reliable way to detect it, and Flock has already shown it will flip these settings on its own. This has already happened to other towns. Records obtained by 404 Media showed local officers running Flock searches on behalf of ICE's deportation operations, and Customs and Border Protection reportedly had access to tens of thousands of Flock cameras well beyond what had been disclosed, with some departments unaware their data was being shared at all. Dayton, Ohio suspended its cameras after learning this had happened to it. [ACLU, October 2025, aclu.org; Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, 2025, business-humanrights.org]

Saying "we opted out" is only as good as the city's ability to verify it. Right now that ability does not exist.

 
The cameras have been pointed at protesters, minorities, and a woman who had an abortion
The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained more than 12 million search records from over 3,900 agencies. The records include hundreds of searches tied to specific 2025 political protests. More than 80 agencies ran searches using racial slurs aimed at Romani people, often with no crime listed at all. A Texas official searched for a woman because she was suspected of having an abortion. [EFF, "Flock Safety's Surveillance Abuses: 2025 in Review," January 2026, eff.org]

Whatever your politics, a system built to let officials look up people for going to a protest, for their ethnicity, or for a private medical decision is a system that will eventually be turned on someone you agree with. The right to assemble and to hold your own views without being tracked for them is not up for negotiation. You may not have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean political winds won't change. That door swings both ways.

 
Flock cannot keep its own cameras secure
Researchers found Flock camera feeds sitting on the open internet with no password. United States senators wrote to the FTC pointing out that Flock does not require its law enforcement customers to use multi-factor authentication, a basic security measure, and lets them rely on text-message codes that are easy to intercept. After Flock claimed it had closed the exposed feeds, researchers found them still reachable days later. [State of Surveillance, January 2026, stateofsurveillance.org; Senator Wyden letter to FTC, 2026, wyden.senate.gov]

Roughly three out of four Flock agencies have opted into the nationwide lookup tool, which means anyone who breaks into a single Flock account, a hacker or a foreign intelligence service, can use it to track people across the country. They are a national security risk. [Senator Wyden letter to FTC, 2026, wyden.senate.gov]

Reynoldsburg taxpayers are funding a database of their own neighbors' movements that the vendor cannot make secure. They have already demonstrated this.

 
The poles are a roadside hazard
Federal highway safety rules require any pole in a roadside right-of-way to sit on a breakaway or slip-base mount, so a car that leaves the road passes underneath instead of hitting a rigid post. Flock's own approved installation drawings, obtained through public records in Tennessee, call for exactly that hardware. [Maryville Residents for Privacy, Maryville PD / Flock Safety TDOT installation package, maryvilleprivacy.org]

The drawings and the reality do not match. Steve Eimers, a road-safety advocate who has spent years pushing states to pull out defective guardrails after one killed his daughter, inspected Flock installations in Tennessee and Maine and reported finding improper installation close to 100% of the time: poles missing breakaway hardware, set straight into concrete, planted too close to the road. Flock did not answer reporters' questions about how it makes sure its installations meet safety standards. [WGME I-Team, May 2026, fox23maine.com]

Nobody has crash-tested the Reynoldsburg poles, and the city has no independent confirmation they meet the same standard required of every other object beside the road. If one of these poles kills or maims a driver, the lawsuit lands on the city, and our taxes pay the judgment.

 
The crime-fighting claims are Flock's own marketing
The study Flock points to as proof its cameras cut crime was co-written by Flock employees, had no control group, and surveyed only Flock's own customers. Independent researchers have found little to no effect on everyday crime from rolling out license plate readers widely. [analysis via "Flock Off AI Cameras," tbot.substack.com]

Before the city spends another dollar and gives up more of residents' privacy, it should demand independent evidence that the Reynoldsburg cameras have actually accomplished anything here. A vendor's sales deck is not evidence.

 
What this means for City Council
This petition puts City Council on formal notice. Every claim above is drawn from public records, news reporting, and Flock's own emails to its customers, all of which any council member can check. No member of this council can now say they were not told.

You do not need a law degree to see where the risk falls. Flock has already stripped the accountability features out of the product it sold, so the safeguard the city was promised no longer exists. That is a broken deal, and the city is the one left holding it. The city cannot confirm whether residents' data is leaving against its own policy, and Flock has switched sharing settings on other cities without telling them, so if Reynoldsburg's data turns up somewhere it should not, this council will be the one answering for it. And if one of these uninspected poles injures a driver, the city pays the judgment.

Renewing this contract will not make any of that go away. It locks the city in for another term and ties this council, by name and by recorded vote, to whatever the cameras and their vendor do next. Voting it down costs the city nothing it cannot replace. The residents who signed this petition will remember which way the vote went.

 
Neighboring cities have already walked away
Austin, Evanston, Eugene, Bend, Springfield, and Dayton have all canceled their Flock contracts or declined to renew after residents organized. Mountain View pulled all 30 of its cameras. The renewal in front of Reynoldsburg City Council is our chance to join them. [Malwarebytes, February 2026, malwarebytes.com]

 We are asking City Council to:

1. Disable the existing Flock Safety cameras now, pending review of the contract
2. Refuse to renew the contract
3. Hold a public hearing before considering any future surveillance technology contract
4. Pass a Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinance requiring council approval for any new surveillance technology.

This is a Reynoldsburg issue before it is anyone's partisan issue. Political winds are always changing. The government should not track where you drive without a warrant. Decisions about surveillance in this city belong to local officials and the residents they answer to, not to federal agencies or a vendor in another state. And no resident's tax dollars should pay for a system that has been caught lying to its customers, leaking its own data, and breaking the terms it signed.

Sign this petition and tell City Council to take the cameras down and keep them down.

TLDR

The Ask:
Disable cameras and refuse contract renewal.

Why:

• Mass surveillance of every car with no warrant
• Police abuse documented; Flock's audits caught none
• Flock removed audit log safeguards without notice
• City can't verify data isn't being shared nationally
• Security vulnerabilities and unvetted road hazards
• No independent proof the cameras reduce crime
• Other cities (Dayton, Austin, Mountain View, Los Angeles) already pulled out.