Columbus City Council holds a hearing on the city's Flock cameras on Monday at 4pm.

Before you dive in, make sure you sign up to speak at Monday's hearing by emailing Pedro Mejia - pdmejia@columbus.gov before noon on Monday. A rally will be held at 3pm outside City Hall prior to the hearing.

How Did We Get Here?

The City of Columbus began to use fixed license plate readers (LPRs) in 2020 when City Council authorized $105,000 of grant money to be spent on two Motorola cameras and license subscriptions to Motorola's Crime Search Investigate Model and the Investigative Data Platform. The LPRs were to be mounted near Shot Spotter equipment in Linden and the Hilltop "to enhance and expand the ability to track vehicles leaving areas alerted by the Shot Spotter program."

Now before anyone relies too heavily on the phrase "license plate reader" you should know that the capabilities of most cameras referred to as LPRs or ALPRs (automated license plate readers) go far beyond recording a license plate number. They photograph everything in view, including the cars, passengers, road, and anything else within the photo frame. In fact, a vehicle does not even have to be identified in order for an LPR to take a photo.

The trigger for a photograph to be taken can be created in many ways, either through hardware or software. The limitations for choosing a trigger only depend on what hardware and software are available. A camera with capable software can take a photo any time a vehicle is detected or any time any motion at all is detected.

So a "license plate reader" does a lot more than read plates, which is why I refer to them simply as cameras.

And here is where we begin to peer into the vast chasm between what Flock employees, police departments, and even your ostensibly liberal local representative will tell you about what Flock cameras do, and what they actually do.

Columbus started off with just two cameras, placed in the two neighborhoods where most gunshots occur. But in 2023, the city entered into a two year lease with Insight Public Sector (essentially a wholesaler of Flock cameras and software) for 32 additional fixed cameras and 8 "quick deploy" cameras at a cost of $275,000 of grant money. These were to be "installed in the same areas of Shotspotter" and used to gather evidence on the location of people suspected of homicides, felonious assaults, and other major crimes.

There was no information attached to the legislation that explains what the cameras are capable of, where exactly they will be placed, what would be done to protect the data gathered, what organizations our data would be shared with, or literally any information other than the couple of sentences I included in the previous paragraph.

These 40 cameras were authorized by City Council after it designated the legislation an "emergency," and placed it on the Consent Agenda. This means that the language wasn't even read out loud during the meeting. There were no discussions by council members about the cameras during the meeting. No residents gave testimony, most likely because this appeared online on November 17th and was approved on the 20th. All seven council members at that time voted yes: Mr. Hardin, Mr. Remy, Ms. Favor, Mr. Dorans, Mr. Brown, Ms. Barroso de Padilla, and Mr. Bankston.

All of those facts indicate that council members knew next to nothing about Flock cameras at the time they voted yes.

In 2024, City Council authorized 38 additional Flock fixed cameras, at a cost of $228,000 from the FY24 Columbus LPR Project Grant, for two years of use. The authorization says that 32 cameras are already in use and this contract is needed so that the new cameras will be compatible with the current cameras. The exact same language as to where and how the cameras would be used was repeated from the 2023 authorization.

The single Flock document attached to the 2024 legislation says that the 38 Flock cameras will be equipped with Vehicle Fingerprint (TM) technology, which is proprietary machine learning software. That is essentially the extent of the information provided, other than the cost. The attachments contain no information from Flock or Columbus Police on camera placement, capabilities, data usage, storage, retention, or sharing. The bid waiver contains one sentence indicating that most of central Ohio uses these cameras which will allow Columbus to communicate with those systems.

The 2024 legislation was first considered by City Council at the 12/9/2024 meeting. However, if you look at that meeting's agenda, the ordinance is listed as being a second reading. It was passed, again, as an "emergency," with all 8 Council Members who were present voting yes: Mr. Hardin, Mr. Remy, Mr. Wyche, Ms. Favor, Mr. Dorans, Ms. Green, Ms. Barroso de Padilla, and Ms. Day Achauer (Mr. Bankston was absent).

At the 3:15:14 timestamp of the video of the 12/9/2024 meeting, Mr. Remy read the Flock legislation. He asked the Deputy Director of Public Safety to explain why there was a waiver of competitive bidding. The Deputy Director said that Flock cameras are used by others and "interoperability" helps meet the goals of the grant. The grant deadline was also only a few weeks away.

Mr. Remy asked if any other council members had any questions. No one did.

At 3:16:40 the ordinance was passed.

So once again, legislation authorizing citywide surveillance was placed on the agenda on a Friday. On Monday, with zero discussion, no testimony, and no questions from council members, 38 cameras were approved.

Where Are We Going Now?

Given all of these facts, why are WE residents being forced to demand that Flock cameras be removed?

Council knew absolutely nothing about the capabilities of Flock cameras when they voted to approve them. They asked for no input from local groups on the privacy implications of the cameras. They held no public hearings to gain input. Despite having just experienced a massive breach exposing the data of nearly every person in the city in July of 2024, when December rolled around council had zero questions for the Public Safety representative about data security issues posed by Flock cameras.

Local organizers, spurred by massive increases in ICE activity in Columbus, ramped up their pressure on the city, and someone was finally forced to look into what was being done with our Flock data. At that point it was confirmed that Columbus Flock data had been searched over 15,000 times for reasons related to immigration.

For some reason these cameras are still operating. Rather than the city simply shutting the system down because council made a massive mistake, us residents are now required to beg our representatives to stop making the same mistake every single day.

Before we are allowed to speak at tomorrow's meeting, we will also have to listen to dozens of outputs from a cranking propaganda machine run by the city, police, and Flock itself. Reuniting some missing children and older folks with their families is apparently supposed to justify the city providing location data for every person in Columbus to our fascist federal government.

The cameras have to come down. There was no understanding of Flock camera capabilities by the people making the decisions. We have no ability to prevent our federal government from using the data against our neighbors. That fact on its own should have brought them down already.