Ohio’s four big law enforcement associations have put their names on Flock cameras.
In a joint statement released Friday, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association announced their support for Flock cameras as an investigative tool that helps put dangerous criminals behind bars — while, at the same time, demanding accountability and oversight:
- Clear rules and stricter penalties for law enforcement members who abuse camera data.
- Better oversight of police agencies through mandatory audits.
- Security and transparency requirements for technology providers.
“We have heard many Ohioans’ concerns about the danger that could come from those who seek to abuse access to this important police investigative resource, and we share those concerns,” the statement says.
Read that again. The organizations that represent the officers, the chiefs, the prosecutors and the sheriffs are telling you, in writing, that access to this system can be abused — and that the people who abuse it should be punished for it.
Here is what Ohio law says today: almost none of it.
The statement notes that unauthorized access to law enforcement’s investigatory tools is a serious crime under the Ohio Revised Code, and argues that law enforcement professionals should be held to the same standard on Flock cameras. Attorney General Andy Wilson has made the same point himself. Wilson, who has called Flock, “when used properly,” “one of the most valuable tools I have seen in my career,” has proposed making misuse of the data a fifth-degree felony — modeled on the penalty for abusing the Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway — with surrender of the officer’s badge attached. Wilson has also said, plainly, that there is currently no penalty for misusing this data.
He is right about the state of the law. Ohio’s only statute that mentions plate readers at all is a public-records exemption — R.C. 149.43(A)(1)(yy) — and all it does is keep the images and data out of the public’s hands. No Flock-specific misuse penalty. No retention limit. No audit requirement. None of it is on the books.
The audits the associations want are specific. “We also want agencies to be held accountable through mandatory audits in which humans review data on who is accessing Flock camera information, how often, and for what purpose,” the statement says. “If an agency allows for widespread abuse, it should be reported publicly so that civilian administrators can work to protect Ohioans’ privacy.”
Agencies, they say, should also have to prove the cameras earn their keep: track and report the number of arrests made because of Flock camera data. “The claim that they serve a legitimate and important purpose for law enforcement should be supported with evidence.”
And the companies that sell the cameras should be held to written security standards — cybersecurity standards, access controls, breach notification, data retention rules and independent security audits — with the officials who sign the contracts, and the local elected officials who approve them, demanding that transparency in public.
Why now
Because Ohio has spent the fall watching what happens without those rules.
In Columbus, Mayor Andrew Ginther paused the city’s Flock program on Sept. 3 and ordered the city’s 65 cameras bagged after an officer assigned to the City Council executive protection unit was found to have searched a single license plate more than 270 times over about 14 months. Police said the searches were not connected to any investigation. The officer was relieved of duty while the city investigates, and Ginther ordered a third-party audit of Columbus police Flock searches. In late September, a second Columbus officer was placed on leave in a separate Flock investigation.
In Franklin County, Sheriff Dallas Baldwin ordered a proactive audit of his own office’s Flock use after hearing about misuse by other agencies. The audit found a deputy who had used the system improperly, and the deputy was suspended for 30 days — a case J News Network reported last month.
In Hamilton County, the sheriff paused the county’s 75 cameras the same week Columbus did, and the county’s program has since ended.
The bills to write the rules exist. Senate Bill 469 would force deletion of plate data within 10 days, require a warrant before the data is shared with another agency, and mandate monthly audits and annual reporting to the attorney general. House Bill 1009, the Stop Flock Abuse Act, would make it a fifth-degree felony to access, use or share the data for personal reasons. Other proposals go further, up to a ban on most government use of the technology. None of them has become law. The associations’ statement backs the cameras and backs the guardrails — but it does not name a single bill, and it sets no deadline.
Flock itself is tightening its own defaults. Starting Jan. 1, the company says every search must be tied to a case number, searches will be automatically flagged for unusual activity, and default data retention drops from 30 days to seven. Those are company policies. They were made by the company, and the company can change them the same way.
What the cameras actually do
The Fallout Files documented this pipeline earlier this year. Flock’s Falcon cameras photograph every vehicle that passes — license plate, make, model and color — around the clock. The driver does not have to be suspected of anything. The data is stored in the cloud and can be searched retroactively, which means an officer can reconstruct where a car has been days or weeks after the fact. No warrant is required to run the search. No probable cause, either.
There is no federal law governing how long license plate data can be retained or who can access it. And the plate readers are one piece of a larger system: tied together with facial recognition and data-fusion platforms, that pipeline has already produced documented wrongful arrests of innocent people in other states — cases where the machine pointed, officers trusted the machine, and the person in handcuffs had done nothing wrong.
That is the record the four associations are now writing rules for — after the cameras are already up.
See the network yourself
Whatever you think of the endorsement, don’t take anyone’s word for the size of this thing. We mapped it.
The JNN Camera Map plots 6,993 plate-reader cameras across 80 of Ohio’s 88 counties — 6,321 of them identified as Flock Safety units. Cuyahoga County alone has 1,111. Franklin County has 719. Hamilton County has 593. There are 27 in Ross County and 45 in Pickaway County.
The map is free, in the JNN app, because we support the free flow of public information. If the cameras are watching the public, the public gets to see the cameras.
The endorsement is now on paper. So are the demands. What is not on paper — anywhere in the Ohio Revised Code — is a single one of the penalties, audits or retention limits that the men and women who run Ohio law enforcement just told you this system needs.
The cameras are already up. The rules are not.
