Take action

Everything on this page is copy-and-paste ready. The single highest-value thing any Deer Park resident can do is file a public records request, because it produces documents rather than opinions — and Ohio law makes it easy. Fifteen minutes is enough to do all of it.

What we are asking for

Let the Flock contract expire without renewing it, and turn the cameras off.

If council will not go that far, the minimum ask is: do not renew a surveillance contract council has never been given operating data for. Get the contract, get a written policy, get the audit log. Then decide.

1. Email council (5 minutes)

These names, titles, terms, and email addresses are published by the City of Deer Park on its own Elected Officials pages.^1,2 Nothing here is private information.

A short email you can adapt

Subject: Flock camera contract — request before any renewal

Dear Council Member [name],

I live on [street] in Deer Park. I recently learned the city operates nine automated license plate reader cameras through Flock Safety. I did not know this, and I could not find any policy, retention limit, camera list, or copy of the contract on the city's website.

Before council renews this contract, I am asking that you require three things in public:

1. The signed contract and every amendment, with the total value and the expiration date.
2. A written policy with a data retention limit and a list of approved uses.
3. The audit log — how many searches Deer Park officers have run, how many searches outside agencies have run against Deer Park's cameras, and how many alerts led to stops of vehicles that turned out not to be the wanted vehicle.

My own view is that the program should end and the cameras should be turned off. But at a minimum, I do not think council should renew a surveillance contract it has never been shown operating data for. The December 2024 minutes record that year two of this contract had no identified funding source, and I could not find anything since that resolves it.

Thank you for your time.

[Your name] [Your street], Deer Park, OH 45236

2. File a public records request (10 minutes)

This is the most useful thing you can do. Everything on this site that is currently marked "unknown" — the contract value, the expiration date, the retention period, whether Deer Park shares data nationally, how many searches have been run — is a public record that no one has requested.

Ohio's Public Records Act is strong, and Deer Park's own published policy is favorable to requesters:³

• Your request does not have to be in writing, and you do not have to give your name or say why you want the records. This is Section 2.2 of the city's policy, and it is also state law: R.C. 149.43(B)(4) provides that any requirement that you disclose your identity or intended use "constitutes a denial of the request."^3,4
• The first 10 paper pages are free; beyond that it is five cents per page, and a CD is $1.00. Ask for email attachments and there is normally nothing to pay.³
• The city's own stated policy is that the Act "should be interpreted liberally in favor of disclosure," and that exemptions "will be narrowly construed by this office in the favor of disclosure."³

Send it to the Clerk of Council, Angie Tegenkamp Chachoff, at achachoff@deerpark-oh.gov, or call 513.794.8860.^1,5 There is nothing wrong with sending it to the City Manager or the Police Chief as well.

The request, ready to copy

Subject: Public records request — Flock Safety / automated license plate readers

To the Clerk of Council, City of Deer Park:

Under the Ohio Public Records Act, R.C. 149.43, I request copies of the following records. I am requesting electronic copies where available. If any portion is exempt, please provide the remainder and cite the specific exemption for what is withheld, as required by R.C. 149.43(B)(3).

1. The contract or agreement between the City of Deer Park and Flock Safety, including all exhibits, order forms, terms and conditions, amendments, renewals, and any statements of work, from 2024 to the present.
2. All invoices from Flock Safety and all records of payment to Flock Safety, from 2024 to the present, identifying the fund from which each payment was made.
3. Any written policy, general order, standard operating procedure, directive, or training material governing the use of automated license plate readers by the Deer Park Police Department.
4. Records sufficient to show the data retention period currently configured for the city's Flock system.
5. The current count and installed locations of all automated license plate readers operated by or on behalf of the City of Deer Park.
6. Any Flock "network audit," "sharing report," or equivalent record identifying every agency or entity with access to Deer Park's ALPR data or hotlists, and records showing whether Deer Park participates in Flock's National Lookup or any statewide or regional sharing arrangement.
7. The Flock audit log or search history for the period February 2025 to the present, showing for each search the date, the searching agency, and the reason code or case number entered. To be clear about scope: I am not requesting any license plate image or any plate read, which I understand are excluded from the definition of a public record by R.C. 149.43(A)(1)(yy). I am requesting the record of searches — who queried the system and what reason they entered. If any field is exempt, please produce the record with that field redacted and retain the date, the searching agency, and the reason-code fields, as provided by R.C. 149.43(B)(1).
8. Records sufficient to show the number of ALPR alerts generated, the number of stops resulting from those alerts, and the number of such stops involving a vehicle that was determined not to be the vehicle sought.
9. Any ordinance, resolution, or appropriation authorizing expenditure on the Flock program, and any record identifying the funding source for the current fiscal year.
10. Any correspondence between the city or its police department and Flock Safety regarding data sharing, federal agency access, security vulnerabilities, or contract terms, from 2024 to the present.

I understand that under Ohio law I am not required to submit this in writing or to identify myself, and I am doing both voluntarily for the city's convenience in responding.

Thank you, [Your name] (optional) [Your email]

Send it as an email and keep the sent copy. Two practical reasons. Ohio's Public Records Act, R.C. 149.43(C)(3), makes statutory damages available only where the requester transmitted a written request by hand delivery, electronic submission, or certified mail, in a manner that "fairly describes the public record or class of public records."⁴ A verbal request is perfectly valid and the city must answer it — but it forfeits that remedy. And a dated email is the record of what you asked for and when.

The city also publishes a Public Record Request Form, and you should know two things about it before using it. It is posted as an image file rather than a fillable form, and it marks name, street address, city, state, ZIP, phone and email as required fields.⁸ Ohio law does not permit a public office to require any of that — R.C. 149.43(B)(4) says such a requirement "constitutes a denial of the request," and the city's own written policy says the same at Section 2.2.^4,3 The form is optional. A plain email is a complete and valid request. We are not suggesting the city intends to deter anyone; a 2007 policy and a scanned form simply have not caught up to each other.

3. Speak at a council meeting (30 minutes)

City Council meets on the first and third Monday of the month at 7:00 pm. Meetings are at 7777 Blue Ash Rd., Deer Park, OH 45236. The city's number is 513.794.8860.^10,11

The city's calendar listed council meetings on August 3 and August 17, 2026, both at 7:00 pm. Confirm the next date on the city calendar before attending.

You do not need to be an expert, and you should not try to deliver this entire website. Three sentences from a resident carries more weight in a city of 5,700 than any document. In Marion, Ohio, residents supplied more than 90 minutes of public comment on a Flock ordinance and the committee held the legislation rather than voting it down.¹² Deer Park is a tenth of Marion's size.

A 90-second script

Good evening. My name is [name] and I live on [street].

I'm here about the Flock cameras. I want to say up front that I'm not here to criticize the police department — I think they adopted this in good faith to deal with auto theft and hit-skip crashes.

My concern is the contract and the missing paperwork. There are nine of these cameras in a city one square mile across. There is no policy on the city's website. No retention limit. No camera list. No audit. In fourteen months of operation, the only performance information in the minutes is one yes-or-no answer this past April.

In December 2024, the finance director told this council that year two of this contract had no funding source. The levy that was supposed to cover it was dropped in January 2025. I could not find anything in the minutes since then that says what replaced it.

I'm asking council to let this contract expire and turn the cameras off. If council isn't willing to do that, then please don't renew it until you have the contract, a written policy, and the audit log in front of you — and until residents can read them too.

Toledo paid a resident $35,000 after one of these cameras misread a digit. Flock didn't pay that. Toledo did. Thank you.

Everything in that script is sourced on this site: the camera count,¹³ the absent policy,¹⁴ the April 2026 exchange,¹⁵ the finance director's warning,¹⁶ the dropped levy,¹⁷ and the Toledo settlement.¹⁸

4. Tell your neighbors (2 minutes)

Most Deer Park residents do not know these cameras exist. That is not a failure on their part — the city never told them. Sharing this site, or just the fact of the nine cameras, does more than any argument.

If council decides to keep the program

We think the cameras should be turned off. But if council goes the other way, these are the terms to demand — and Cleveland's council obtained every one of them from this same vendor in a single amendment in July 2026, which disposes of any claim that they are unobtainable:¹⁹

• A written policy with a retention cap and an approved-use list, published on the city website.
• Warrant-only disclosure to outside government authorities, expressly excluding subpoenas, informal requests, and preservation letters.
• No national lookup or sharing arrangement without a council vote.
• Advance written notice to the city before the vendor discloses anything, with an opportunity to seek protective relief.
• A financial penalty for vendor privacy violations — Cleveland set it at up to 25 percent of contract value.
• Quarterly written reports to council: searches run, agencies with access, alerts, stops, and false hits.
• A mandatory hotlist review interval, which addresses the stale-data failure mode that no camera upgrade fixes.
• Ohio governing law and venue. Flock's February 2026 standard terms specify Georgia law and mandatory arbitration.²⁰

Oak Park, Illinois also published its general order, a camera map, and its approved crime categories before it terminated — a useful model for the transparency half of this.²¹

Ground rules we hold ourselves to

We ask anyone using this material to hold to them as well:

• Don't overstate. Say "no policy is published on the city website, checked July 2026" rather than "there is no policy." Say the $22,500 cost figure is an estimate based on another city's published rate. One inflated number discredits every accurate one.
• Don't target individuals. Nothing on this site goes beyond public officials' published roles and contact information, and nothing suggests any Deer Park officer has misused this system. The argument is about a vendor, a contract, and a governance gap.
• Concede what's true. The chief said the cameras help with hit-skip reports, and Oak Park's two stops produced four arrests and two firearms.^15,22 Say so. A case that only survives against a weak opposing version is not worth making.
• Correct errors publicly. We do, on the corrections page. We have already flagged two overstatements circulating in community materials — the CVE count and the Mountain View duration — and one of our own.