What other cities did

Deer Park is not being asked to do something unprecedented. More than 80 jurisdictions across 28 states have terminated Flock contracts since 2025, including the Los Angeles Police Department. Dayton suspended its program and put trash bags over 72 cameras. Cleveland's safety committee voted against renewal because police could show only three convictions from a hundred cameras. This page is the precedent, Ohio first.

The scale of the reversal

NPR reported in February 2026 that more than 30 U.S. cities had cancelled Flock contracts since early 2025, with concerns about immigration-related data access driving much of it.¹

Three months later that number had more than doubled. The San Francisco Standard, which has kept a running tally, reported in May 2026 that "80-plus jurisdictions in 28 states have terminated their Flock contracts" since 2025 — 39 of them in the first five months of 2026 alone.² That is a news organization's count rather than an official register, and we present it as one. But the direction is not in dispute, and the pace is the part a council should notice: cancellations were running at roughly eight a month in the same year Deer Park's council received a one-sentence briefing.³

We are not going to claim a national trend proves Deer Park should act. Plenty of cities kept their cameras. What the list below establishes is narrower and more useful: ending a Flock contract is an ordinary municipal action, taken by ordinary councils, using provisions already in their contracts. A Deer Park council member voting for non-renewal would be in unremarkable company.

Ohio first

Cleveland — renewed, but on terms

Cleveland is the most useful case on this page for a Deer Park council member, because it is an Ohio legislative body imposing conditions on this same vendor, in the same month Deer Park's council was last briefed.

The sequence: the safety committee rejected a $250,000 renewal for roughly 100 cameras in June 2026, reversed course on July 8, and full council approved on July 15 by 9–6.^4,5,6

The committee's June vote was 3–1 against recommending renewal, and the reason its chair gave is the one Deer Park's council should sit with. Councilman Michael Polensek said police "could only show us three cases that led to convictions, that's not acceptable" — for a hundred cameras, over three years.⁷ He added that he believed there were more but that they had not been documented, and he was explicit that his objection was not to the technology: "I don't care if it's Flock, or whoever. The bottom line, we need some type of system that can read license plates."⁷

That is a council member who wanted to keep plate readers, voting against renewal anyway, because the department could not show him what three years of them had produced. Deer Park's council has never asked the question.³

Council then reversed the committee and renewed — but only on an amended ordinance. The amendment, signed by an assistant director of law, did all of this:⁸

• Cut the term from one year to six months and the amount from $250,000 to $125,000.
• Barred Flock from selling, sharing, publishing, or exchanging data for any purpose other than law enforcement.
• Required a search warrant based on probable cause before any disclosure to a third-party government authority — expressly excluding subpoenas, administrative requests, informal inquiries, preservation letters, and national security letters.
• Barred voluntary disclosure based on "good faith belief, contractual enforcement interests, investigatory convenience, or generalized public safety concerns."
• Required advance written notice to the safety director before any disclosure, with an opportunity to seek protective relief.
• Imposed a penalty of up to 25 percent of contract value for privacy and data-sharing violations.
• Required a public transparency portal and quarterly written reports.
• Barred sharing with the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center.

The context matters: the city's safety director told council "We are no longer involved in a national lookup," after reporting that immigration authorities had accessed Cleveland's camera data without the city's knowledge.^9,10

Marion — considering a ban

Marion's legislation, codes and regulations committee heard more than 90 minutes of public comment on July 22, 2026 on an ordinance that would ban Flock and similar technology inside city limits and make continued use a misdemeanor. The committee took no action and continued the matter to August 3, 2026.¹¹

Two details in the reporting that we think a Deer Park reader should have:

In Marion's favor as a comparison: residents drove this. Coverage describes views as "mixed, but the majority were against the cameras in some way," citing data storage, over-surveillance, audit practices, and poor county-city communication.¹¹

Against it as a comparison: the contract belongs to the Marion County Sheriff's Office, not the city, and Marion police merely have access to the data.¹¹ A city ordinance is a blunt instrument against a county contract. Deer Park's situation is simpler — the program is the city's own, so non-renewal is directly within council's power.

Marion's police also made the argument Deer Park's council will hear: Major BJ Gruber said concerns persist "no matter what level of transparency we offer," and called the cameras a force multiplier for a department "down 10 officers."¹¹ That is a real argument from a real staffing problem, and it deserves an answer rather than a dismissal.

Colerain Township — wrote a policy

Colerain Township, in Hamilton County, adopted written ALPR Policy 5.40 on April 8, 2025, capping retention at 30 days.¹²

This is the most direct local comparator on the entire site: a neighboring agency in Deer Park's own county, subject to the same absence of Ohio law, that chose to write a rule down. Deer Park has published nothing.¹³

Dayton — suspended the program, then put trash bags over the cameras

Dayton is the Ohio city that did everything Deer Park has not, and it was not enough. This is the most important case on the page for that reason, so it gets the most space.

Dayton adopted a written ALPR policy by commission vote on July 20, 2022, published it, published its impact statement, and published the public comments it received.¹⁴ That policy prohibited using the data for immigration enforcement or sharing it with agencies whose primary purpose is enforcing immigration law.¹⁵

In October 2025 a new commander of the department's support services division noticed that data sharing was running far higher than it should be.¹⁶ What the department eventually found was that a network sharing feature had been switched on, and that the previous commander had not implemented the safeguards he had himself helped write and present.^16,17

The scale of it: roughly 7,100 search requests citing immigration-related purposes, from outside law enforcement agencies, over about three years.^16,17 Later reporting on the released logs put more than 140 outside agencies in Dayton's system for immigration-related searches, including thousands of searches by federal Border Patrol and hundreds by a sheriff's office in Georgia.¹⁸

Dayton cut off federal access in January 2026, shut off all sharing on April 7, and suspended the fixed-site program indefinitely, announcing the findings on May 1.¹⁶ The city set aside $30,000 to audit its own data logs.¹⁵ The commander was given the choice of resigning or being fired.¹⁶

The officials' own words are worth quoting, because they are not activists:

It does reveal egregious violations of policy and has certainly led to a deterioration of trust. Shelley Dickstein, Dayton City Manager¹⁶

We found it ourselves. I would have hoped the previous commander would have found it and reported it, but he did not. Kamran Afzal, Dayton Police Chief¹⁶

Then comes the part that reads like satire and is not. Having suspended the program, the city could not confirm the cameras had actually stopped working, and was not certain its contract allowed it to remove them. So it put bags over them. Deputy City Manager Joe Parlette told the city commission that the "DPD agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras," as a temporary measure until they could be taken out.¹⁹ By late May 2026 city workers had covered all 72 fixed-site readers in black plastic — including the one outside City Hall.^15,19

Dayton was not alone in reaching for that solution. Evanston, Illinois did the same thing in late 2025 while waiting for Flock to come and collect its hardware.¹⁹

Dayton's spending is also a useful yardstick for a small city reading a big number. Dayton approved $825,750 for 35 cameras in 2024 and took a $90,000 grant for 27 more in early 2026 — an expansion now on hold.^15,16 Deer Park's nine cameras were also part-funded by a grant, per its own minutes.²⁰ The grant is how these programs start in both cities. It is not how they continue.

Los Angeles — the largest customer walked away

In July 2026 the Los Angeles Police Department, one of Flock's largest government customers and the third-largest police force in the country, let its three-year Flock contract expire rather than renew it.^21,22

The department's stated reason was not cost. LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas said the contract "is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues," and specifically "around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras."²¹ He called it "a difficult decision," and said the department was discontinuing use until data, privacy, security and sharing questions could be settled in a contract.^21,22

Gialamas also defended his own department's use of the system in the same interview — "The use is strictly for law enforcement purposes, and it is inherently not for any immigration purposes" — and talks about revised terms were continuing.²¹ So this is not a city declaring the technology illegitimate. It is a very large, very well-resourced police department concluding that Flock's terms were not good enough to sign, which is precisely the question in front of Deer Park.

Flock's response deserves to be quoted in full, because it is the company's standing answer to every city on this page:

Flock's position has been simple: if this technology is going to be used, it should be used with strong privacy protections, strict auditability, and clear oversight. While this latest development comes as a surprise, we remain committed to continuing our active and ongoing conversations with LAPD to find a path forward. We are proud of our partnership with LAPD and the results it has achieved for the city. Flock Safety statement to ABC7 Los Angeles²¹

Separately, Flock told TechCrunch it was confident it could "clear up the current misconceptions" that led to the contract's end — and would not say which misconceptions it meant.²²

Note what the first sentence of that statement concedes. Flock says this technology "should be used with strong privacy protections, strict auditability, and clear oversight." Deer Park has published no privacy policy, no audit, and no oversight mechanism of any kind.¹³ By the vendor's own stated standard, Deer Park's deployment does not qualify.

Central Ohio — the scale of the spend

WOSU obtained records showing 15 departments holding contracts for 319 cameras, totaling nearly $2 million.²⁴ WOSU notes the tally is likely an undercount because several departments did not respond. This is cumulative spending across multiple years, not an annual rate — we work through that arithmetic on the cost page.

The Cincinnati region

FOX19 reported in July 2026 on the spread of Flock cameras through the Tri-State and the Fourth Amendment concerns accompanying it.²⁵ Deer Park's nine cameras sit inside that regional buildout.²³

Cities that ended their programs

Oak Park, Illinois — the closest match to Deer Park

Oak Park is the most instructive case in the country, for two reasons: it had eight cameras to Deer Park's nine, and it is the only jurisdiction the Institute for Justice found publishing routine ALPR reports.^26,27

Its Citizen Police Oversight Committee reported, for July–December 2024 across eight cameras: 373 investigative searches of residents' movement data, producing 2 stops, which yielded 4 arrests and 2 firearms recovered.²⁸

The committee concluded:

With a total of two stops and approximately 2.1 investigative searches per day over this reporting period, it is clear that no statistically significant crime prevention or resolution is realized by using the Flock Safety ALPR System here in Oak Park. Oak Park Citizen Police Oversight Committee semi-annual report²⁸

The Village Board voted on August 5, 2025 to exercise the termination provision in its Flock contract, ending the program immediately — cameras installed August 2022, renewed for a second two-year term in June 2024, terminated early.²⁶

Oak Park also did what Deer Park has not: it published its general order, a camera location map, and a public list of approved crime categories — limiting ALPR use to violent stolen vehicles and carjacking, stolen plates, violent felonies, and missing or endangered persons, with anything beyond that requiring the chief's written approval.^26,29

Cambridge, Massachusetts — terminated for breach

Cambridge deactivated and removed 16 cameras in October 2025. In late November, Flock technicians installed two more without the city's knowledge. Flock attributed it to an outstanding work order that should have been cancelled.

The city called it a "material breach of our trust and the agreement" and terminated the contract on December 10, 2025.^30,31

The relevant lesson for Deer Park is question ten on our council page: what happens to the hardware and the data when a contract ends, and who verifies it?

Mountain View, California — terminated after federal access

Mountain View's own city bulletin reported that federal agencies accessed data from one of its cameras between August and November 2024, through a nationwide search setting "enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge."³²

The city disabled all 30 cameras, and council voted unanimously to terminate in February 2026.^33,34

States and attorneys general

Illinois — an audit with teeth

The Illinois Secretary of State audited 12 agencies and found Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois plate data in violation of state law, and ordered the access shut off.^35,36

Flock's CEO acknowledged the company "didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users," and that "some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information."³⁵

California — the Attorney General sued a city

California's Attorney General sued the City of El Cajon in October 2025 for illegally sharing license plate data out of state, and has continued the litigation since.^37,38

This one cuts in a direction Deer Park should notice: the defendant was the city, not Flock. When data sharing goes wrong, the enforcement target is the municipality that enabled it.

Massachusetts — opting out may not be enough

The ACLU has documented that Flock's network architecture can result in a city's data being shared even when that city opts out of sharing.³⁹

We flag this as advocacy in our source list, and we are not going to assert it as an established fact about Deer Park's configuration. It is a reason the network sharing report is worth requesting rather than assuming.

Atlanta — legislating the process instead of the vendor

Not every response is a cancellation. In Atlanta, the ACLU of Georgia has pushed a Community Control Over Police Surveillance ordinance, which requires council approval and public engagement before any city agency enters or renews a surveillance technology contract. It has passed in 26 other jurisdictions nationally.⁴⁰

This is the structural version of the argument, and Deer Park is a live example of why it exists. Deer Park's council funded this program in November 2024 in a discussion recorded in a few lines of minutes, and has not revisited it substantively since.^20,3 An ordinance of this kind would have required the conversation to happen in public first.

What Flock says about all of this

Flock's public answer to the cancellation list is not that the list is wrong. It is that the list does not matter, because the cameras are inevitable. Chief communications officer Josh Thomas told a Cleveland City Club audience:

License plate readers will be a part of our city infrastructure. If it's not Flock, it'll be somebody else. Josh Thomas, Flock Safety chief communications officer⁴⁰

A Deer Park council member should notice what that argument does and does not address. It may well be right about the long run. It says nothing about whether to sign this contract, with this vendor, on these terms, this year — which is the only question in front of council. "Somebody else will do it eventually" is not a reason to do it now, without a policy, without an audit, and without knowing who can search the data.

The same round-up records Flock's data position, from the same executive: "Our customers own the data, not Flock."⁴⁰ That sentence is the one to hold against the February 2026 contract rewrite, in which the company deleted the sentence "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data" from its own terms.^41,42 We work through that on the claims page.

The pattern

What cities did when they wanted to keep the cameras

Because this is the outcome Deer Park's council may prefer, and it should be able to see what that looks like done properly. Oak Park before termination, and Cleveland after amendment, together supply the template:

• Written general order, published.²⁶
• A public list of approved crime categories, with anything beyond requiring the chief's written approval.²⁶
• A camera location map, public.²⁶
• A stated retention cap — 30 days in Colerain's policy.¹²
• Regular reports to a civilian body: searches, stops, arrests, outcomes.²⁸
• Warrant-only disclosure to outside government authorities.⁸
• A financial penalty for vendor privacy violations.⁸
• No national lookup without a council vote.⁹
• Someone whose job is to read the search logs, and who reports what they find. Dayton's policy contained most of the items above and still failed for three years, until a new commander looked at the logs.¹⁶

Deer Park currently has none of the nine.¹³