For council members

You voted to fund this program with money the city received from the courts. Your finance director told you at the time that year two was unfunded. The levy floated to cover it was dropped. You have received one performance report in fourteen months. This page is about the decision in front of you and the questions that would let you make it on evidence.

What we are asking you to do

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

We are asking for a decision you already have the authority to make, using a provision the contract almost certainly contains. Oak Park, Illinois exercised the termination provision in its own Flock contract by a simple board motion on August 5, 2025.¹ Cambridge, Massachusetts terminated its contract outright.² This is a normal municipal action, not an extraordinary one.

If council is not prepared to go that far, we ask that you not renew until the protections at the bottom of this page are in the contract in writing. That is the minimum. We think non-renewal is the better answer, and the rest of this page explains why.

What you were told, and what has happened since

We read all 53 posted minutes and public hearing records the city has online. Here is the whole record, without commentary.

Two observations about this table that we think are fair and that you can verify yourself.

The funding question your own staff raised was never answered on the record. Your finance director told you in December 2024 that year two needed a source.⁶ The levy under discussion for that purpose was dropped in January 2025 for reasons unrelated to the cameras.⁸ Nothing in the subsequent eighteen months of minutes identifies what replaced it.

You have never been given operating data. Not a search count, not an alert count, not a false-hit count, not a list of outside agencies with access. One yes-or-no exchange in April 2026 is the complete performance record.¹⁰

The governance gap, stated precisely

Deer Park has no ALPR policy published anywhere on its website. We checked the Police Department pages, the contacts page, the About page, the records policy, and the auditor's reports on July 29, 2026.¹¹

We are careful here: that means none is published, not that none exists. If a general order exists internally, council should have it in front of it, and so should the public.

What other Ohio agencies have done:

• Colerain Township, in your own county, adopted written ALPR Policy 5.40 in April 2025, capping retention at 30 days.¹²
• Dayton published a policy, an impact statement, and the public comments it received — and then found roughly 7,100 immigration-related search requests in its own data anyway, suspended the program, and covered all 72 cameras with trash bags.^13,14,15 Dayton is both the disclosure model and the warning that disclosure alone does not enforce itself.
• Cleveland wrote binding restrictions into the ordinance itself in July 2026 — see below.¹⁶

None of these required a large budget. They required a vote.

What Cleveland's council did, and why it is the useful precedent

On July 15, 2026, Cleveland's council renewed its Flock contract 9–6 — but amended it substantially first. This is the single most useful document for a Deer Park council member, because it is an Ohio legislative body imposing terms on the same vendor. The amendment, signed by an assistant director of law, did the following:^16,17

• 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 any data for any purpose other than law enforcement.
• Required a search warrant based on probable cause for any disclosure to a third-party government authority — and expressly excluded subpoenas, administrative requests, informal inquiries, preservation letters, and national security letters.
• Barred Flock from voluntarily disclosing data based on "good faith belief, contractual enforcement interests, investigatory convenience, or generalized public safety concerns."
• Required Flock to give the safety director advance written notice before any disclosure and a chance to seek protective relief, and to use commercially reasonable efforts to resist overbroad legal process.
• Imposed a financial penalty of up to 25 percent of the contract value for privacy and data-sharing violations.
• Required a public transparency portal and quarterly written reports to the clerk and safety committee.
• Barred sharing data with the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center.

Every one of those is a term a council can demand. Cleveland's council obtained them under time pressure, in a single amendment, on a contract already in front of it.

The counterparty question

Everything above is about Deer Park's own governance. This section is about the company on the other side of the signature, because a renewal vote is a decision to keep trusting a specific vendor's assurances — and with no policy, no audit, and no published contract, assurances are the only protection the city has.

Four items, each from a primary document.

One. Flock told police customers it had no relationship with the Department of Homeland Security, and that was untrue. In September 2025 the company confirmed to Sen. Ron Wyden's office that it had given Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service access to its system as part of a pilot — roughly 200 CBP searches and 175 HSI searches. Flock's own words to the Senator's office: "due to internal miscommunication, customers were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS, while pilot programs with sub-agencies of DHS were briefly active."¹⁸ Wyden's characterization: "Flock deceived its law enforcement customers."¹⁸ Five months later, after the Illinois audit, Flock's CEO said again that "some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information."¹⁹

Two. The contractual promise not to sell customer data has been deleted. Flock's December 2025 terms contained the sentence "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data." Its February 16, 2026 terms do not. The same revision removed the section requiring training images be de-identified and "never sold or shared with third parties," removed the carve-out that had kept gross negligence and willful misconduct outside Flock's liability caps, moved governing law from the customer's home state to Georgia, and made arbitration mandatory.^20,21 We read both documents ourselves. Every change runs in the same direction.

Three. A United States Senator has recommended that cities in this position remove the cameras. Wyden's October 2025 letter states: "local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities."¹⁸ He is one Senator with a stated position, not a court and not a regulator, and we present him as that. But he reached the recommendation after his office questioned the company directly and obtained the DHS admission above.

Four. The accountability features Flock advertises are features somebody at the city has to operate. Flock's own CEO writes that agencies "should prescribe, in their LPR policies, how users should populate that search field" and "should regularly conduct audits."²² Deer Park has no published policy and no published audit.¹¹ On the vendor's own description of how the system stays accountable, the customer-side work is not being done here.

Ten questions for staff

These are written so that each answer is a document or a number, not an assurance. We suggest asking for them in writing before any renewal vote.

1. Produce the signed Flock contract and every amendment. What is the total contract value, the annual value, the signing date, and the exact expiration date?
2. What is funding year two? The December 2024 minutes identified a gap and the January 2025 levy decision closed the option then under discussion.^6,8
3. How many cameras are deployed, and where? The Atlas of Surveillance lists nine as of September 2025, derived from another agency's records.²⁴
4. Is there a written ALPR policy? If yes, produce it. If no, why has none been adopted in the eighteen months the system has operated?
5. What is the data retention period? Colerain Township's is 30 days in writing.¹²
6. Is Deer Park enrolled in Flock's national lookup or any statewide sharing arrangement? Produce the network sharing report and the list of every agency with access to Deer Park's cameras or hotlists.
7. Produce the audit log. How many searches have Deer Park officers run since February 2025, how many searches have outside agencies run against Deer Park's cameras, and what reason codes were entered?
8. How many alerts has the system generated, how many stops resulted, and how many of those stops involved a vehicle that turned out not to be the wanted vehicle? Toledo paid $35,000 for one such stop.²⁵
9. What does the contract say about the vendor's own conduct? Does it contain a data-use restriction, a warrant requirement, breach notification, an audit right, or any penalty? Cleveland's now contains all of these.¹⁶
10. What happens to the data if the contract ends? Cambridge found that Flock installed two cameras after its program was shut down, which the city called a material breach.²

The cost question you should ask before anything else

Nine cameras at the $2,500 per camera per year that two other cities have published would be $22,500 a year.^26,27 We flag clearly that this is arithmetic on another city's published rate, not Deer Park's contract, which has never been made public.

Set against that: the one-time $14,000 from the courts is spent, and the city's own published financial reporting stops at September 2022.^4,28

If the real number is anywhere near $22,500 annually, this is a recurring general-fund obligation created with a one-time windfall and no identified renewal source — which is precisely what your finance director warned about in December 2024.⁶

Contacting council

City Council meets on the first and third Monday of the month at 7:00 pm. 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. Meetings are at 7777 Blue Ash Rd., Deer Park, OH 45236; the city's number is 513.794.8860.^29,30

Council members' names, titles, terms, and email addresses are published by the city and listed on our take action page, with a suggested script for public comment.