What Deer Park actually has

Everything below comes from Deer Park's own council minutes. We read all 53 posted minutes and public-hearing records from 2024 through June 2026 and every earlier document the city has online. Flock appears eight times. This is the complete public record of how Deer Park acquired, paid for, and reported on a surveillance camera system.

How we built this page

The city posts its council minutes as PDFs. Most are posted as scans of the printed page rather than as searchable text, so a word search finds nothing in them — which is a large part of why this record has not been assembled before. We downloaded all of them, ran optical character recognition over every page, and read each Flock passage against the original page image to confirm the transcription.

Then we searched the whole set for flock, camera, license plate, ALPR, and surveillance, including the misspellings a scan commonly produces. Eight passages mention the program. All eight are quoted below in full context.

The timeline

March 4, 2024 — a council member asks for cameras; the chief suggests something else

The first camera discussion in the record has nothing to do with Flock. Council member Natasha Kohorst "asked about a camera system to use near the Dillonvale Shopping Center for safety as well as crime prevention." The response is notable: "Chief Battin suggested lighted crosswalks instead."¹

Eight months later the city bought nine plate readers.

November 4, 2024 — the vote

The city manager brought a funding opportunity to council. From the minutes:

The city has received 14,000 in funds from the courts that Dr. Jetter would like to earmark for the Police Department Flock program. We are one of 10-15 agency's that do not have this program. Flock provides cameras' on the side of some roads, it can determine license plate and type of car but cannot see inside of the car. We have borrowed some from other cities to test, they helped solve an auto theft as well as 5 hit skip cases in the last 60 days. Deer Park City Council minutes, November 4, 2024²

The vote followed immediately:

Mr. Camp made a motion to earmark the $14,000 the city received towards the Flock program, Mayor Donnellon seconded the motion. Roll call vote: Mr. Camp - yes, Ms. Downs-yes, Ms. Kohorst- yes, Ms. Westmark- yes, Mayor Donnellon- yes. Motion carried. Deer Park City Council minutes, November 4, 2024²

Two of the seven council members were absent and excused that night.²

Three things are worth noticing about this record. First, the case for adoption was that other agencies have it — "we are one of 10-15 agency's that do not have this program." Second, the trial results are reported as a count of cases the cameras helped with, and nothing else: no error count, no number of stops of innocent drivers, no total number of vehicles recorded. Third, no one raised retention, sharing, audits, or who outside Deer Park would be able to search the data. The minutes record no such discussion, and no such rule was adopted.

November 18, 2024 — funding year two, and a levy

Two weeks later, council thanked the chief for a Flock report and asked when the program would start:

Mr. Kelly thanked Chief Battin for the Flock report, and thanked council for voting to fund the camera system. He asked timeline for the start of the program and Chief Battin said 2025. Chief Battin stated it would be placed on social media so the public would be aware of when the program starts. Deer Park City Council minutes, November 18, 2024³

Under New Business the same night, the finance director raised the money problem and a possible tax increase to solve it:

Police Department will also need some addition funds for the flock camera program. A grant covers part of the cost but not the entire amount, Sheena suggested a 1 mill levy which would cost residents about $35 per 100,000 generating about $100,000 a year. Deer Park City Council minutes, November 18, 2024³

So within two weeks of the vote, the Flock program was already part of the argument for a new property tax levy.

December 2, 2024 — the contract term, and the year-two gap

The clearest statement of what Deer Park signed up for:

Sheena discussed the Flock program for the Police Department, the contract with Flock lasts for 2 years, and if we cannot pay the equipment is taken back. While we have most of the funding for year 1, we need to be aware we need to find the money for year 2. Deer Park City Council minutes, December 2, 2024⁴

Read that again. The city's own finance director told council, before the cameras were installed, that Deer Park had most of year one covered and no identified source for year two.

The same meeting records the levy pressure: "Dr. Jetter discussed the Police Levy, council needs to make a decision, levy could be lowered to a half mill," alongside a fire levy renewal, a possible school levy, and a road levy renewal.⁴ On December 16, staff prepared "versions of the levy, 1 mill and .5 mill to have ready just in case council decides to move forward."⁵

January 20, 2025 — the levy is dropped

City Manager - decision was made to not put a Police operating levy on ballot, it would have impacted the homestead tax credit many of the residents receive. Deer Park City Council minutes, January 20, 2025⁶

The funding mechanism floated to pay for Flock's second year was abandoned for a legitimate reason unrelated to the cameras. Nothing in the subsequent record identifies what replaced it. The question "where does year two money come from" was raised by the city's own finance director and, as far as the public record shows, never answered.

February 3, 2025 — the cameras go live

Mr. Kelly asked about the Flock program, 2 officers left for training, it will be completed tomorrow and cameras will be in use this month. Deer Park City Council minutes, February 3, 2025⁷

Two officers trained. Cameras live. No policy adopted before, during, or after.

April 20, 2026 — the only performance report in fourteen months

Between February 2025 and June 2026 — the most recent minutes posted — the record contains exactly one substantive mention of the program:

she asked Chief Battin if the Flock camera is helping with the hit skip reports, and he stated it is. Deer Park City Council minutes, April 20, 2026⁸

That is the entire public accounting of a surveillance system in its second year: one yes-or-no exchange. No number of searches. No number of hits. No number of misreads. No number of stops. No list of agencies that queried Deer Park's cameras.

Compare what Oak Park, Illinois required its police department to report every month: which agencies have direct access to the network, which have access to hotlists, which have searched the data, and a full audit of account activity.⁹ Deer Park's council has asked for none of this, and has been given none of it.

How many cameras, and who can see them

The Atlas of Surveillance — a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno — lists the Deer Park Police Department as operating nine Flock ALPRs as of September 2025.¹⁰

The way that number was obtained matters more than the number. It came from a Flock "shared devices list" produced under a public records request to a different police agency. Deer Park's cameras appeared in another department's system.¹⁰ Whatever the sharing settings on Deer Park's account are, at least one agency outside Deer Park could enumerate its devices.

Nobody has told Deer Park residents which agencies can search these cameras. That is the question Cleveland's council forced onto the record for its own city, and the question Oak Park's oversight committee demanded monthly reporting on.^11,9

Where the cameras are — as far as volunteers have mapped

There is no official camera list, so this is the best available picture, and it is a crowdsourced one.

What is not published

We checked the city website on July 29, 2026 — the Police Department pages, the department contacts page, the About page, the public records policy, and the auditor's fund reports. We found no ALPR policy, no retention schedule, no audit requirement, no data-sharing rule, and no camera inventory.¹⁴

By contrast, Colerain Township — a Hamilton County agency ten minutes away — adopted a written ALPR policy in April 2025 capping retention at 30 days.¹⁵ Dayton published its ALPR policy, its impact statement, and the public comments on it.¹⁶ Oak Park published its general order, its camera location map, and semi-annual public reports on every search.¹⁷ None of this requires a large city or a large budget. It requires a decision.

The two numbers residents still do not have

Deer Park's city government does not publish enough for a resident to answer the two questions that decide a renewal:

1. What does the contract actually cost, per year and in total? The $14,000 from the courts was a one-time sum, and a grant covered part of the cost.^2,3 The full contract value has never been stated in the minutes.
2. When exactly does it expire? A two-year contract with cameras in use from February 2025 points to early 2027, but no signing date and no expiration date appears anywhere in the record.⁴

The city's published financial reporting cannot fill the gap: as of July 29, 2026 the most recent auditor's fund report on the city website is from September 2022, three years before Flock was purchased.¹⁸

For scale, if Deer Park pays the rate two other cities have published — $2,500 per camera per year — nine cameras would cost $22,500 a year, or $45,000 over a two-year term.^19,20 We stress that this is arithmetic on someone else's published price, not Deer Park's contract. See cost to taxpayers for the full working and its limits.

Both facts are obtainable with a single records request. Here is how to ask for them.