How Cleveland became searchable
Citizen backlash has thrown the spotlight on the city's use of cameras to track vehicle movement.
The cameras are easy to miss until you know what they look like. Then, suddenly, they seem to be everywhere across Northeast Ohio.
They come into view through windshields as small rectangles mounted high on utility poles along the Opportunity Corridor, as neutral-seeming devices watching traffic drift through busy intersections in Shaker Heights. They keep a vigil near school parking lots, commercial strips, apartment entrances, highway ramps. They blend almost perfectly into the visual wallpaper of modern municipal life, traffic lights, road signs, transformers, wires. Nothing about them announces a dramatic shift in civic power. They look administrative. They seem routine.
That is perhaps why so many residents only began noticing them after the controversy started.
This spring, Cleveland found itself at the center of citizen backlash over its relationship with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread rapidly through American cities and suburbs over just the past few years. The city is considering renewing and expanding its contract with the company, a proposal that would maintain Cleveland’s network of roughly 100 license plate readers while adding Flock’s gunshot detection technology in a deal worth more than $2 million over three years.
Read more:
Mysterious Cleveland texts promote Flock traffic license plate readers (Signal Cleveland)
Cleveland’s Flock fight heads to city council (Axios Cleveland)
Some residents say ‘Flock No’ to surveillance tech as Cleveland mulls contract renewal (Ideastream)
Activists Intensify Pressure on Cleveland City Council to Reject Flock Contract Renewal (Cleveland Scene)
None of this happens in a vacuum, and Northeast Ohio is not alone in its relatively rapid expansion of surveillance tools. Nor is Flock Safety the only game in town, though the company has become something of a “Kleenex” in the industry, at least among the public with its brand name standing in for all public cameras and license plate scanners.
