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DELAWARE — If you’ve ever experienced that hair-prickling feeling that something is watching you, it might be a Flock Safety camera.
The cameras are used in Delaware, Powell, Sunbury, Dublin, Westerville, Worthington, Hilliard, Gahanna, Upper Arlington and other Central Ohio communities.
But they’re not watching you; they’re watching your vehicle.
These artificial intelligence-powered cameras are Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems. Law enforcement agencies use them to track and identify vehicles.
They do not employ facial recognition, but instead use AI to log physical vehicle characteristics, such as license plate number, make, model, color and identifying features such as a bumper sticker.
Flock Safety cameras are in use across the United States, serving more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, 6,000 communities and 1,000 businesses, according to Flock’s website.
The Delaware Police Department (DPD) operates and utilizes 17 cameras within city limits.
There are also homeowners associations and construction sites that privately own and operate cameras, Police Chief Adam Moore said.
Moore did not know an exact count of those privately-owned cameras, but a map from DeFlock shows 20 cameras that are fully or partially in Delaware’s municipality limits.
“At this time, we do not have plans for additional installations,” Moore said.
How do police use the cameras?
In December 2024, Delaware City Council officially approved an ordinance authorizing a three-year master services agreement with Flock Group Inc.
The ordinance initially authorized the department to install the 17 cameras in public right-of-ways throughout the city, with an initial startup and installation cost of $62,050 out of the DPD’s 2024 operating budget.
The annual maintenance of the system requires an annual subscription renewal fee of $51,000.
As the police department relies on the city’s general fund for operations, local municipal income tax revenue and property taxes fund Flock operations.
“Decisions on maintaining or expanding the program will likely be considered at the conclusion of the initial 36‑month agreement,” Moore said.
According to the DPD Flock Transparency Portal, Flock cameras have detected 490,577 unique license plates in the past 30 days, as of June 9.
The system retains that data for 30 days, according to the portal.
Flock cameras also captured 674 hotlist hits, which functions as a digital watchlist of license plate numbers connected to “vehicles of interest.”
Hotlists connect to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and state databases to flag stolen vehicles, fugitives, AMBER Alerts, and missing persons.
Delaware Police can also upload a vehicle linked to certain crimes, but Moore said the department does this process sparingly and with heavy oversight from supervisors.
Moore said just last week, in the middle of the night, a Flock Camera caught a reported-stolen car. Officers eventually had to deploy spike strips to catch the driver.
But police use the cameras in other ways too, including asking the cameras to look for a specific color, make and model linked to other crimes, such as scamming.
Police once used the cameras in that fashion to help an elderly woman scammed out of $100,000, Moore said. The cameras picked up the license plate and the suspects were located in Springfield.
Moore also pointed to a time when a victim of sexual assault explained her alleged assaulter picked her up and drove her to another town, citing the roads they drove on.
Police were able to corroborate her story by using the cameras to show the car type did in fact drive on the roads she mentioned.
Safety and privacy concerns
However, not everyone feels these cameras protect individuals privacy, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
The organization argues these cameras create massive, unregulated and widespread surveillance systems that routinely track the daily movements of innocent drivers.
Another organization, DeFlock, maps out these cameras and advocates against their usage.
In Dayton, police suspended the city’s use of its Flock cameras indefinitely and covered the cameras with trash bags in May following an investigation that revealed data was improperly shared with outside agencies for immigration-related searches.
The Dayton Police Department initiated an administrative investigation, which found that a network-sharing feature that should not have been enabled led to around 7,100 search requests citing immigration-related purposes from various law enforcement agencies, according to a WHIO article.
“I can’t speak for how Flock cameras are used across the country, I can speak to how they’re used here across the local community,” Moore said.
“We hire good people, we have good policy, we have things in place and if there is a violation we will immediately take steps to correct that.”
Moore also pointed out he rarely can make out the gender, race or other characteristics of the driver from a Flock picture. The pictures do not identify drivers.
For anyone concerned about how the police use Flock cameras, Moore invites skeptics to stop by the station for a demonstration of how police use the system.
