For drivers in the City of Akron, there’s a good chance a police officer can track where they went, when they were there and the route they took before and after their trip.
From main thoroughfares to neighborhood streets, nearly 150 Flock Safety cameras are mounted throughout the city, logging the license plates of every vehicle that drives by into a database searchable for the next 30 days by law enforcement agents nationwide.
Across the country, officers in more than 6,000 agencies operate roughly 120,000 Flock cameras that don’t need a warrant to discover where the drivers have been.
For example, a sheriff’s department in Texas used the technology to track a woman suspected of driving out of state to have an abortion, searching cameras nationwide for her. Akron City Council Member Fran Wilson, who represents Ward 1, recently discovered Flock explicitly allows the technology to be used to enforce anti-abortion laws in jurisdictions that don’t proactively set up a filter against it.
The spokesperson for the Akron Police Department told Signal Akron the feature is turned off in Akron for anti-abortion law enforcement, as it is for immigration enforcement.
A Flock spokesperson told Signal Akron Monday that the company “offers an immigration and reproductive care filters within the system that can be activated by the agency. When the filters are activated, if a user attempts to search for reasons associated with immigration enforcement or reproductive care, the platform automatically prevents the search from including networks that have the filter on.”
But for a long period of time in Akron, officers infrequently logged any reason for why they tracked a car. APD records from a five-month period in 2025 obtained by Signal Akron document a list of more than 37,000 Flock searches by officers that listed no discernible reason for the use of the cameras and database, despite APD policy that requires it.
That makes it nearly impossible to know how Akron’s system, introduced in 2022, was used at that time.
The city’s spokesperson said that since October of 2025, in response to a complaint, the APD has required more thorough recordkeeping of Flock searches.
Nationwide, the company is facing widespread accusations of facilitating stalking and other abuses by law enforcement, increasingly loud alarm bells from civil liberties advocates, “unprecedented” vandalism of the expensive license-plate tracking cameras, and growing debates inside city governments about whether to continue the contracts.
‘Don’t trust what you read on Facebook’ about Flock cameras
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley and other executives convened a conference call on Thursday, Aug. 6, for local Ohio law enforcement and government officials.
“You already know what this partnership does for your agency,” the Wednesday morning emailed invitation states. “This is the chance to put someone else’s doubts to rest, and this is not an opportunity that comes around again.”
In an email to Signal Akron, a Flock spokesperson wrote that “Thursday’s discussion was a customer conversation focused on communications and public safety.”
Wilson, a staunch critic of Flock, joined the Thursday afternoon call and invited a Signal Akron reporter to sit in on it.
The message from Flock executives to the local police officials on the call — including chiefs from Medina, Strongsville, Euclid, South Euclid, and other area officials — was clear.
Flock Safety executives, Langley explained, are working to counter the growing criticism of the camera surveillance system.
Their solution, discussed on the call, is a public relations campaign to sway local and national media, online critics and the “skeptical” government officials whose opposition could put the contracts, and the technology lauded by police departments, at risk.
As part of that, Langley said 80 percent of his time now is spent doing national media interviews.
“It’s the most impactful thing we’re trying to do, guys. I’m averaging three to four national interviews per day,” he said.
But he encouraged the local Flock clients to leave the national interviews to him. “Let me handle the New York Times. You handle your local media,” Langley said. “They want to hear from you, you know your reporters, they’ll pick up a sob story.”
Langley also urged each agency to join a new portal used by roughly 2,000 of its customers, to pool Flock “success stories,” including those from across Ohio, to better counter local criticism.
“We’re seeing really positive results where now you have a place to point people, saying, ‘These are the facts,’” Langley said. ”You know, ‘Don’t trust what you read on Facebook, don’t trust what you read on instagram, these are the facts for our town.’”
More frequent vandalism of expensive Flock cameras, including in Akron
Police officials on the call, including from the Medina Police Department and Lorain County Sheriff’s Office, were concerned about more frequent vandalism of the cameras, along with the associated costs, that might mean a loss of the tool for their departments.
Langley said Flock is starting to offer an insurance plan that agencies can buy for every camera (later confirmed by a Flock spokesperson to be $500 per year per camera) and is working to implement vandalism detection in cameras, though he had concerns that a maintenance worker could be labeled a vandal.
“A lot of this is such a contentious issue that we’re not going to be able to go back to our legislative bodies and ask for extra money to pay for [these] extra damaged cameras or for any type of insurance plans,” Medina Police Chief Edward Kinney told Langley.
“We’ve definitely had some isolated incidents of Flock cameras being damaged and vandalized throughout the city,” Akron police spokesperson Lt. Michael Murphy told Signal Akron.
Flock technology can be used for abortion and immigration enforcement
Wilson was one of the few other officials to ask Langley a question. The council member said they learned that a Flock administrator in Akron mentioned a new “abortion filter” and asked for more information about it.
Langley instead sharply criticized a widely read 404 Media story last year about the Texas officer who tracked a woman accused of seeking an abortion out of state. Langley said, incorrectly, that the reporting didn’t include the context that her family was worried for her safety.
“There’s a few things, right, because one, it’s not illegal to have an abortion in Texas. It’s illegal to administer an abortion,” Langley argued. “So the woman could never have been under investigation for having an abortion.”
The officer’s “reason” for the search stated “had an abortion, search for female.” Langley did not elaborate further on Flock’s current abortion-specific tracking technology, which Wilson asked about, and the Ward 1 representative did not come away from the meeting feeling any better than before it.
“Generally, I walked away with a sense that this technology has collected an absolute treasure trove of data and is being used in ways that Flock isn’t being forward enough about,” Wilson said after the call.
“I was really shocked that we have immigration and abortion-related offense filtering for a public safety technology. The fact that even exists tells us a lot about where we are in the country. It is disgusting that this technology is being used for such offenses. We are in a dark time. That is morally and ethically where my head was at, at the end of that call.”
146 Flock cameras deployed in Akron
In the city’s Flock surveillance logs obtained by Signal Akron, APD officers and analysts search for cars in Akron’s network and, frequently, hundreds or thousands of other networks nationwide. More than 12,000 of those searches included at least 600 other networks, including 400 searches of more than 5,000 Flock networks nationwide.
In thousands of those instances, the searches listed indecipherable, vague or no justification at all in violation of the APD rules for the technology, but the city now requires officers to select a reason from a drop down menu — they also have the ability to log more justification.
In the 2025 records obtained by Signal Akron, roughly 10,000 of those entries do not list a license plate. Instead, the officers searched for a broad descriptor of the car, such as the color or make and model. Nearly 5,000 searches just list “investigation,” including misspellings and abbreviations, as the reason for the search. Hundreds just list “crime,” and thousands more contain no information or seemingly random letters.
During that period, a complaint showed that an APD analyst and officer tracked a car belonging to Autumn Riddle, a prominent critic of the Akron police and the November 2024 killing of Jazmir Tucker. One entry listed “activist recording” as the reason for the search and another listed only “LE.”
An internal APD investigation of the tracking said the searches weren’t retaliatory or harassment because of Riddle’s activism, but that the scant information included in them violated the department’s policy.
Akron’s Independent Police Auditor, Anthony Finnell, backed up that finding and declared that the searches “fail to identify a crime, public-safety concern, or investigative nexus and therefore undermine the department’s ability to demonstrate reasonableness, necessity, and proportionality after the fact.”
The records obtained by Signal Akron show that officers used the “LE” tag as the sole reason for a search in 138 instances in that five-month period.
City of Akron spokesperson Stephanie Marsh said that the five months of records from 2025 analyzed by Signal Akron are not indicative of how the department tracks the searches now because of the more thorough documentation currently required.
“After this citizen complaint came in and we realized there was an issue with how officers were documenting their searches, we changed it so that now officers have to choose from a drop down list of options for searches,” Marsh wrote in an email.
“They do still have the ability to add additional information related to a search and if it’s already related to a case, they are required to include the case number as well.”
Marsh said the cameras are essential to the city’s policing efforts.
“Flock cameras have proven to be an important tool for law enforcement, helping support criminal investigations, giving officers another resource to identify and apprehend those responsible for serious crimes, as well as helping to recover missing persons. At the same time, we understand there are concerns in our community about the use of this technology, and we look forward to having thoughtful conversations with residents about those concerns in the coming months.”
