Akron officials in City Council chambers Feb. 9 condemned the tactics of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement in the wake of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. They railed against bills moving through Ohio’s Statehouse, saying forced collaboration with the agency was an affront to Akron’s autonomy, a waste of city resources and a danger to the city’s immigrants.
“We have no interest and no desire to take part” in ICE sweeps, said Akron Mayor Shammas Malik during the Public Safety Committee meeting earlier that day. “We’ve seen them stoke fear even here in Akron as we’ve talked to members of the immigrant and refugee community.”
Inside City Hall, an anti-ICE resolution passed unanimously that night.
Outside City Hall, just as it had since then-Mayor Dan Horrigan’s administration, the Akron network of nearly 150 Flock Safety surveillance cameras continued logging every car that drove by into a database instantly accessible to thousands of law enforcement agencies.
Hundreds of those departments are deputized to enforce federal immigration laws.
On that day alone, Akron’s Flock system was accessed at least 41 separate times, explicitly and exclusively for federal immigration enforcement by law enforcement agencies in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Kansas. All of the agencies collaborate with ICE.
Who searched Akron’s Flock network for immigrants?
(Editor’s note: click the box in the upper left-hand corner to open the map legend.)
How does Flock surveillance in Akron work?
In Akron, as in 6,000 other jurisdictions Flock says are in its network, the cameras mounted alongside city streets:
- Capture images documenting every car that passes, including license plates, vehicle characteristics and the exact time and location.
- Log the information into a database and store it for 30 days. Flock announced in August, amid growing pushback and headlines detailing widespread abuse, that the data retention period would shrink to a week.
- Can be searched by thousands of other agencies that use Flock by entering searches for a particular vehicle’s attributes such as its license plate, make, model and color.
- Allow law enforcement to know someone’s daily patterns, where they are and where they are likely to be.
Search logs of Akron’s network obtained and analyzed by Signal Akron show that police agencies outside of Akron accessed its Flock information 33.4 million times in the 18 months between December 2024 and June 2026. During that time, at least 8,829 documented searches from at least 369 different agencies were clearly labeled as being necessary to aid the work of federal immigration targets.
Flock Safety has long declared ICE does not have an account with the company, nor does Flock share data with ICE. But civil liberties advocates across the country, including Akron City Council Member Fran Wilson and a growing number of Akron residents, have been ringing alarms about so-called “back door” access available to more than 1,000 state or local law enforcement agencies cooperating with and deputized by ICE.
“We’re seeing all across the U.S. that it doesn’t matter if you are an immigrant or refugee with paperwork, citizenship or not, you are still likely to end up being arrested and detained,” Wilson said in an interview with Signal Akron. “This technology opens Akron up for our former refugees and immigrants to be on the radar for an immigration force and a federal administration that is actively hunting, arresting, detaining and deporting everyday neighbors regardless of citizenship status or criminal history.”
City turns off Flock access for immigration and abortion searches
Malik’s office told Signal Akron last week that the city blocked searches for immigration and abortion — Akron’s network was accessed in a controversial abortion investigation in 2025 — in May, amid increasing coverage of Flock abuses nationwide. That change came after the office learned “that a toggle existed which would no longer allow these searches to occur.”
Records show that explicit immigration searches stopped after the mayor’s office turned off the access. But millions of searches that contain no information related to their purpose are still being made using Akron’s Flock data.
In its analysis, Signal Akron tallied entries made in the 18 months of records that explicitly state “immigration,” “ICE,” or “alien.” Signal Akron excluded entries with those terms if they also included a reference to a state criminal law that local municipal, county or state agencies typically would enforce. The biggest hurdle to a full accounting of immigration-related queries is that millions of the searches in Akron’s network include vague or indecipherable justifications.
Most searches of Akron Flock data came from agencies participating with ICE
Signal Akron’s records show that most documented immigration searches between December 2024 and May 2026 were from agencies typically searching among hundreds or thousands of Flock networks, which are the collections of cameras controlled by a particular entity, like the City of Akron. On average, the agencies searched 2,257 different jurisdictions at once.
The bulk of the known immigration searches from across the country that included Akron came from agencies participating in an ICE program that delegates immigration authority to state and local law enforcement. The agencies are mostly, but not exclusively, located in Southern states with laws that mandate local cooperation with the federal agency.
For example:
- In Florida, 50 separate agencies conducted 3,052 documented immigration-related searches that included Akron’s records — more than a third of all the immigration searches.
- The Florida Highway Patrol, the agency that most frequently searched Akron records, was responsible for 1,171 searches (most frequent reason: “ice warrant”).
- The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission had the fourth-highest number of searches overall (most frequent: “Immigration (criminal) – I.C.E.”)
- In Texas, 52 separate agencies conducted 1,200 immigration searches that included Akron.
- The Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office’s 240 searches ranked highest in the state (most frequent reason: “Immigration”) and eighth-highest overall.
- In Louisiana, 12 separate agencies conducted 1,038 immigration searches that included Akron.
- The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, 30 miles south of New Orleans, was the second-most frequent immigration searcher in Akron’s audit, with 891 entries (most frequent reasons: “Immigration (criminal), Immigration (civil/administrative).”
- In Georgia, 39 separate agencies conducted 891 searches.
- The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, just north of the Florida border, conducted 616 documented immigration-related searches (most frequent reason: “ICE”), the third most by a single agency of any in the country.
- In Indiana, 20 separate agencies conducted 426 searches.
- The Grant County Sheriff’s office, halfway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, conducted 304 of them (most frequent reason: “Immigration (civil/administrative) – Test”).
Wilson, the Ward 1 City Council member since December 2025, received a similar set of records as Signal Akron that document searches using Akron’s Flock data. The massive file size crashed their computer when they tried to open it.
Wilson said the records reflect a significant intrusion on Akron’s residents.
“I continue to have very deep reservations about our ability to take action on something that is clearly a problem all across the United States and here in Ohio,” Wilson said.
Malik acknowledged that “no system is perfect” in a statement in response to Signal Akron’s questions about access to the city’s Flock data. “Our responsibility is to ensure this tool serves legitimate public-safety needs while protecting privacy and maintaining public trust.”
Controversial Texas abortion search used Akron Flock camera data
Akron’s Flock database was also used on May 9, 2025, to search for a Texas woman accused by her partner of a self-managed abortion, according to the records obtained by Signal Akron.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s office logged “had an abortion, search for female” in two nationwide Flock searches for the woman. The first search sought a week of records among 1,294 other Flock networks outside Johnson County. A second, 74 seconds later, expanded the search to a month of records from 6,809 networks. Akron’s data was included in both searches.
After 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found the search in an audit of other networks, national headlines followed. But the notoriety of the incident didn’t trigger any review of Akron’s handling of Flock data or prompt any changes to outside access at the time.
Signal Akron found Akron was included in an average of 13.4 daily searches from the rural Texas agency prior to searches labeled “had an abortion, search for female” and an average of 19 daily searches in the aftermath.
While only two of the Johnson County Sheriff’s searches contain references to abortion, most of the agency’s 9,961 searches in the 18-month period from December 2024 to June 2026 do not contain enough information to determine the reasons behind them.
After the city shut down abortion-related searches in May, the agency’s 1,447 searches contain hundreds with no way to check their intent. “Wanted person” is listed in 200 searches alone.
The 33.4 million overall searches that accessed Akron’s Flock data include millions that contain little information about their purpose, making it impossible to determine their intent.
Variants of the single word “investigation” were listed 3.2 million times — nearly 10 percent of all searches — giving no indication of what or who was being investigated. The 714,948 entries listing only the three lower-case letters “inv,” for investigation, would fill Ohio Stadium to capacity seven times over if each were assigned a seat.
Others have even less detail, irrelevant rationales or no detail at all.
- 2,034 searches state only “1234.”
- 8,426 searches state only “TBD.”
- 143 searches list only “?”
- 157 searches state either “lol” or “LOL” (laugh out loud), including from the nearby Barberton Police Department.
- 23 searches log either just “weird” or “weirdo.” Additional searches include “driving around being weird” and “Weird dude susp auto.”
Akron police officers listed immigration enforcement
Signal Akron also obtained a log of 145,000 Flock searches made by Akron Police officers.
The records indicate two officers submitted searches investigating non-criminal immigration infractions, once in January and twice in late June. Those three entries list “Immigration (civil/administrative) – suspicious vehicle.”
In response to questions from Signal Akron last week, the mayor’s office said it investigated those searches. The two officers who conducted them said they accidentally included those explanations from a list of pre-formulated justifications. The mayor’s office said that option was removed months ago.
Stephanie Marsh, the city’s spokesperson, told Signal Akron in August that the city had not done a widespread audit. But in October, Malik said in a statement that the city was “conducting a broader audit of how Flock is used, who has access and whether our safeguards are sufficient to identify inappropriate activity.”
Marsh said that “when looking for misuse, there is an automated review of all searches in our system that will flag certain searches for further analysis.” The flags include: multiple searches in a short period of time; searches for the same [license] plate over an extended period of time; and any searches for material outside of the city’s retention window for data.”
Any searches that are flagged are reviewed once a week by an internal team of supervisors, who “dig deeper if further analysis is needed.”
The system only flags what it’s been told to, “so some areas of concern might be missed,” Marsh said.
Akron’s Flock cameras used by Davon Fields while on leave
The Akron Beacon Journal reported Sept. 30 that then-Akron Police Officer Davon Fields used Flock while on administrative leave in the months after he killed Jazmir Tucker in November 2024.
The mayor’s office said it immediately took action after it was contacted by the paper about Fields’ use of Flock and initiated a criminal investigation. It also barred on-leave officers from the technology.
But an email provided to Signal Akron documents that an Akron resident and critic of the APD warned the mayor’s office and Akron City Council members in July after the resident found a record of Fields’ search on haveibeenflocked.com, an open-source website that maps license plate readers across the U.S.
“We went back to see if that email had been received and it was. It is unclear whether it was reviewed when it was sent,” Marsh said in an email. “Regretfully, we overlooked the information about Fields’ Flock access that was attached in that email. That information should have prompted review sooner.”
Marsh said the activist who sent the warning about Fields also sent the mayor’s office 10 others that day.
“It’s unfortunate it was not caught sooner but no one in this administration was aware of Fields using Flock while on leave until Sept. 17 when we spoke with Derek Kreider from the Beacon,” she wrote.
How Signal Akron processed the Flock data related to this article
Signal Akron obtained the Flock search logs it used in this reporting via a public records request with the City of Akron. The request was initiated after a recent Akron Beacon Journal story used Flock data from the city to detail how former police officer Davon Fields used the surveillance tool while on administrative leave.
Signal Akron acquired the data used in this story on Oct. 7. Records of the 33.4 million outside searches of Akron’s network were contained in 19 csv files, each containing between 1.4 million and 2.1 million rows documenting every search over 565 days.
Signal Akron used the open-source analytics tool DuckDB and SQL queries to combine the 19 separate files. We then used the open-source database management tool DBeaver to review the unified 33.4 million-row database. Signal Akron used SQL queries to search for key words in the “reason” column of the Flock database, which contained the verbatim explanation of the officer who conducted a Flock search within Akron’s networks.
The terms included “immigration,” “alien” and “ICE,” excluding entries with “ice” embedded in other words (typically “police” or “justice”).
To isolate searches justified solely on immigration grounds, Signal Akron did not count entries that also contained other words indicating suspicions of a criminal violation. The keyword-matching strategy likely missed less obvious immigration-related searches.
Signal Akron analyzed key departments’ use of Akron’s network by again conducting an SQL query for the agency’s name and then exporting those results into Google Sheets.
Our reporter checked the figures obtained using DBeaver and SQL queries against the results from a similar process using Microsoft Excel’s Power Query Editor and the internet-based spreadsheet tool Row Zero.
