For almost a year now, residents involved in the Flock No campaign have been pushing back against surveillance technology in Cleveland.
When we started this campaign, it was really just about Flock – and specifically, about an ordinance for a $2 million no-bid contract introduced just weeks after a sitting city council member left to take job with the company.
But the scope of the campaign has expanded significantly as we’ve learned more about the pervasive, multi-layered infrastructure that this city has built to spy on its own residents.
This includes the Northeast Ohio Fusion Center, a facility where federal agents sit beside Cleveland police, thereby rendering all local protections around information sharing more or less meaningless.
It also includes the Real Time Crime Center (or, as we like to call it, the Real Time Surveillance Center), which uses a software integration tool called Fusus to monitor all of us, all the time.
In the five years since Fusus was implemented, we've gone from audio surveillance in 3 square miles of the city to over 13 square miles; from no drones to a fleet of at least nine; from zero license plate readers to 100; and from 350 integrated cameras to several thousand.
Many of these tools were implemented through grant-funded pilots and approved by the Mayor's own unelected cabinet. Over and over again, residents have been opted into mass data collection without anything resembling an open and democratic process of deliberation. And even when City Hall does stoop to let the unwashed masses weigh in, there is no evidence that our concerns are taken seriously.
A couple weeks ago, with help from Councilman Davis, we learned that despite the 6-month renewal passed by city council in July, the City of Cleveland doesn’t actually have an active contract with Flock.
That’s right: after all those hours we spent in all those meetings, and all that effort that went into all those amendments, the Administration apparently couldn’t be bothered to do the paperwork. So all those guardrails that were supposed to keep us safe are now legally unenforceable.
It seems likely that within the next week or so, the administration will magically produce a properly executed legal agreement backdated to mid-August to make it appear as though everything has been buttoned up this whole time, and this is all just one big misunderstanding.
But that won’t change the fact that we have been begging for these public records for months with no response. It won’t change the fact that the police have had more than 90 days to activate their Flock transparency portal, which was a condition of them continuing to use the tool, and they still have not done so. It won’t change the fact that there is a complete lack of trust between City Hall and Cleveland residents.
The city has issued a fresh RFP for ALPRs, audio surveillance, and drones, but in this context, it is absurd to think that just switching to a different vendor will solve the problem. City council must protect its residents and reject this unchecked expansion of surveillance altogether.
Watch this comment here.