Ohio: The Growing Surveillance State?
The Flock Problem
By Imari Burton, Dayton Weekly News
A recent police review in Dayton, Ohio has uncovered roughly 7,100 search requests for flock camera data with the claim cited, regarding “immigration-related purposes”.
This revelation has risen serious questions and concerns locally about who all exactly has been accessing the cities surveillance data, how that information was being shared, the outside enforcement agencies involved, what safeguards were put in place to protect residents, and lastly; just how much of our data and information did those searches actually return?
Dayton’s Flock Investigation Raises Serious Questions
The recent findings prompted the city to suspend (not cancel) its Flock Camera Program while officials continue to investigate how the data sharing occurred along with finding the answers to many of the pressing questions that remain on Dayton locals minds at this time. Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal announced the suspension on May, 1st 2026 after an internal investigation found that the former commander of the Support Services Division had failed to implement safeguards that he himself had helped develop and presented to the Dayton City Commission. Dayton first approved the ALPR program back in July 2022 when Jeffrey Mims Jr. was mayor. Mims, along with Commissioners Matt Joseph and Chris Shaw, each voted in favor of the technology, while Commissioners Shenise Turner-Sloss and Darryl Fairchild voted against it. This technology began its use in Dayton in 2023, in which shortly after in October of 2025, police noticed an unusually high spike in the number of data sharing which prompted the audit and investigation.
Beyond Dayton
But Dayton is far from the only city in the U.S. facing questions about Flock cameras (Automated License Plate Readers/ALPR) growing surveillance network, overall public safety implications, and potential overreach of our civil liberties. Interestingly enough, Ohio seems to be at the center of this growing controversy. As just a couple hours north, Ohio’s capital Columbus is currently facing its own questions about Flock Cameras after another recent audit found they had been searched from outside agencies at least 15,577 times since November of 2023.
Unlike Dayton, Columbus has not suspended its Flock Camera Program even temporarily as it is still active today. Though Columbus has taken steps to restrict how its data can now be accessed and shared. In June, Columbus police disabled the nationwide network sharing function on its Flock cameras, and Mayor Andrew Ginther also ordered police to stop statewide sharing of the city’s Flock data to all “unvetted agencies”. The Columbus audit examined nearly 19.6 million searches of the cities Flock system. Of those, more than 15,000 were identified as searches for “possible immigration-related purposes” making up less than 1%. But the number in itself is still striking. At more than 15,577 searches, Columbus, Ohio currently represents the highest publicly reported number of flock camera searches with the reason for said searches being “potentially immigration-related searches” in the nation at this time.
The broader issue still remains: The data collected on Ohio’s streets were made searchable and accessible beyond the agencies that originally were intended to collected it.
All across the country law-enforcement agencies have gained access to data collected by flock cameras in communities far beyond their own legal jurisdictions, raising further concerns about how easily information is being collected from ordinary citizens, how it can be accessed, shared, and searched outside of where it was originally gathered or even intended for. Flock data has notably also been used recently in abortion cases, residency verification, protests, monitoring activists who were not suspected of crimes, noise complaints, and even several cases of police misuse of license plate data that led to multiple firings, resignations, and criminal investigations in the states of Texas, and Georgia. With the other major incidents in the states of California, Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio that we know of.
The Infrastructure Behind the Surveillance
Moreover, flock cameras don’t just simply store the information captured, as all information collected are transmitted into cloud infrastructure, particularly through Amazon Web Services (AWS) meaning the surveillance data collected from public streets ultimately enters the same cloud-infrastructure that houses enormous amounts of digital data across the country. Flock surveillance systems depend on the digital infrastructure which is held inside the rapidly expanding data center projects going on all around the U.S.
An interesting overlap is that the same six states listed for these controversies and misuse are the same six states who are the biggest players in Americas growing data center infrastructure, with the highest amount of data centers in said states. Ohio is home to what the U.S. Department of Energy calls ”The world’s largest planned AI data center” . A massive 10-gigawatt project at the former Portsmouth nuclear site. The broader development has been discussed as a potential $500 billion investment with proposal discussions providing as much as $250 billion in financing guarantees to OpenAI to build. Making this the single largest data center in size as well as projected total cost should it come to fruition.
As the government continues to deploy more cameras in order to collect more information about where Americans travel, private companies are simultaneously investing in, and building the infrastructure capable of and needed for storing and processing unprecedented amounts of digital information. The result of this is a rapidly expanding ecosystem in which surveillance technology and data infrastructure increasingly depend on one another.
The question now isn’t simply who’s watching us. But also where that information is being stored, who controls the infrastructure holding it, who can access it, and how far that information can travel once it leaves the camera on your local street.
Those are all important questions Ohio, and other states seemingly with a saturation of ALPR’s and Data Centers are currently grappling with. And soon, the rest of the country before the surveillance infrastructure itself already in place becomes even larger. The thousands of searches identified in Dayton, along with the far larger number uncovered in Columbus demonstrate how quickly a surveillance system designed for local public safety can actually become part of a much broader covert information sharing network.
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