State
Dayton police officials said that Flock Automated License Plate Reader data was allegedly shared with federal immigration law enforcement, despite assurances that photos of vehicle license plates were not used for that purpose.
The department said the data was shared several thousand times to help ICE and other immigration-related agencies, prompting officials to announce that the department will indefinitely stop using Flock cameras during its investigation, according to the Dayton Daily News.
The department also said that the person who ran the Support Services Division, which oversees the program, no longer works with them.
“The investigation concluded that the former division commander of the support services division failed to implement the safeguards he helped develop and present in the surveillance impact report. As a result of this failure, the commander will no longer serve in the Dayton Police Department,” outgoing Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal said, adding that the official resigned, retired, or was terminated, the Dayton newspaper reported.
Flock cameras are mounted on poles and capture images of vehicle license plates. The system then uploads the photos to a cloud storage system accessible to law enforcement. Additionally, in case the plates belong to the stolen vehicle, the cameras could send a real-time alert to law enforcement.
“Back in October, DPD noticed a higher than expected level of data sharing, and we began to investigate,” Afzal said last week, adding that the immigration authorities allegedly were allowed to access the photos.
“The investigation over several months determined that approximately 7,100 axis requests cited immigration,” Afzal said. “None of these searches targeted Dayton.”
Afzal also said that his department doesn’t know whether other agencies have taken any action to investigate the alleged scandal. The news source reported that even though the data in Dayton’s system disappears after 30 days, the audit will remain.
All photo sharing was allegedly disabled in November 2025. However, department officials said they didn’t know about the automatic re-enabling, according to the news source.
Soon after that, in January 2026, all federal sharing was allegedly disabled, according to Afzal. As of April 7, all license plate reader data was disabled for organizations outside Dayton law enforcement, with Afzal saying in a city commission meeting on the new Flock cameras that Dayton’s contract with Flock explicitly prohibits immigration authorities from accessing the information.
“We share our data with local law enforcement in Ohio. We will not share with any federal agencies. That’s written in the contract, and that’s how we manage it,” he said.
As of Monday, there is no criminal investigation into the issue, Afzal said.
It looks like the reason why nobody began the criminal investigation was that there is allegedly no proof of intentional wrongdoing or misuse by officers, according to Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein. However, Dickstein said that the officials were responsible for policy violations.
According to the Dayton newspaper, Dickstein said that the city officials “enthusiastically” support outside authorities joining the investigation to determine what happened.
Dayton Mayor Shenise Turner-Sloss and Commissioner Darryl Fairchild want more transparency and accountability into automated license plate reader data violations, urging Dickstein to release more information, WOSU Public Media reported.
“This is not an isolated failure. It is the product of a broader culture, one that minimizes and dismisses the legitimate concerns of residents, evades accountability, and treats oversight as an obstacle rather than an obligation,” they said.
The Dayton Daily News reported that the Dayton City Commission approved the DPD’s automated license plate reader policy in July 2022, and the city of Dayton received an $88,500 grant this January to expand its automated license plate reader program with 27 new cameras.
Flock cameras became the center of another scandal, this time in Columbus, when city officials decided to continue the collaboration with the company, even though there were accusations that immigration officials were using photos taken by the company’s cameras in their work.
The Midwesterner reported on another surveillance issue in Michigan, where people are trying to recall Oakland County Board of Commissioners Chair Dave Woodward over a controversial drone surveillance contract and his alleged dealings with county companies.