AINEWS
The bill would cap data retention at 10 days, ban third party sharing, and make personal use a felony. The privately operated, cross jurisdiction network sits outside any state law's reach.
About 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras, run by a single private company and accessed by roughly 6,000 law enforcement agencies, log American drivers' comings and goings every day. An Ohio state senator wants to draw some hard lines around how the state can use that data. The lines he is proposing are narrow, and the data network sits well outside them.
State Sen. Al Cutrona, a Republican from Canfield, said he plans to introduce legislation that, as he described it to the Salem News, would bar any Ohio government entity from sharing Flock Safety camera data with third parties, cap automatic deletion at 10 days instead of the current rolling 30, and make personal or non-law-enforcement use of the data a fourth-degree felony punishable, per the senator's description, by up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine. The proposal follows reports of officers using the system for personal reasons — including a Columbus Police Department disclosure that it ran plate-reader searches on behalf of federal immigration enforcement — as questions about officer misuse have drawn scrutiny to the technology.
Flock Safety's cameras are automated license plate readers mounted on poles, in patrol cars, and on private property. Each camera photographs every passing vehicle, runs the plate through a database, and pings the operator when it hits a hot list (stolen cars, wanted persons, registered sex offenders, and so on). The data the cameras collect is searchable across the network: an officer in Youngstown can run a plate and see every Flock-equipped jurisdiction that camera has passed through. The network's national scale, roughly 6,000 agencies and 120,000 cameras, including about 400 Ohio entities from hospitals and school districts to HOAs and retailers, is the part the bill does not touch.
What the bill does address is the abuse pattern that has emerged in Ohio over the past year. Cutrona's legislation, confirmed by WFMJ, will be introduced and assigned to a Senate committee. The third-party sharing ban would stop an Ohio police department from selling or otherwise transferring plate-reader data to a private party, a federal agency, or another government the bill's authors had not authorized. The 10-day retention cap would force Flock Safety to delete Ohio plate reads after 10 days unless they had been flagged for an active investigation. And the felony provision would make it a crime for any Ohio employee to use the data for personal reasons — the kind of conduct that has drawn scrutiny to the technology following reports of officer misuse.
What the bill cannot do is shrink the network itself. Flock Safety is a private company that operates nationally. An Ohio law cannot stop an out-of-state officer from querying Ohio plate data, or force another state's agency to shorten its retention window. It can only govern what Ohio's own roughly 400 entities do with the system. The data retention cap is the most ambitious part: by cutting Ohio's retention window in half, the bill tries to shrink the searchable history an Ohio plate leaves behind, even when an out-of-state officer looks it up.
Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, framed the broader debate this way when asked about Flock: "Just because a tool is abused does not mean that the tool is not an effective tool." That captures where the bill lands. It does not outlaw the cameras or the cross-jurisdiction search. It says Ohio will police how its own people use the tool, and leave the tool itself in place.
The Ohio General Assembly adjourned in June and does not reconvene until after the November 3 election. Any bill not passed by December 31 dies and would have to be reintroduced for the 2027-28 session. Cutrona said he plans to introduce the legislation when members return, but the calendar leaves at most a few weeks of committee time and a single floor vote to move a bill that would change how every Ohio city, county, and school district handles plate-reader data.
The Columbus Police Department has not said whether it will continue using Flock cameras after the immigration-enforcement disclosure. The Senate committee that picks up Cutrona's bill will likely hold its first hearing within weeks of the legislature's return.