Breaking ranks with Kent and Kent State University, the Brimfield Township Trustees recently approved a one-year, $12,000 contract renewal with Flock Safety, a technology company that provides public and private entities with license plate readers and other surveillance capabilities.
The township has four Flock cameras, two in the commercial area along Tallmadge Road and two by the hotels on state Route 43 near the I-76 interchange, Police Chief Chris Adkins said.
Brimfield first inked a two-year agreement with Flock in 2024, but, acknowledging that Flock is “a very, very hot topic right now,” Adkins said a one-year contract will allow him “to monitor the system and see what happens.”
Flock cameras, and the company’s policies, have been the target of concerns around privacy and how Flock allows the data it collects to be used. Police departments can adopt internal policies regarding the cameras, but there’s no force of law behind them, Ohio ACLU Legislative Director Gary Daniels said.
Daniels likened Ohio’s technology environment to “the Wild West,” saying individual companies are stepping in where governments have failed to tread, perhaps for reasons rooted in time, effort, knowledge, logistics and/or money. Flock Safety can say what it wants, but as a private company, it can just as easily change its own internal policies and procedures, he said.
Kent City Council rejected the use of Flock cameras last year, and Kent State University canceled its contract with the surveillance company six days into a May 2026 trial run. However, Stow, Tallmadge, Ravenna, Aurora, Bainbridge, Mogadore, Windham and Akron all use the cameras.
Flock’s automated license plate readers are intended to photograph the license plates of passing vehicles, but they do provide images of the rear of the vehicles and the back of the drivers’ heads as well, Adkins told trustees during their June 15 meeting.
Though he could not specify the number of local crimes Flock cameras have helped solve, Adkins said the majority of the BPD’s success stories have stemmed from local officers searching the system and finding the target vehicle out of the township.
“We don’t have a lot hitting our cameras, but we’ll be looking for a suspect and we’ll see, ‘Oh, they were in Akron. The car’s already in Akron,’” he said.
Garnering that information means entering into a contract with Flock as the company does not allow agencies to buy access to their camera data, he said.
The Flock cameras reduce officers’ investigative times and provide information the department would otherwise lack, he said.
“It’s hit and miss. I know my detective bureau would be very frustrated if we got rid of Flock because they use them a lot for thefts and crime in the business district on the west end of town. A lot. That’s one of the main reasons that camera is over there, because of the retail problems we have over there,” he told the trustees.
With the alleged perpetrators typically gone before BPD officers can respond and witness accounts “usually not as good as what the camera picks up,” Flock cameras are an invaluable resource, he said.
“Someone might tell us it was a black truck and we go and look for a black truck, and we can tell you it was a black Chevy Silverado and this is the license plate,” Adkins said.
The cameras also alert officers to license plates associated with Amber and Silver alerts and allow BPD officers to enter information about missing persons and others at grave risk, he said. Trustee Nic Coia said, “If we find one missing kid in 10 years, I don’t think you can put a price on that.”
Adkins said he’s got the system “locked down about as strict as you can get without blocking everyone from being able to access that data.” Brimfield only allows access to statewide agencies, not national, doesn't partner with the federal government and doesn’t allow searches involving immigration or reproductive care, he said.
Officers must enter a case number every time they run a search and must provide a reason for doing so. Adkins said he routinely audits “what goes on” and has set the system to flag suspicious searches.
Recalling one incident, he said, “It flagged a plate being run repeatedly. So I checked the report number and what it was was a domestic violence suspect that they were trying to figure out where he went. He wasn’t showing up on Flock cameras, so they kept entering it to see, ‘has he showed up yet?’”
As it turned out, the suspect was never found, but “data tracking is so robust it showed that he [the officer] had done 10 searches, and it warned me that someone was searching for something repeatedly.”
Since “that could be a problem,” Adkins said he ran an audit, entered his response and logged it.
Wendy DiAlesandro
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.