ASHLAND — Liz Conley said she’s been interested in politics since she was a child.
The now 20-year-old still remembers seeing her first protest when she was around 10 or 11 years old. In that moment, Conley said she learned the power to enact change can live inside anyone.
As concerns regarding Flock cameras — automated license plate reading systems produced by Flock Safety — continue to sweep the state and nation, Conley decided to organize a protest.
“I decided instead of waiting for somebody else to do something, it was my turn to do something,” she said Saturday morning. “But it’s not just me. It’s everybody here. It’s the people driving on the roadways.”
A small group of protestors gathered Saturday morning around 9 a.m. near the intersection of Claremont Avenue and Main Street — close to both the Ashland Municipal Building and Ashland County’s office building.
Several participants displayed signs to passersby, with messages including “Warrantless Access, Mass Surveillance,” “Get The Flock Out” and “Our Money, Our Future, Our Safety,” among others.
“These things (Flock cameras) are posing a serious threat to everything that we love,” Conley said.
Ashland is not the only Ohio city where the license plate readers are a hot topic.
In Delaware County, commissioners in July approved adding six new Flock cameras to the sheriff’s office network.
Opposite to Delaware, the city of Dayton suspended the use of Flock cameras over concerns “the system’s data was being used for immigration enforcement,” according to a Fortune news article.
Conley related Flock cameras to “1984,” a dystopian speculative fiction novel penned by George Orwell which centers around totalitarianism and mass surveillance.
She said she’s concerned about Flock Safety’s increasing lineup of products, which now includes drones, according to the company’s website.
“When you know you are being watched, you are going to subconsciously change all of your behavioral patterns, even if you’re not meaning to,” Conley said. “I genuinely believe that it is stripping people not only of their Fourth Amendment rights but also their right to be a human.”
Conley said she does have a petition available for citizens to sign expressing their opposition to the use of Flock cameras in Ashland. She said anyone interested in signing the petition can contact her.
Below are more photos from Saturday’s protest. (Credit: Hayden Gray) The story continues below.
Sheriff says cameras are not ‘unconstitutional’
Within the past month, seven Flock cameras in Ashland County have been vandalized, according to Ashland County Sheriff Kurt Schneider.
Of those seven, three of the cameras are owned by the county, three by the city of Ashland and one is privately-owned, Schneider told Ashland Source on July 29. All seven were vandalized within a 48-hour timeframe.
The Ashland County Sheriff’s Office has a total of 11 Flock cameras located throughout the county’s unincorporated areas, Schneider said. The city has around 15 within its corporation limits and the village of Loudonville has three.
Each Flock camera system costs about $3,000, Schneider said. Seven of the county’s 11 were purchased through a grant. The other four were purchased by private businesses.
“We’re always evaluating the use of the tool as it relates to staying within the constitutional freedoms that we’re sworn to protect,” the sheriff said July 29.
“There are no unconstitutional issues, period, with taking a picture of a car or license plate on a public road.”
The cameras take a picture of a car and its license plate during a split-second moment in time and do not track its every movement, the sheriff said.
“(The camera is) a witness on a pole. (If anything happens) then we (sheriff’s office) still need to investigate it,” Schneider said.
The Ashland County Sheriff’s Office participates in Flock Safety’s Transparency Portal, which can be accessed publicly by anyone, the sheriff said.
The portal displays a variety of information and statistics, including the number of unique plate reads, total user search sessions and total hotlist hits (from the National Crime Information Center and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Amber Alerts) over the past 30 days.
Also found on the portal is a list of what the cameras detect (license plates and vehicles) versus what they don’t detect (facial recognition, people, gender and race).
According to the portal, data from the 11 county cameras is “used for law enforcement purposes only,” owned by ACSO and never sold to third parties.
Prohibited uses listed on the portal include immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based solely on a protected class (race, sex or religion for example) and personal use.
