Columbus Approved Its Flock Contract in Minutes. Undoing It Is Taking Six-Hour Hearings.
Bot Mutiny |
The Flock contract at the center of a six-hour Columbus hearing, a police audit showing 15,000 possible immigration-related searches, and a December renewal fight was approved in 2024 with competitive bidding waived and no questions from council. The procurement record shows how the network got built before anyone was required to look.
The ordinance is number 2965-2024 in the Columbus city record, and its title is dry even by municipal standards: "Flock Group, Inc, Bid Waiver."
Its text authorizes the Director of Public Safety to contract with Flock Group, Inc. to lease and install license plate readers, waives the competitive bidding provisions of the Columbus City Code, authorizes $228,000 from a federal LPR grant, and declares an emergency. It was introduced November 13, 2024 and passed the following month.
Two years later, that contract is the subject of the largest surveillance fight in Ohio. On August 10, Columbus City Council held a public hearing on the city's Flock cameras that ran nearly six hours. Axios Columbus reported that feedback from 55 residents was overwhelmingly negative, and that a Flock representative was booed by protesters with the Safety Not Surveillance Coalition and left before public commentary began. The People's Justice Project delivered petitions with more than 600 signatures demanding the contract be terminated.
The hearing did not come from nowhere. It followed an audit by the Columbus Division of Police, published roughly a month earlier, which found more than 15,000 searches in Columbus' camera network since 2024 that were potentially related to immigration enforcement, according to reporting by NBC4 and WOSU. Mayor Andrew Ginther halted the network's statewide and national data sharing after the audit's findings. ACLU of Ohio legislative director Gary Daniels told WOSU that Columbus has no statutory law governing license plate readers at all: "a police policy can be abandoned the next day, and it holds no force of law."
How the network was approved
The part of this record that has received the least attention is the beginning.
The bid waiver ordinance gives one operational justification for skipping competitive bidding: much of central Ohio already uses Flock cameras, so buying Flock would let Columbus communicate with those systems. Interoperability with the surrounding surveillance network was the argument for not considering an alternative to it.
The neighborhood publication Flytown News reviewed the video of the December 9, 2024 council meeting and reported the timeline of the vote: the legislation was read at the 3:15:14 mark, a deputy public safety director explained the waiver by citing interoperability and an approaching grant deadline, no council member asked a question, and the ordinance passed at 3:16:40. By that account, the approval took under 90 seconds. That characterization comes from a single local outlet, but the meeting video is a public record, and the passage date and the absence of recorded debate are consistent with the council's own legislative file.
The scale has grown since. WOSU reported in March that the city's contract covered 38 cameras. By August, Columbus police operated 65 Flock cameras with 11 more planned, and police own only about 10 percent of the hundreds of Flock cameras installed across the city by private and other users, according to WOSU.
The December question
The two-year, $228,000 contract expires in December. Council must decide whether to renew it or let it lapse, and the surrounding jurisdictions are answering the same question in every direction at once: Marion City Council voted 5 to 4 to prohibit the cameras within city limits, the Knox County Sheriff's Office announced it would not move forward with implementation, Dayton suspended its program, and Cleveland renewed for six months while cutting off its regional fusion center's access and requiring quarterly public reports.
The asymmetry is the story. Building the network required one paragraph waiving competition, a grant deadline, and less than two minutes of a council meeting. Examining it has so far required a police audit, a mayoral intervention, a six-hour hearing, 600 petition signatures, and a citywide argument that is still unresolved. Whatever council decides in December, the procurement record already shows which direction the system is designed to move easily.
Sources: Columbus City Council legislative record, Ordinance 2965-2024 (Legistar ID 131942); Axios Columbus, August 11, 2026; NBC4 WCMH, August 2026; WOSU Public Media, June 2, August 10, and March 16, 2026; ABC6, August 2026; Flytown News review of the December 9, 2024 council meeting video; Signal Cleveland, July 16, 2026.