Deflock Monroe
Monroe, Ohio · Est. petition of the governed

Twenty-three cameras. One question.

We hold this truth to be self-evident: a free people are not tracked by default.

Every car. Every road. Logged without cause.

Courts have long held that privacy doesn't end at your front door — you're still entitled to it in public. This isn't a photograph. It's the government building a permanent, searchable profile of everywhere you go.

Next Monroe City Council meeting

Tuesday, September 8 · 6:30 PM

Council Chambers
233 South Main Street, Monroe, OH 45050

You don't have to speak. Showing up counts.

Resolution 28-2024

Monroe signed this without a public vote.

On April 23, 2024, City Council authorized the city manager to sign a contract with Flock Group Inc. for 23 automatic license plate reading cameras. Most residents found out much later.

The cameras don't wait for a crime to be reported. They photograph and log every vehicle that passes — the plate, the state, the make, the body type, the color, even bumper stickers and roof racks — and store it. Not suspects. Everyone.

Monroe's plate data is also shared with other departments. At the April 9, 2024 council meeting, Chief Buchanan confirmed Monroe has worked with other agencies' Flock networks for several years, naming Middletown, Springboro and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office. Flock's own materials listed roughly 30 Ohio departments. How many agencies can reach Monroe's data specifically has never been made public.

  • 23 cameras, logging every vehicle, with no warrant and no suspicion required
  • $152,150 committed under Res. 28-2024 and Res. 38-2024 combined
  • $3,000 per camera, per year — and the city owns none of it

The money

We're renting surveillance we'll never own.

$80,950 in year one. $69,000 every year after that. Split across 23 cameras, that's exactly $3,000 per camera, per year.

It's a lease. After the initial two-year term, Monroe will have paid roughly $6,000 per camera and owns nothing. End the contract and every camera goes back to Flock. For comparison, a competing vendor sells similar plate-reader hardware outright, one time, for about $1,399 a unit.

So the question isn't whether $3,000 a camera is a fair rate. It's why a city is renting surveillance equipment in perpetuity, on a system it can't independently audit, from a company that takes the hardware back the day we walk away.

Already happening

This system is being misused right now.

Not hypothetically. Not eventually. These are documented, this year.

Shively, Kentucky · August 26, 2026

A police officer was arrested after running 2,048 searches on two vehicles belonging to the mother of his child — including 241 searches while she had an active protective order against him. He logged them as drug investigations. Flock's own audit tool caught it, but only after five months.

Dayton, Ohio

More than 7,000 immigration-related searches of the city's Flock data by outside agencies were found to violate Dayton's own stated policy for the system.

San Francisco, California

A pending lawsuit alleges outside agencies searched the city's plate database more than 1.6 million times in six months.

Flock Safety, on the record

The company's CEO has acknowledged Flock had not built the permissions needed to stop federal Customs and Border Protection from reaching state camera data in violation of a state law restricting immigration enforcement use.

The two things people say

Both deserve a real answer.

My phone already tracks me. What's the difference?

Your phone's tracking is tied to apps you chose to install, with settings, opt-outs, and companies you can stop using. Flock asks for none of that. It captures you for the act of driving on a public road, and it's the government holding the record — not a company you picked. If phone tracking bothers you, that's an argument for regulating it harder. It isn't a reason to build a second system with no consent at all.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

This asks innocent people to justify their privacy, instead of asking government to justify surveillance. It also assumes the system will only ever be used on people who deserve it — which is exactly the assumption that failed in Shively, in Dayton, in San Francisco. Nobody actually lives this way. You close doors. You don't publish your medical records. Privacy isn't evidence of guilt.

The region is already leaving

Five cities near us ended it in six weeks.

  1. July

    Newport, Kentucky

    Ended its pilot and removed its cameras.

  2. Aug 18

    Oxford, Ohio

    Council voted 6–1 to terminate — overriding its own review commission, which had recommended keeping the cameras with added safeguards.

  3. Aug 18

    Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

    Ended its program the same night.

  4. Aug 24

    Independence, Kentucky

    The mayor ordered all cameras physically removed — while saying he still personally believes the technology works. He pulled them because residents asked him to.

  5. Aug 28

    Fort Thomas, Kentucky

    Announced it is discontinuing Flock, citing privacy concerns and the network shrinking as neighbors drop out.

  6. Sept 8

    Monroe, Ohio

    Undecided. This is the part you're in.

What actually moves this

Council counts people, not posts.

A comment thread doesn't change a vote. A room full of residents does.

  1. Be there September 8

    6:30 PM, Council Chambers, 233 South Main Street. You don't have to speak — attendance itself is the message. If you want to speak, public comment is limited to a few minutes and you sign up when you arrive.

  2. Email the Clerk of Council

    Ask that ending the Flock contract be placed on a council agenda. One sentence is enough.

    Email the clerk

    If the button doesn't open your email app: Beth Combs, Clerk of Council — combsb@monroeohio.gov

  3. Bring one person

    The single highest-value thing anyone reading this can do. Send them here: deflockmonroe.com

  4. Sign the resident petition

    A short form — name, address or ZIP for verification only, never published. This is what makes the count credible to council without exposing anyone's information.

    Sign the petition

    Link pending — form is being finalized.

  5. See where the cameras are

    DeFlock is an independent, crowdsourced map of license plate readers. It shows the surveillance network around Monroe — note that it includes cameras from multiple vendors across the region, not only Monroe's 23.

    Open the map

    If the button doesn't open: deflock.me

Check everything

Don't take our word for any of it.

Every claim on this page traces to a public document or named reporting. If something here is wrong, we want to correct it.

  • Resolution 28-2024 and the full Flock contract — City of Monroe, monroeohio.org/449/2024-Legislation
  • April 9, 2024 council minutes (Flock presentation, data sharing) — available from the Monroe Clerk of Council
  • Shively, KY officer arrest, 2,048 searches — CNN, KSL, WAVE3, FOX56, August 2026
  • Oxford's 6–1 vote, 2,215 departments with data access, and the police chief's statement that solved-case numbers were never tracked — WVXU, Oxford Free Press, August 2026
  • Independence, KY camera removal and the mayor's statement — WCPO, WKRC, WVXU, LINK nky, August 2026
  • Fort Thomas, KY discontinuation — regional reporting, August 28, 2026
  • Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___ (2018) — the Supreme Court held 5–4 that tracking a person's movements over time is a search requiring a warrant
Where the law actually stands. Carpenter concerned cell phone location records, not license plate readers, and the Supreme Court has not extended it to camera networks. Lower courts are split — a Washington court found no violation in a Flock capture; a Virginia trial court found the opposite before being reversed on appeal. The constitutional question is open. That's precisely why the decision sits with a city council, and with the people who elect it.