Lakewood Police Department is using Flock Safety's license-plate readers to issue parking tickets according to audit logs of searches on Flock Safety's network. Three searches in April 2026 and two in December 2025 were logged under "Traffic Infraction - parking." Another search from June 2025 even has a parking ticket number associated with it.

Mission Creep

As license-plate readers come under increasing public scrutiny, some police departments have publicized their use of the technology to investigate serious matters such as vehicle theft, hit-and-runs, and missing persons cases. What police don't mention in their ALPR propaganda is how they also may use license-plate readers to enforce petty offenses such as traffic violations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this "mission creep," when the way surveillance is used begins to outgrow its initial scope.

Flock Safety themselves has been helping police move these goalposts. In a November 2025 blog post, the company said that their technology "is not used to enforce traffic violations," only to later edit the post to remove all mention of traffic enforcement. Mission creep is how a democratic society transforms into one where surveillance is turned against everyday people.

Not-So-Public Records

While the current data only reveals six searches that were definitively made for the sake of enforcing parking rules, there may be more. Lakewood community members have been making public records requests for Lakewood Police Department's own audit logs so that we may have a more complete picture of how they use Flock. The City of Lakewood has been rejecting all requests under Ohio Revised Code 149.43(A)(1)(yy), which exempts data "captured by an automated license plate recognition system." The exemption clearly refers to image and raw plate data recorded by the cameras and not the search logs, but the City of Lakewood has decided to interpret it as liberally exempting all data within their Flock Safety system.

To the City of Lakewood, we ask this: What do you have to hide? Until these records are available it is safe to assume that if you got a parking ticket in Lakewood, Flock might have had something to do with it.