By Henry Aleksandrov | May 05, 2026
Dayton police officials said that Flock Automated License Plate Reader data was allegedly shared with federal immigration law enforcement, despite assurances that photos of vehicle license plates were not used for that purpose.
The department said the data was shared several thousand times to help ICE and other immigration-related agencies, prompting officials to announce that the department will indefinitely stop using Flock cameras during its investigation,according to the Dayton Daily News.
The department also said that the person who ran the Support Services Division, which oversees the program, no longer works with them.
“The investigation concluded that the former division commander of the support services division failed to implement the safeguards he helped develop and present in the surveillance impact report. As a result of this failure, the commander will no longer serve in the Dayton Police Department,” outgoing Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal said, adding that the official resigned, retired, or was terminated,the Dayton newspaper reported.
Flock cameras are mounted on poles and capture images of vehicle license plates. The system then uploads the photos to a cloud storage system accessible to law enforcement. Additionally, in case the plates belong to the stolen vehicle, the cameras could send a real-time alert to law enforcement.
“Back in October, DPD noticed a higher than expected level of data sharing, and we began to investigate,” Afzal said last week, adding that the immigration authorities allegedly were allowed to access the photos.
“The investigation over several months determined that approximately 7,100 axis requests cited immigration,” Afzal said. “None of these searches targeted Dayton.”
Afzal also said that his department doesn’t know whether other agencies have taken any action to investigate the alleged scandal.The news source reportedthat even though the data in Dayton’s system disappears after 30 days, the audit will remain.
All photo sharing was allegedly disabled in November 2025. However, department officials said they didn’t know about the automatic re-enabling,according to the news source.
Source: Drudge Report
