This story is part of Worthington Pulse's coverage of the September 21 City Council meeting. Start with the September 21 meeting recap.
Worthington will stop sharing its automated license-plate-reader data with outside law enforcement agencies while it works out stronger ground rules for the technology. City Council directed staff to suspend that data sharing, pursue a formal agreement with select central Ohio communities, and bring the question back for another look in December. The motion passed over a single dissenting vote (Council member Maria Ramirez). The city's 14 Flock cameras stay switched on for Worthington's own investigations; what changes is that other departments can no longer search Worthington's data.
The vote followed more than an hour and a half of presentation, questions, and public comment on a technology that has become a flashpoint for privacy across the region.
How the cameras work
Interim Police Chief Jeff Kubasek walked council through the system, with a Flock company representative joining remotely to field technical questions. The cameras photograph the rear of vehicles on public roads, capturing the license plate, the vehicle's make, model, and color, and the time and place it passed. They generate "hot list" alerts when a plate matches an entry for a stolen vehicle, an outstanding warrant, or a missing person.
Kubasek explained the system's limits. The cameras "do not use facial recognition, do not identify who is inside a vehicle, do not continuously track people or vehicles," he said, and that officers cannot pull up a live video feed. Data is stored in a criminal-justice-compliant cloud and automatically purged after 30 days, and a written department policy restricts use to legitimate law-enforcement purposes, bars use that targets people by race, religion, immigration status, or protected class, and states that a camera hit alone is not enough to stop a vehicle.
Why Worthington installed them
The cameras arrived on Huntley Road in October 2023, after businesses in that corridor were hit repeatedly by catalytic-converter thefts and asked the city for help. Ten cameras went in at the corridor's entry points. Catalytic-converter thefts there dropped from 22 to one, Kubasek said, and the cameras assisted three arrests. In April 2025 the city relocated cameras to cover major entrances to Worthington and added four more, for 14 in total. Kubasek told council that vehicles figure into 36% of all Worthington police cases and 44% of theft-related cases.
Stay connected to what's happening in Worthington, Ohio.
The concerns council raised
Much of the discussion turned on what happens once Worthington's data leaves Worthington. Council Member Maria Ramirez pressed hardest. She pointed to a system audit that showed searches labeled only "other investigation," a vague category she said made it impossible to know what a search was actually for, and to the City of Columbus, where she said roughly 14,000 searches had included terms related to immigration or ICE despite local policy against it. "Personally, I want Flock out. I don't want to support Flock in my community," she said. Ramirez framed the stakes as constitutional: "You are not free unless you have privacy, because all the other rights really are dependent on that."
Council Member Glen Pratt zeroed in on verification. New restrictions and required case numbers help, he said, "but what's to prevent another law enforcement agency from simply lying" about why it is searching. Council Member Amy Lloyd raised data retention, comparing it to a lesson she gives her children: "once you put something on the internet, it's there forever." Kubasek and city staff noted that Flock recently moved its default retention to seven days for new contracts, and that the American Civil Liberties Union recommends 48 hours; Worthington remains on the 30-day default.
Kubasek acknowledged the misuse concern while defending the department's own controls. Officers who misuse the system face discipline up to termination. He also noted that alerts for stolen vehicles, warrants, and missing children flow through federal databases that operate independently of Flock's agency-to-agency sharing.
What residents said
Three residents from the same family spoke, each urging the city to remove the cameras. One, who identified himself as a computer-science professor speaking as a private citizen, warned that a network of hundreds of agencies sharing data with no consistent oversight was "a way different thing" than a small local system, and offered a data-handling maxim: "when in doubt, don't collect data." A second invoked the Fourth Amendment, arguing that recording where residents drive amounts to a search without a warrant. A third asked council to hold a vote that night to remove the readers, citing the end of the month as a deadline.
What council decided
Council did not vote to remove the cameras. Instead it settled on a middle course that several members said they could support: suspend sharing Worthington's data outward, keep using the cameras for local cases, and work toward a memorandum of understanding with trusted central Ohio jurisdictions that would spell out shared rules. Staff confirmed the city can shut off outbound sharing while still receiving alerts from agencies that share with Worthington, and that federal missing-person and stolen-vehicle alerts would continue regardless.
Council President Rachael Dorothy said she was "very comfortable with pausing this and then getting more guardrails around this camera right now," while stressing the cameras' role in reducing car thefts in her own neighborhood. Pratt asked what the program costs; staff put it at $3,000 per camera, or about $54,000 a year for all 14. Several members asked that the December check-in not foreclose earlier discussion if conditions change. The motion carried with one no vote (Ramirez). It suspends outside sharing, directs staff to develop an MOU, and calls for a report back by December.
This is one of 2 Worthington Pulse stories from the September 21 city council meeting recap.