Cleveland Makes First Flock Referendum Possible

After another long debate at Cleveland’s Committee of the Whole, the Cleveland City Council voted 9–6 for Ordinance 683-2026, to extend the city’s Flock contract by six months. That fell one vote short of the two-thirds (10 of 15) needed to trigger the ordinance’s emergency provision, meaning the Flock contract stays dead for at least thirty days — and giving Clevelanders a chance to force a referendum.

No ordinance passed by the Council, unless it be an emergency measure, shall go into effect until thirty (30) days after its final passage by the Council. If at any time within said thirty (30) days, a petition … be filed with the Clerk of the Council requesting that the ordinance, or any specified part thereof, be repealed or submitted to a vote of the electors, it shall not become operative until the steps indicated herein have been taken.

This means two things: first, there will be no new contract for at least thirty days. Nor will the “guardrails” passed by Council come into effect. If the cameras stay up and Flock continues to collect data, that collection will not be constrained by local democracy.

Second, Clevelanders have roughly thirty days^[1] to deliver a petition forcing Council either to repeal the ordinance outright (no contract extension) or to put it to a referendum. A petition would need roughly 4,400 registered Cleveland voters — in a city of ~360,000 residents — to sign on.^[2]

Before the vote, Flock told Clevelanders that “there will be cameras.” In what would appear to be the first popular referendum on mass surveillance, Clevelanders — the people directly affected by the surveillance — now have an opportunity to respond.