Dublin police will keep their 25 Flock license plate reader cameras active, city officials said, even as Columbus suspended its entire system and Worthington Schools dropped the technology.

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther announced Sept. 3 that the city would pause its Flock cameras after a police officer allegedly misused the system. Officer Melvin Tellis searched a single license plate 272 times over about 13 months between November 2023 and December 2024 for what Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant said were not law-enforcement purposes.

Tellis was relieved of duty but not fired, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Dublin's response was the opposite. The city said its cameras are closely monitored and that its policies have been reviewed and audited, according to 10TV. A Dublin official told the station the cameras help police solve crimes and locate missing children.

"I think that if your child is missing, you'd wanna know that the city and the police department is using everything at their disposal to find that missing child," the official said.

Since launching the system in spring 2024, Dublin police have documented at least 135 investigative successes, according to NBC4. Those cases included locating a missing juvenile, identifying suspect vehicles in three robbery investigations and helping connect a vehicle to multiple arson-related incidents in the region.

Dublin also drew a sharp line on data sharing. The city said it does not have reciprocal data-sharing agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and that the system cannot be used for immigration-related searches. Dublin approves each law enforcement agency individually before establishing a data-sharing relationship, according to an Aug. 5 statement reported by NBC4.

That stands in contrast to Columbus, where a July 2026 audit found more than 15,000 possible immigration-related searches in the city's Flock network since 2024, NBC4 reported.

Columbus is not the only jurisdiction where Flock misuse has surfaced. Two Reynoldsburg Police Department officers resigned in 2026 over alleged unauthorized searches, according to 10TV. One officer searched a plate belonging to a former domestic partner 46 times.

Worthington Schools announced Sept. 1 that it would end its Flock contract and remove cameras from high school entrances. Superintendent Trent Bowers said when the district announced the decision, "I have come to believe that the limited benefits we receive from these cameras are not worth the potential loss of public trust in our schools."

At the state level, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the Ohio Department of Transportation on Sept. 2, asking it to stop issuing new permits for license plate reading technology in state rights-of-way, the Statehouse News Bureau reported. Ohio does not have a state law requiring the privacy protections Dublin has written into its department policy. Legislation is in development, but the legislature is not expected to reconvene until after the November election.

No scheduled Dublin City Council vote on Flock camera policy has been announced.