The camera was a mystery.

Late last month, Millcreek officials found the Flock Safety device on city property next to City Hall, but they didn’t know where it came from.

The suburb, after all, has no contract with the company that has found itself at the center of a growing debate over surveillance as more cities and police departments adopt its license plate readers.

City Manager Mike Winder said the city found the device on July 29 after crowdsourced maps tracking the cameras circulated online.

“That’s when we looked into it with the police and any of our departments and realized nobody knew who put it there and why,” Winder said. “So we certainly took it down, and nobody’s missed it since.”

The camera was found in the parking lot north of 3300 South between Millcreek Common and Highland Drive, Winder said. It was “dormant” when the public works team removed it on July 31, Winder added, so it “probably hadn’t been doing its thing for a number of years.”

City officials determined through Google Street View histories that the camera was installed sometime in the first half of 2022.

The city has two theories as to where the camera came from, Winder said. Either a previous business owner installed the camera before the property was purchased to become part of the Millcreek Common parking lot, or Flock Safety forgot to remove the device after a previous contract with Unified police expired.

Unified last had a contract with the company three or four years ago, Assistant Chief Justin Hoyal said. The department has not been able to determine whether it owned the camera Millcreek cut down.

The crowdsource map DeFlock and Winder said the camera was a Flock-branded device. Unified police have a current contract with Motorola’s Vigilant cameras, which are also license plate-reading devices.

The camera from Millcreek Common is currently sitting in storage in the basement of a city building, Winder added. For now, the city is not working with Flock to determine exactly where the camera came from, he said.

“We’ll see if someone misses it; nobody has stepped forward to claim it,” Winder said. “The fact that it was dormant at the time, we’re not too worried about recent data on it because it was dead when we took it down.”