When Kenton County’s police chief asked his fiscal court this summer for money to install six automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras at the entrances to the county’s parks, his primary reasoning was to make those parks safer.
“We see this as a way to keep potential predators from coming into our parks and preying on children,” Chief Spike Jones said at the July 14 meeting.
Commissioner Jon Draud of Edgewood seemed to agree that it was a problem.
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“There’s a lot of weird people that hang out at parks,” he said in response to Jones’ report, which stated the cameras would only point into the parks – not the general right-of-way – and only record vehicle data entering and exiting.
The report cited more than 1,000 calls for “suspicious person/vehicle” in the county’s parks since 2021, by far the most common type of call in those areas. Figures showing how many of those calls resulted in arrest or charges were not immediately available.
Related: Northern Kentucky Communities Push Back Against Flock Safety Surveillance Cameras
Vague commentary aside (Draud did not elaborate on who he meant by “weird people”), the story sounds reasonable enough on its surface. It aligns with police departments across the country making the case that the emerging technology is a game-changer for both investigating and deterring crime. Flock Safety’s website is populated by dozens of accounts of these types of cameras’ role in facilitating or expediting case closures.
The game-changing element is the AI-powered data collection and analysis that act as what police officials call a “force multiplier,” allowing departments to do more with stretched resources and pooled intelligence.
“It has changed how we do police work,” Lexington Police Commander Matt Greathouse told Kentucky Law Enforcement magazine. “Not only in Lexington and Fayette County, but all these counties now have some sort of Flock camera. What’s great about that is we can share that information across those jurisdictional boundaries, which we have discussed in many cases.”
Even Kentucky police agencies that have decided to discontinue their use of the cameras stressed the technology’s value. When announcing its decision in July to cancel its contract with Flock, the Newport Police Department said, “The city’s decision should not be interpreted as opposition to emerging public safety technologies or as a reflection that [ALPRs] lack public safety value.”
A ‘permanent dragnet’ for the ‘safest’ cities?
Residents and business owners across Northern Kentucky have been asking leaders why the cameras are needed — and whether the potential threats to their privacy are worth the returns in fighting crime — when they already feel safe.
At an August 17 public hearing, Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni spoke to his department’s initial deployment of 10 cameras in 2024, after a pilot the year prior. He purchased five more in 2025 and another five again this past June. He said 17 of those cameras were active at the time of the hearing.
“We are utilizing these ALPR cameras to identify and arrest criminals that come to the city to victimize our citizens and deter others who plan on doing the same,” he told more than 100 people in attendance and more watching the meeting from home.
The city council has approved Ferayorni’s contracts with Flock each of the last three budget cycles, with little fanfare. According to city contracts obtained by Link NKY, each camera costs roughly $3,000 per year, plus initial installation fees ranging from $650 to $1,250 each, depending on location. The first 10 cameras and their installation cost $68,900 over a 24-month period. The second and third contracts waived the installation fees, totalling $30,000 a batch, each for 24-month terms. In total so far, the city has spent nearly $130,000 on the cameras for four years of service from 2024 into 2028, when the most recently signed contract would expire.
Ferayorni defended the cost with a list of more than 30 recent cases he said the cameras assisted in solving since their deployment. Most common among those were stolen vehicles (10); missing persons, drugs and assaults and threats made up the next third (three each), with a variety of other one- or two-off cases comprising the remaining dozen.
Independence resident Zach Ford looked at FBI crime statistics prior to the meeting. While praising the chief for keeping the city “probably the best…in the commonwealth,” he said he couldn’t square a request for more cameras with the safety he feels police officers and more traditional tools already provide.
“We are among 80 percent for the safest cities in Kentucky, and that’s without Flock cameras,” he said during the three-hour public hearing, where, like in other recent meetings across Northern Kentucky, dozens stood up to speak against the city’s use of the cameras, with no one speaking in their favor.
Home security tech site SafeWise aggregates FBI crime data to rank cities by per-capita crime rates. It ranked Independence as the commonwealth’s fifth overall safest city in 2026, aligning with the figures Ford shared and making Independence the top-ranked among its Northern Kentucky peers. Neighboring Taylor Mill is the only other NKY city in the site’s top 10 for the year. A similar federal crime data aggregate site, Crime by City, ranks Independence as Kentucky’s safest, followed by Fort Thomas and Erlanger also in the top five. Newport and Florence had two of the commonwealth’s highest crime rates per capita among reporting cities, alongside Bowling Green, Owensboro and the Louisville metro.
“We have cities that are close to us with higher crime rates that are saying our Fourth Amendment’s more important,” Ford said, referring to Newport officials citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court case (Chatrie vs. United States) which they said could have future implications on how AI-powered ALPR networks could constitute unconstitutional searches.
While the Chatrie case did not consider ALPR cameras specifically, it challenged police’s authority to mass-obtain mobile device location data through so-called “geofence” warrants, as part of a criminal investigation (in this case, of a bank robbery in Virginia). The justices reaffirmed court precedent by holding that the suspect’s geolocation data tied to his cell phone constituted private, Fourth Amendment-protected information. Flock Safety maintains their cameras’ constitutionality, citing dozens of recent lower-court rulings throughout the U.S. affirming their position that the still, discrete images captured by the cameras in public areas do not fall under Fourth Amendment protection.
Court opinions aside, public opinion largely holds these cameras violate their rights.
Around the same time Ford was addressing Independence leaders, about 10 miles north in Fort Mitchell, resident Ashley Chaiken was expressing her concerns to her city council.
“Law enforcement has solved crime without the violation of our Fourth Amendment right,” Chaiken said. “Extreme cases do not justify a permanent dragnet of surveillance on the entire population.”
Less than 24 hours after Chaiken and others’ comments in Fort Mitchell, Mayor Greg Pohlgeers announced in a Facebook post that he was ending their contract with Flock, “effective immediately.” Less than a week following the meeting in Independence, their mayor issued a similar statement, announcing the city would be removing its cameras, but that he “continue[s] to believe [their] original decision to utilize this technology was a sound one.”
Fort Thomas, also frequently listed among Kentucky’s safest cities, has scheduled a public hearing on September 2 to discuss their use of the cameras, with scrutiny and pushback already coalescing online.
‘How much crime has been stopped?’
Serious crime in Kentucky has been shrinking for several years, since even before the commonwealth’s first Flock cameras went into service in 2022, according to both federal crime data and Kentucky State Police’s annual reporting, although there’s some variation.
Overall crime has shrunk steadily since 2019, achieving roughly a 23-percent reduction in the seven-year period, with nearly 10-percent reductions in “serious crime” in both 2024 and 2025. Both state and federal data sets show a steeper drop in property crime than in violent crime, but they differ on how violence has progressed: While federal data show cases like homicide and assault returning to 2019 levels after a spike during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, state police data show violent crime is up by 10 percent statewide compared to pre-pandemic, after topping out in 2023.
| Year | Overall (FBI) | Overall (KSP) | Violent (FBI) | Violent (KSP) | Property (FBI) | Property (KSP) |
| 2019 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 2020 | 99 | 96 | 128 | 110 | 96 | 96 |
| 2021 | 90 | 92 | 129 | 106 | 86 | 85 |
| 2022 | 80 | 84 | 98 | 101 | 78 | 78 |
| 2023 | 87 | 91 | 102 | 113 | 85 | 84 |
| 2024 | 77 | 84 | 97 | 109 | 75 | 75 |
| 2025 | 78 | 110 | 67 |
Crime statistics indexed against 2019 levels. Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting; Kentucky State Police annual reports.
Federal and state police data vary somewhat in their categorizations of crimes and reporting methods, which, along with differently sized data sets, could partially account for the discrepancy in violent crime rates.
Compared to the rest of the country, U.S. News and World Report currently ranks Kentucky’s violent crime rate as seventh lowest, according to FBI city-crime data, with below-average property crime rates, as well. For crime overall, Kentucky ranks 28th, on the lower end of the crime-heavier half.
Kentucky’s overall per-capita crime rate is lower than four of its neighboring seven states, with only Ohio, Illinois and Virginia ranking safer. Those rankings hold when zoomed in on property crime, and only Illinois and Virginia rank safer for violent crime.
For Chaiken, it’s not adding up.
“The pros for these cameras are supposedly that they stop crimes and help solve crimes,” she said. “How much crime has been stopped in Fort Mitchell? How many crimes have been solved solely based on data from the ALPR cameras in Fort Mitchell?”
This article first appeared on Queer Kentucky | Kentucky’s Only LGBTQ+ Newsroom and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
