Maybe you’ve seen them mounted on poles at intersections … or maybe you haven’t, but they’re there: devices designed to snap photos of your license plate as you drive by.
These automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, have become the subject of recent outcry, especially as the devices grow in popularity among law enforcement agencies around the region and beyond.
For instance, people packed the Newport City Building last Wednesday to discuss the prospect of the City of Newport contracting with tech company Flock Safety to install automatic ALPRs around the city.
Newport had actually already been using some readers on a trial basis, but one thing was clear from the meeting: Most if not all of the attendees weren’t in favor of installing them throughout the city.
“I do not want Flock in Newport,” said local defense attorney Jacqueline Mayer Grant to applause from the crowd.
But Newport isn’t the only community in the region to consider the use of ALPRs. In fact, several cities already have contracts, have trialed ALPRs or are seriously considering getting contracts with either Flock or another company that produces the devices and their software.
As this has occurred, a tension has arisen between law enforcement professionals who find them useful as investigative tools and citizens who have expressed worries about mass surveillance and the breach of constitutional protections against erroneous search and seizure.
Additionally, there have been concerns about the behavior of Flock Safety as a company, as well as the security of their products.
Let’s unpack what different sides have to say about the matter.
Electric eyes
ALPRs are mounted at fixed angles on poles and use a combination of computer software and cameras to read a vehicle’s license plate, make, model and color as it passes by. The software then converts that information into searchable data that law enforcement agencies — and sometimes private customers — can use to track vehicles as they move around.
Even though ALPRs have been deployed throughout the commonwealth for a few years, the Kentucky General Assembly only passed legislation regulating the devices in the form of House Bill 58 this year. Northern Kentucky Reps Kim Banta, Marianne Proctor and TJ Roberts, all of whom are Republicans, sponsored the bill, and it went through multiple amendments before reaching the governor’s desk.
The bill established database retention limits, limits on what sort of information an ALPR can capture and the purposes agencies can use them for. It also made the locations of ALPRs subject to open records laws. Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed the bill into law in April.
Much of the conversation around ALPRs focuses on the company Flock Safety, founded in 2017. Flock makes several surveillance products in addition to ALPRs, including mounted video cameras capable of moving and independently following subjects, drones and audio sensors that can purportedly detect gunshots. Flock dominates the market, but it’s not the only company that makes ALPRs; other companies include Motorola, Axon (known for manufacturing police body cameras), Axis Communications and others.
Where can you find them in Northern Kentucky?
Deflock, an advocacy initiative that uses crowd-sourced information to track the locations of ALPRs around the country, puts the number of ALPRs around the NKY region at over 100. Most are produced and owned by Flock Safety. Use the interactive map below to see where they are.
NOTE: You may need to click the ‘RETRY’ button or refresh the page to get the map to load properly.
LINK nky is working to get a handle on which of the nearly 30 police departments, offices and authorities throughout Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties use ALPRs or have contracts. Most of our records requests are still pending, but we plan to write a follow-up story once we have all the information.
However, we have spoken with some departments that already use them or are planning to. As of July 10, we have confirmed contracts with the following departments: Independence PD, Bellevue PD, Villa Hills PD, Fort Mitchell PD and Wilder PD.
Taylor Mill has money set aside for ALRPs in its budget but doesn’t yet have a contract, according to the city’s police chief. The Kenton County Fiscal Court was set to vote on a resolution to begin the bidding process at their last meeting, but they postponed the vote to Tuesday.
Proponents of ALRPs argue they allow for easy sharing of information, especially in Northern Kentucky, where there are so many jurisdictions and departments.
“In my opinion, they’ve been very useful,” said Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni.
Independence has been using Flock ALRPs since 2024 and currently has 15 devices throughout the city. Independence is among the geographically larger cities in the region, which makes it an interesting case study for the use of the devices, as the city’s size arguably presents a challenge to police enforcement and logistics. Ferayorni said the devices are especially helpful for tracking down stolen vehicles and missing people. They’ve also aided in cases of retail theft and burglary, Ferayorni said.
LINK nky obtained records for two cases involving Independence PD. One from June of 2025 involved a 91-year-old man who had been reported missing. The police used Flock cameras to track the man’s vehicle and perform a wellness check. The man turned out to be “in his right mind,” according to the police narrative. “No issues were observed.”
The second case, this one in January 2026, involved an Independence resident who was reportedly suicidal. A combination of Flock and cell phone pings indicated he had driven into Dearborn County, Ind., where he was threatening to drive his car off a bridge. Independence PD used this information to contact Dearborn police, who successfully located the individual.
Flock’s system pulls data from the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, a legacy federal database managed by the FBI and the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, along with other databases used to track federal crimes. If a vehicle that’s been logged into the NCIC passes a Flock ALPR, it sends an alert, called a “hit” (yes, that’s the technical term), to the contracted department, notifying the officers in the area. Officers can also use Flock’s database to conduct searches for vehicles logged in its history during the legally allowed retention period to generate leads for further investigation.
Data captured by the devices in Independence is stored in Flock’s database for 30 days. Newport has similarly proposed a 30-day data retention period. State law prohibits the data from being stored for longer than 90 days, unless a particular log is used in a criminal investigation or another exception allowed under House Bill 58, which you can read here. In Independence’s case, hits that were later employed in a criminal investigation are manually logged and stored by officers.
Ferayorni shared some manually logged data showing some of the outcomes from Flock hits in 2025 and 2026. It was not exhaustive, he said, as every hit has to be manually logged, but it showed some trends as to how the department employed the technology. Hits on Flock’s system led to 28 arrests, two false positives and 12 recovered stolen vehicles in 2025 and 2026, according to Independence’s data. In 24 instances, police were not able to locate the vehicle that triggered the hit.
“I think it’s like any other police technology,” said Taylor Mill Police Chief and President of the Northern Kentucky Police Chiefs Association, James Mills, in that it can be a “great investigative tool.” Still, he admitted that if people were misusing the technology, then “they need to be held accountable.”
Who’s watching the Flock?
The devices’ utility is not the only thing at issue, however. Residents have expressed concerns about privacy and misuse (or abuse, depending on who you ask) of the devices.
One point of contention is the concern that Flock Safety devices may, in fact, be less secure than they purport to be, such that anyone with enough tech savvy could use them to spy on people.
In late 2025, YouTube content creator and technologist Benn Jordan bought some Flock devices, hacked them and published his findings in a video. Shortly thereafter, cybersecurity expert and contractor Jon Gaines, who goes by the moniker “GainSec” online, published a white paper laying out 52 security issues he and a colleague identified in Flock devices.
There were limitations to Gaines’ study, namely that the research was not performed on “live production deployed devices operating in the wild,” as Gaines himself points out early in the paper. Yet, subsequent attempts to assess the security of Flock’s devices have borne out some of the issues.
About a month after Gaines’ published his paper, reporters at the tech periodical 404 Media published an investigation that found that “Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its [AI cameras] around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files and run diagnostics.”
The AI cameras are, admittedly, a different product than ALPRs, but the vulnerabilities exposed by 404 Media dovetail with issues previously identified in Flock Safety’s products.
“I think the one that affected me most was a playground,” Jordan told 404 reporters. “You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.”
There have also been concerns about the sharing of local data, whether intentionally or inadvertently, with federal authorities. Dayton, Ohio, for instance, recently suspended its use of Flock ALPRs after it discovered the local network had been left open to access by immigration authorities, contrary to the contract approved by the city government, according to reporting by The Dayton Daily News.
“The investigation over several months determined that approximately 7,100 axis requests cited immigration,” Dayton, Ohio, Chief of Police Kamran Afzal said at a May press conference.
The company also received criticism when it changed its data policy in February to remove a line that said “Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data.” Flock later issued a statement responding to the criticism, arguing the language change “does not change ownership. Flock customers own their data.”
Other problematic uses of the technology abound: There have been multiple reported arrests of those within the law enforcement system using Flock to stalk people, often their exes, including cases in Milwaukee, California and Kansas City.
Mayer Grant, the defense attorney who spoke at the Newport meeting, expressed the constitutional hazard in the technology.
“This isn’t HIPAA,” Mayer Grant said, responding to a comparison made by Newport police at the beginning of the meeting. “No one’s telling someone if I’m pregnant or not. Someone is going to jail at the end of the day if this evidence is used in a certain way. This data is evidence; the evidence can be used against you.”
If Cincinnati and Hamilton County, which already have over 400 ALPRs, according to Deflock, are any indication, this issue is likely to continue in the future. LINK nky will report more as information becomes available.
