Erlanger was one of the first cities in the region to use Flock cameras, but not anymore.
Statements from city staff members at a special meeting on Thursday, plus information gleaned from public records, suggest the city has functionally ended the program, not due to public pressure but due to funding drying up.
“I’m glad they’re coming down,” said Council Member Rebecca Reckers on Thursday.
Flock Safety is a company that makes automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, and other surveillance products. 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 can use to track vehicles.
Flock’s products have come under scrutiny both locally and nationally as questions rise about the technology’s constitutionality. Documented cases of law enforcement misusing the devices have come to light, leading to backlash across the political spectrum. Multiple cities in the region have severed their contracts with Flock Safety, as a result.
Memos from Erlanger City Administrator Mark Collier in the spring and early summer of 2024, when he was still the city’s economic development director, show the city’s use of Flock cameras sprang out of an attempt to monitor potential criminal activity around some of the city’s hotels.
MeetNKY, the region’s tourism bureau, offered to pay for the cameras since the hotel industry was integral to the health of the region’s tourism landscape. Collier presented the idea to the city council in late May 2024, according to meeting minutes. A subsequent email in June 2024 from Julie Kirkpatrick, meetNKY’s CEO, indicates that meetNKY had offered a $25,000 sponsorship for the cameras for two years. For the second year, the city would have to contribute $1,000. If the city wanted to keep them after that, it would have to pay for them all by itself.
Five cameras were ultimately installed throughout the city: four on Holly Lane and one on Commonwealth Avenue in front of the city building. MeetNKY paid for the four on Holly, and Flock offered to give the fifth on Commonwealth for free as a trial.
The city council never voted on the contract—either to start it or end it. Meeting minutes show that a vote on a municipal order on the issue was originally scheduled for the council meeting on July 2, 2024, but it was removed from the agenda. Mayor Jessica Fette signed a $26,600 contract with the company, which you can see here, the same day.
City Attorney Jack Gatlin explained why: Since the city didn’t spend any of its own budget on the cameras, it didn’t require a vote from council.
“If it’s something, in this case, that there was no money that was expended by the city, I don’t see that as something that council would have to approve; that would be to the administration and police,” Gatlin said.
The contract expired in July of this year. All of the cameras on Holly Lane have been removed, and the one in front of the city building is still up but not operating, Collier said, as of Thursday night. The police department is working on taking it down and storing it so Flock can come and retrieve it at a later date, Collier said.
Police Chief Mike Lemming said that “after we looked at the pros and the cons, we decided that we weren’t interested in renewing the contract.” Cost was another reason for not renewing the contract, Lemming said.
Lemming did not have an exact count offhand of the number of crimes the technology had been used to solve, but he did not view the end of the city’s use of the devices as a great loss.
“We were solving cases before Flock, and we’ll continue to solve cases after,” Lemming said.
