Fort Mitchell mayor reverse course on Flock: 'Not a hill I'm going to die on'

Our Take

Credit to Hellbender Newsroom for catching something rare: a sitting mayor admitting he got it wrong on Flock Safety. Fort Mitchell's Greg Pohlgeers framed his original support in the language every city council hears from Flock's sales pitch — "more tools, limited resources" — the idea that a network of always-on cameras scanning every plate that passes is just a force multiplier for a stretched-thin department. What's notable here isn't the walk-back itself so much as what it says about the pitch: it only survives until someone starts asking who else gets access to that data, how long it's kept, and what happens when it's wrong.

That's the pattern we keep seeing across small and mid-size towns that get courted by Flock. The initial sell is always framed around public safety, but the actual system is a mass-surveillance dragnet that logs the movements of everyone, not just suspects, and feeds that information into a nationwide network that your local police department doesn't fully control. Mayor Pohlgeers saying it's "not a hill I'm going to die on" is a quiet admission that defending permanent surveillance infrastructure gets harder the more scrutiny it receives.

Fort Mitchell is a reminder that these decisions aren't locked in — local officials can and do reconsider once residents push back. If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already running in your area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your own mayor to have a change of heart, our take-action page has tools to get the conversation started now.