Covington commissioners vote to remove license plate readers from cruisers

Our Take

Credit to WLWT for covering a story we don't see often enough: local officials actually hitting the brakes on license plate reader surveillance. Covington commissioners voting to strip ALPRs out of cruisers runs against the national trend, where cities quietly expand these networks year after year with little public debate.

We don't have the full backstory on what pushed this vote — cost, effectiveness, privacy concerns, or some combination — but the fact that a governing body reconsidered a surveillance tool already in use says something. Most communities never get the chance to vote twice. Once cameras go up, they tend to stay up, data retention policies tend to loosen, and the inventory of who's reading your plates tends to grow, not shrink.

This is exactly the kind of local accountability we want to see replicated everywhere, not just in Kentucky's Covingtons and Ohio's border towns. If you want to know what's watching the roads in your own community, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a surprise vote to go the wrong way, see what you can do now at take action.