Who's watching? Kentucky law makes Flock cameras easier to hide

Our Take

Credit to FOX 56 News for digging into this: Kentucky law enforcement agencies appear to be leaning on state statute to shield the locations of Flock Safety license plate readers from public disclosure. That's a problem. These cameras sit on public roads, log the movements of every driver who passes, and feed into a shared network accessible by agencies far beyond the one that installed them. If the public can't find out where they are, there's no way to hold anyone accountable for how that data gets used, shared, or abused.

Transparency isn't a courtesy here — it's the only check ordinary people have against a system that otherwise operates entirely out of sight. When a state carves out an exception that lets police keep camera locations secret, it isn't protecting an investigation, it's protecting the surveillance apparatus itself from scrutiny. That distinction matters, and Kentucky residents deserve to know it's happening in their state.

We've been tracking publicly known ALPR deployments nationwide, including in Kentucky, on our camera map. If you want to push back on secrecy like this, start with our take-action resources — public records requests and local council pressure are still some of the few tools residents have left.