Northern Kentucky city residents question plan to double controversial Flock license plate cameras
The short version: Fort Thomas wants to double its Flock camera count, and residents are showing up to ask why more surveillance is the answer to anything.
Our Take
Credit to Local 12 for covering this one, because Fort Thomas is a textbook case of ALPR mission creep. A city rolls out a handful of cameras with modest promises, then a year or two later comes back asking to double the network — usually without any hard data showing the first batch actually reduced crime. Residents pushing back and demanding answers before council rubber-stamps an expansion is exactly the kind of civic friction this technology needs and rarely gets.
What tends to get lost in these local debates is scale. One city doubling its cameras doesn't just watch that city — it feeds into a nationwide network that Flock and law enforcement partners can query well beyond municipal lines. Nobody in Fort Thomas voted for their daily commute to become searchable by agencies in other states, but that's the practical effect once these systems interconnect. Check our camera map to see how dense this coverage has already gotten, in Kentucky and everywhere else.
If you're in Fort Thomas or anywhere else facing a Flock expansion vote, don't wait for the council meeting to be the first time officials hear pushback. Public records requests, open-records audits of existing camera data use, and organized turnout at hearings are what actually move these votes. Our take-action page has templates and steps for exactly this fight.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of LOCAL 12, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.