Cities across northern Kentucky remove Flock cameras amid privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to WCPO 9 for documenting something we don't see often enough: elected officials actually reversing course on Flock Safety once they look past the sales pitch and into the fine print. Northern Kentucky joins a small but growing list of communities that decided the trade-off — constant tracking of every driver's movements in exchange for vague promises about solving crime — wasn't worth it, especially once questions about who else gets access to that data started piling up.

This is exactly why local pushback matters more than national hand-wringing. Flock's network is only as powerful as the number of cameras feeding it, and city councils are one of the few places ordinary residents can still show up, ask hard questions about data retention and sharing agreements, and actually change the outcome. When a city rips out cameras, it's not just a local story — it's a crack in the dragnet that other departments use to justify expanding theirs.

If you want to see how saturated your own area is, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a reporter to cover your city's reversal, our take-action page has the tools to start asking your own council the questions northern Kentucky residents apparently did.