In January 2025, Louisville's Flock Safety license plate reader system notified a police officer that a camera spotted a stolen car on West Broadway. Police found the vehicle at the nearby Kroger gas station and approached a man who was about to fill the tank. Officers allege the man jumped in the car and tried to start it, then gave up. Police said they found a baggie of what appeared to be heroin in his jacket pocket.
The next month, on Valentine's Day, Flock alerted a detective to a stolen car near the airport. They found the car, called it in to confirm it was a match for a possible stolen vehicle, and waited for backup before detaining the man behind the wheel. Police said they found some marijuana and a few pills.
A month after that, officers stopped a car in Shawnee because it had a temporary tag in the window. They checked the Flock database and found cameras had clocked the same tag number on multiple cars – an indicator it was fake. The woman driving said the tag was on the car when she bought it.
All three defendants' court cases are ongoing, they all face felony charges, and they're all Black.
Louisville Metro Police Department detailed the use of license plate readers in 177 criminal citations last year — half were issued to Black people, according to a Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting review of public police records.
Black residents account for about a quarter of the city's population. The disproportionate share of Black people caught up by LMPD's use of license plate readers underscores concerns shared by some local lawmakers and civil liberties advocates that the popular surveillance technology may be over-concentrated in marginalized communities.
Technology is not "immune from bias" and KyCIR's findings "should be a wake-up call," said Louisville Metro Council Member Shameka Parrish-Wright, a District 3 Democrat and mayoral candidate.
"What you're describing is deeply concerning, especially given Louisville's history with over-policing and surveillance in Black and brown communities," she said.
LMPD officials did not provide a comment for this report or respond to a list of emailed questions about the agency's use of license plate readers by KyCIR's deadline.
Police officials have defended the technology in recent weeks after KyCIR revealed the agency shared license plate data with agencies enforcing federal immigration laws. The reporting led to an internal police investigation that resulted in discipline for two commanders and one officer, as well as new safeguards for the technology announced by LMPD.
Police in Louisville say Flock cameras help fight crime. Last week, LMPD said license plate cameras aided in the arrest of a man accused in a quadruple shooting at a cigar bar. Lt. Matt Chaudoin said they used Flock to trace a rental car the man drove after leaving the crime scene. His arrest citation makes no mention of the technology.
Parrish-Wright said Flock cameras should be evaluated not only for how effective they are for police but for whether they're deployed equitably in the community, because tools like this can amplify existing inequities in policing.
"I want them to have reasonable tools to be able to do that job," she said of LMPD. "But I also want to make sure that methods, standard operating procedures, and all those things are applied equitably and fair, with strong guardrails and oversight and clear limitations on use."
Louisville Urban League President Lyndon Pryor also said KyCIR's findings of a racial disparity in Flock-related citations raise "more questions and certainly significant concerns."
People working in the tech world often say software is "somewhat agnostic" in terms of bias, he said. But various research has shown bias gets baked into technology because humans build the systems.
"Whether it be the technology itself, whether it be the placement of where … the Flock cameras are actually located in the city, or how the data itself is being run, sorted, prosecuted … there's going to be bias every step of the way," he told KyCIR. "And so it is absolutely concerning when we think about the significant disproportionality that you all have already found in the usage of these cameras."
A critical question unanswered: Where are the cameras?
LMPD has nearly 200 license plate readers in operation, with another 100 or so awaiting installation. But police won't release camera locations, citing public safety concerns and saying it would allow people doing crimes to evade detection.
Considering the racial disparity KyCIR found in LMPD's Flock-related citations, "it's probably safe to assume" that the license plate readers are disproportionately concentrated in parts of Louisville where many Black people live, said Amber Duke, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky.
Duke and other people KyCIR interviewed, including those skeptical of and those supportive of Flock's technology, said the locations of the cameras is an important but missing piece of information necessary to analyze the root causes of the racial disparity KyCIR identified in the police citations.
Duke said KyCIR's findings also fit with other studies she's seen over the years on this technology and other forms of surveillance.
"Everything that I have seen has been pretty consistent in saying: If you're Black, brown or poor in an urban area, you are going to be surveilled more in your everyday life than if you are not those things," she said.
The U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing evaluation of LMPD in 2023, finding – among other problems – that the police force had a history of discriminating against Black people. Last month, at the request of President Donald Trump's administration, a federal judge dropped a consent decree that would've legally required LMPD to make reforms.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, a Democrat up for reelection this year, and Police Chief Paul Humphrey have said they will push ahead with a "Community Commitment" plan that includes a lot of the same reforms from that now-defunct legal agreement.
Parrish-Wright said if Louisville is serious about public safety and rebuilding trust, officials must interrogate how tools like license plate readers are used.
"You cannot interrogate without looking at who they impact the most and how they impact people, and whether they are advancing safety … or simply reinforcing these longstanding disparities under the banner of innovation," she said.
Automated license plate readers record passing cars and catalog the license plate number and other details in a city database, which LMPD shares access to with other law enforcement agencies across the U.S. The cameras are often placed at intersections but also can be mobile, attached to police patrol cars.
About 70% of the citations reviewed by KyCIR show license plate readers alerted police to a potential stolen car.
Professor Adam Wandt, deputy chair for technology at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he supports and sees a lot of promise in Flock's license plate readers.
He highlighted their ability to provide fast and empirical, rather than subjective, evidence that guides police investigations, although he noted that technology, like people, can still make mistakes, such as recording the wrong license plate number.
"I think that it is an excellent system for doing many law enforcement related tasks, including one of the most important ones to me: Helping ensure that the right criminal is caught for the right crime, and helping reduce the error rates of innocent people that are sent to prison," he said.
Standards are important to ensure the technology is used safely, he said, from limiting how long police retain the data collected by the cameras to ensuring officers only search license plate data for official investigations.
"I think it's important to realize that as technology matures, as we are using new devices in our lives, law enforcement will want to do the same … and they'll want to do the same because they get better investigative tools," he said. "It's not a need to arrest more people. It's a need to do better law enforcement and keep the community safer."
Measuring racial disparities in policing
Metro Council Member Anthony Piagentini, a District 19 Republican and chair of the minority caucus, said it's inaccurate to use population rates as a metric to determine fairness in policing.
"The question is not: Is it proportionate to the amount of the population? It has to be a question of: Is it proportionate to the amount that any particular group commits a certain crime?" he said.
He said a disproportionate number of arrests for a group of people doesn't necessarily equate to discrimination. He noted that LMPD hired a firm last year to dig into a variety of data points, not just a person's race, regarding traffic stops and other instances when officers interact with members of the public to check for indicators of racial discrimination.
"I'm not saying that there isn't discrimination going on, but we have to be very careful about how we parse these numbers," he said of KyCIR's findings about Flock-related police citations. "We need to dig into the data a little bit more."
Pryor, with the Louisville Urban League, said the long-running "narrative around Black people and criminality" has been repeatedly debunked, regarding who commits various types of crimes in various communities.
"If we are only targeting areas where there are higher percentages of Black residents in the city, then obviously the disproportionality is going to come up," he said. "And that, in and of itself, becomes a problem, because that then feeds this narrative around Black people and criminality."
Duke, with the ACLU of Kentucky, indicated general population rates are a useful comparison point when analyzing crime statistics.
She's Black and said she has no reason to believe "that our community is that much more involved in stolen-car rings than maybe other folks are."
Duke said while Flock company executives and law enforcement agencies may argue license plate readers are a neutral technology, snapping photos of cars irrespective of who's driving them, the "environment in our city is not neutral."
Copyright 2026 LPM News
