WKYT Investigates: Who’s using Lexington’s Flock cameras? Data shows it’s mostly outside agencies

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) - Lexington taxpayers are helping pay for 125 Flock cameras used by the Lexington Police Department, but a WKYT Investigates review found the majority of searches on the system come from outside agencies.

The Lexington Police Department says the goal of the Flock program is to help solve crime in the city. WKYT Investigates found the cameras are also helping other departments solve their crimes.

Audit logs show search totals

WKYT Investigates reviewed seven months of audit logs, covering every search tied to Lexington’s Flock camera system from January through July. The review found more than 7 million searches. Just over 63,000 came from Lexington Police. Roughly 96% came from out-of-state or federal agencies.

(Editor’s note: The data spans seven spreadsheets—each totaling more than 47,000 pages-making publishing the complete raw logs impractical due to the massive amount of data)

Lexington Police Commander Matthew Greathouse said criminals do not stay within jurisdictional boundaries.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have our own information and pictures of potential criminals that are involved or cars that are involved in criminal activity and not share those with our other law enforcement agencies,” Greathouse said. “And we’ve all seen with our leveraged capabilities, great success in helping solve crime and bring justice to victims.”

Louisville leads in-state searches

Even within Kentucky, Lexington isn’t the top searcher. Louisville is, with roughly 78,000 searches compared to Lexington’s 63,000.

“You look at Louisville, they’re about double our strength, so we would expect that they’re probably going to be double,” Greathouse said. “If you’re looking at larger cities like Houston and Dallas, well, I have no idea what their even allocated strength is, but it’s much, much, much greater than ours is, and they may just be doing the automatic default of searching nationwide; that could be part of what you’re seeing.”

Greathouse said every search of Lexington’s system doesn’t necessarily turn up a result. However, audit logs WKYT Investigates obtained from police do not list whether a search returned a result.

Police say agencies choose whether to search nationwide or just their own system. However, they say signing an agreement with Flock doesn’t automatically connect an agency to Lexington’s network.

“We’d have to review their request and then actually hit an approval button within our system,” Greathouse said.

Past misuse cases

Across the country, and in Kentucky, officers have been fired and arrested for misusing Flock cameras. A former Louisville Metro officer was indicted last year, accused of using the cameras to monitor an ex-girlfriend. This month, LMPD announced an investigation into alleged misuse of the system by another one of its officers.

Asked how Lexington Police make sure there aren’t bad actors at other agencies misusing local information, Greathouse said the department relies on agreements and oversight.

“We signed the agreement, and we assume that everybody that took the oath to protect their community are going to follow through,” Greathouse said. “Are there bad apples in every profession? Absolutely. And this is what accountability looks like.”

Data retention policy

Lexington Police policy limits Flock data storage to 30 days. State law allows longer retention if the data becomes evidence. Records of searches, including who looked at what and when, stay in the system permanently.

“Anytime there’s ever allegations of misuse, or there’s questions, we can go back to look to see what somebody was actually searching,” Greathouse said.

Lexington Police say there have been zero incidents of their officers misusing the system since the first camera went up in 2022.

The Lexington Police Department conducts quarterly audits of its use of Flock cameras. You can find those reports and view a map of Flock camera locations here.