When Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg presented his 2026 city budget, he touted drops in violent crime, including shootings and homicides, under his administration.
The city was becoming safer, he said. But he pressed that they still needed to do more.
Greenberg specifically singled out the need for more license plate reader cameras — a controversial technology that’s sparked lawsuits and ignited a wave of pushback across the country from privacy proponents over concerns about unconstitutional mass surveillance.
Greenberg told Louisville Metro Council members the cameras would “help deter criminals and solve crimes.”
The lawmakers backed his plan and allocated $500,000 for the cameras.
Since 2021, the Louisville Metro Police Department has built a fleet of license plate readers provided by the company Flock Safety. Nearly 190 cameras are posted around the city with about 100 more awaiting installation. Such devices are often affixed to utility poles, and they photograph passing vehicles and catalog the information in a database that’s shared with law enforcement agencies across the country.
And while publicly Greenberg pledges to make LMPD the nation’s most “trusted, trained and transparent” police force, the agency won’t say where the cameras are installed.
Local officials’ refusal to disclose license plate reader camera locations is not unique. But the secrecy troubles civil liberty advocates who are concerned about the cameras potentially being concentrated in marginalized neighborhoods and used to conduct warrantless searches of data on unknowing passersby.
The cameras collect a trove of data that enable police to map residents’ daily routines, even people who aren’t under investigation for alleged crimes, said Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based civil liberty law firm. Police can then share the information with other agencies.
“So the law-abiding people who are having their movements hoovered up into this enormous database that’s often shared very widely across the country have an overriding interest in knowing where they’re being tracked by their government,” he said.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting requested records showing license plate reader camera locations from several police departments in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee and Georgia. We received mixed responses.
Police in Kentucky cities Jeffersontown, Paducah, Georgetown and Owensboro, as well as Evansville, Indiana, and Knoxville, Tennessee, provided KyCIR with records that show locations. The Lexington Police Department even shares a map online showing the approximate locations of its license plate readers.
LMPD, along with police at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky, as well as Kentucky cities Elizabethtown and Bowling Green and Atlanta, Georgia, refused to provide camera location details. KyCIR is appealing the denials from Kentucky agencies to the state attorney general.
Rationale for the secrecy ranged from averting terrorism to avoiding tipping off would-be criminals to cameras that could detect their movements.
LMPD officials said disclosing the location of cameras would “compromise public safety.”
"The Louisville Metro Police Department uses license plate reader technology as a tool to enhance public safety and assist in criminal investigations. Disclosing the exact locations of these cameras could compromise their effectiveness and allow individuals engaged in criminal activity to avoid detection,” Sgt. Matt Sanders, the agency’s spokesperson, said in an email.
The mixed decisions from police on whether to reveal the locations reflect how these surveillance networks have expanded quickly in recent years, often with policymakers setting little-to-no rules on how they’re used and what level of transparency is required, said Soyfer, with the Institute for Justice.
“I think when police resist revealing the locations of the cameras, they’re kind of speaking out of both sides of their mouths,” he said. “Because on the one hand, they’re saying these cameras are just capturing people at public locations where no one has any expectation of privacy. And on the other, by the way, the locations of the cameras are super secret.”
‘Why wouldn’t you want people to know?’
Louisville Metro Council Member Tammy Hawkins, a District 1 Democrat and chair of the council’s majority caucus, said she sees a public safety benefit to using license plate readers “because the police can’t be everywhere.”
She’s sympathetic to LMPD’s argument that disclosing the devices’ locations could inhibit their ability to use this tool to fight crime.
“I can agree with that because people are beginning to identify where those cameras is at and trying to find a loophole to go around,” she said.
When LMPD denied KyCIR’s open records request, the agency said it would have to do a “complete overhaul of the camera system” every time it disclosed license plate reader locations. And moving the devices costs time and money, city officials said.
The permitting and installation process for each camera can take months, with some cameras currently awaiting approval having been “in the permitting process for six months to a year,” said Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell and Assistant County Attorney Michael Spenlau in a letter to the attorney general sent in response to KyCIR’s appeal. Moving a camera can run between $500 and $1,000, they said.
Amber Duke, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky, said she hasn’t seen a specific example where a police department identified a suspect who evaded detection by avoiding known locations of license plate readers.
“Beyond it being a scenario that people are throwing out, I haven't seen any evidence that it is something that can ever happen, or that it's something that is provable that it can happen,” she said.
License plate readers are just one form of surveillance, along with a network of video cameras, ShotSpotter audio devices and other tech that LMPD and other law enforcement use, Duke said.
“And all of these technologies together create a pretty, you know, heavy blanket over Louisville … really over this country, at this point,” she said.
If someone knows the location of a license plate reader camera on Main Street, for example, she’s skeptical they’ll also be able to evade detection from the several other surveillance technologies active in Louisville.
Civil liberties and privacy rights advocates, like the ACLU, warn that license plate readers monitor everyone, not just people doing crimes. With enough cameras, and without safeguards such as tight limits on how long photos can be retained in the database, they say these devices can collect enough information to create a virtual dossier on residents.
“Very few of the data points in these massive databases even relate to an investigation. Very few of them result in, you know, hot list alerts for stolen cars or anything like that,” said Soyfer of the Institute for Justice, the nonprofit law firm that started the Plate Privacy Project, a campaign against warrantless mass surveillance by license plate readers.
Louisville Metro Council Member Shameka Parrish-Wright, a District 3 Democrat, said she’s concerned mass surveillance can be used for racial profiling.
She suggested one reason a police department might not want to disclose camera locations is because it could reveal inequities in who’s being monitored.
“Why wouldn't you want people to know where that data is being captured at? Because you don't want to show how targeted you are in marginalized communities,” she said.
Parrish-Wright said she saw a map of Louisville surveillance cameras and license plate readers and noticed a heavy concentration in areas that are home to such communities.
“It is scary, and the over-concentration in some neighborhoods was ridiculous,” she said.
Transparency is important to establish trust between police and residents, Parrish-Wright said.
“If we have a real commitment towards the most trusted, trained and transparent police department, then this is how we start,” she said. “I'm for building relationships that are needed, and you cannot do that without transparency.”
‘You can’t hide them’
Lexington Police Department Commander Matthew Greathouse led the agency’s rollout of Flock Safety license plate readers a few years ago.
The agency didn’t disclose the devices’ locations when it ran a pilot program to test the technology, he said.
The secrecy sparked some pushback from local groups worried about the police using the tools to target “over-policed, marginalized neighborhoods.”
When the police agency expanded their license plate reader program, however, they made the locations public.
Greathouse said license plate readers gather data that helps them do “precision policing.” If they’re searching for a white vehicle used in a crime, for example, the technology can help them find the exact car they’re looking for rather than pull over a bunch of people driving white cars.
“We want to be very efficient in what we do and where we deploy our police officers,” he said.
The Lexington police’s transparency page lists the department’s license plate reader policy, statistics on cases the agency says it has solved using license plate data, audits of the network database, and a static map of camera locations.
“I mean, you can't hide them … It’s not like you can just drive by them and not notice them if you're paying attention,” Greathouse said. “They're not covert. They're very overt.”
As for someone trying to avoid detection by license plate readers while committing a crime, Greathouse said making the map “available to our community is of higher value,” even if that means some criminals might study the map and try to plan a route that doesn’t pass by any of them.
Plus, he said, license plate readers are just one avenue of detection.
“Avoid the Flock camera network, that's fine. But probably the traffic cameras are going to catch you,” he said.
Transparency as a tactic
Transparency is sometimes a trade-off for gaining support, said Sarah Hamid, director of strategic campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy advocacy group .
She said some police departments will offer a level of transparency to curry favor with the public or win lawmakers’ votes to approve buying license plate readers.
“I'm seeing transparency, and the many layers of transparency that a police department can admit the public into, being leveraged as a clear negotiating tactic,” she said. “It looks different in every city, and transparency arguments and concessions are playing an interesting role in getting legitimacy.”
Knowing where the license plate readers are located is nice, she said, but it doesn’t erase the “legitimate public safety risk” posed by the vast amounts of data this technology collects.
In cities that don’t disclose license plate reader locations, citizen researchers are trying on their own to track down the devices. The anonymously-run NosyNelly.com posts locations of about 100 cameras in Louisville — details taken from city permits, according to the website.
Another website, deflock.me, crowdsources reports of license plate readers that people spot in the U.S. and other countries. Flock Safety is a major supplier of license plate readers, including the ones used by LMPD and Lexington police.
Hamid said citizen research like this is inspiring public scrutiny of mass surveillance that has been absent as the boom in government surveillance technology erupted over the past decade or so.
“Having to, like, cleave information about a system that is being paid for by your own tax dollars really activates people,” she said. “It starts to create a public that is more literate on how to read contracts, how to read budgets, how to file public records requests.”
