🌎 Resumen en español · traducción automática
La policía de Lexington realizó 266,183 búsquedas en su sistema de lectores de placas Flock entre julio de 2024 y junio de 2026, según auditorías trimestrales del departamento, aunque diez de las 27 auditorías listadas en el sitio web de la ciudad no se pueden descargar y corresponden a los primeros dos años del programa. El caso de un oficial de policía de Shively acusado de realizar 2,048 búsquedas inapropiadas en el sistema Flock ha generado preocupaciones sobre la supervisión, mientras que activistas del Partido Demócrata Socialista planean entregar una carta de demanda pidiendo a Lexington que cancele su contrato con Flock y retire las 125 cámaras en seis meses.
Traducción y resumen generados por IA a partir del artículo en inglés. Puede contener errores; consulte el texto original.
Lexington police officers ran 266,183 searches through the city’s Flock license plate reader system between July 2024 and June 2026, according to the department’s own quarterly audits. Every one of those audits was conducted by the Lexington Police Department. The check the department describes as independent examined 60 entries per quarter.
The Lexington Times tried to download all 27 audits the city lists on its license plate reader audit page. Seventeen came back. Ten do not download at all, and every figure in this story comes from the seventeen that do.
The review comes as the cameras arrive at City Hall. On Thursday, Aug. 27, at 6 p.m. at 200 E. Main St., the Bluegrass chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America plans to hand the Urban County Council a demand letter asking Lexington to cancel its Flock contract, remove all 125 cameras within six months and delete the data they have collected. A companion petition had 297 signatures toward a goal of 1,000 as of Wednesday afternoon.
And on Wednesday, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that a Shively police officer has been charged with running 2,048 Flock searches on two registration numbers belonging to a single woman. Asad Zahir, 40, faces five counts of official misconduct and five counts of unlawful access to a computer; the complaint says that between Jan. 1 and May 2 he “harassed the victim in Indiana and made threatening comments to the extent that she filed and was granted a temporary protection order against him.” His superiors discovered the searches. He was arrested Aug. 25, released, and is set for arraignment Thursday in Jefferson County District Court. He has not entered a plea.
That case is about Shively’s system, not Lexington’s. But it raises a question a resident can reasonably ask here: if an officer did that in Lexington, what would catch it?
The first two years are gone
The city’s audit page lists 27 documents, beginning with the third quarter of 2022, when the program launched.
Ten of them return a 404 error: every quarterly audit from Q3 2022 through Q1 2024, the consolidated 2022 audit, the Q2 2024 quarterly audit and the Q2 2024 Public Integrity Unit audit. The links point at a migrated-files path on the city’s content server that no longer resolves. The failure is silent — the page presents them as available documents.
What that means in practice is that the first two years of Lexington’s Flock oversight record, covering the period when the program was launched, expanded and brought to the Council for a five-year renewal, is not available to the public at the place the city directs the public to find it.
Who does the auditing
Two reviews run each quarter, and it is worth being precise about them, because the difference matters.
The first is by the Intelligence Unit inside the Bureau of Investigations — the unit that operates Flock. Lt. David M. Richardson signs these memos to the chief. This audit reports monthly search totals, reviews repeat-searched plates, and states each quarter that all searches were for legitimate law enforcement purposes.
The second is by the Public Integrity Unit, which each memo describes as “conducted independently of the Bureau of Investigations Intelligence Unit, which maintains and operates the License Plate Reader (FLOCK) system.” That is a real separation, and LPD deserves credit for building it in: the unit checking the searches is not the unit running the cameras. Lt. Meredith Taylor signed these through 2024; Lt. Dillan Taylor has signed them since.
Both units are the Lexington Police Department. The Times found no record of an audit by anyone outside it — no outside firm, no LFUCG internal audit, no Council-commissioned review — at any point since 2022, and the city’s page lists none.
The sample shrank as the searching grew
The Public Integrity Unit reviews a sample. How that sample is drawn changed in 2025.
Through the first quarter of 2025, the memos describe a proportional method: “A random number generator was utilized to audit 1% of the unique entries.” That produced 87 entries reviewed in Q3 2024, 75 in Q4 2024 and 89 in Q1 2025.
Beginning with the second quarter of 2025, the language changes to a fixed number: “At random 20 of the unique entries for the months … was selected totaling 60 overall selections.” It has read that way in every PIU audit since — a flat 60 per quarter, no longer tied to how much searching happened.
Search volume did not hold still.
| Quarter | Total searches | Unique stated reasons | Searches per reason | PIU entries reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2024 | 23,299 | 3,144 | 7.4 | 87 |
| Q4 2024 | 25,731 | 3,187 | 8.1 | 75 |
| Q1 2025 | 33,966 | 3,309 | 10.3 | 89 |
| Q2 2025 | 38,896 | 3,299 | 11.8 | 60 |
| Q3 2025 | 39,836 | 3,175 | 12.5 | 60 |
| Q4 2025 | 32,511 | 2,426 | 13.4 | 60 |
| Q1 2026 | 32,825 | 2,198 | 14.9 | 60 |
| Q2 2026 | 39,119 | 2,241 | 17.5 | 60 |
Quarterly searches rose 68% from Q3 2024 to Q2 2026. The number of entries the Public Integrity Unit reviewed fell from 87 to 60.
One number in that table deserves its own sentence. Searches per stated reason — total searches divided by the unique reasons officers entered — rose in every single quarter, from 7.4 to 17.5. The audits explain that one investigation legitimately generates many searches as officers hunt a vehicle. That is true. It also means each written justification now covers more than twice as much searching as it did two years ago.
A caution on the arithmetic, because it cuts against an easy headline: the Public Integrity Unit samples “unique entries,” and the Intelligence Unit counts “unique search reasons.” These are not the same figure — 1% of a month’s unique entries yielded 29 in a month the quarterly memo lists as 1,095 unique reasons. The 60 can be reported as a count. It cannot honestly be converted into a percentage of anything in this table, and LPD should be asked what the current denominator is.
The test that would flag a Zahir pattern was replaced
Every quarterly audit that can still be downloaded, from Q3 2024 through the end of 2025, describes the same screen for repeat searching:
“If a search was conducted on a specific plate more than 10 times, further review was conducted including the reason for the search and the dates the search was conducted.”
That is a volume test, and it is the shape of the Shively allegation — 2,048 searches on two plates. Each time it ran, the audits report the repeats traced to ongoing investigations.
In the first quarter of 2026, the method changed. The Q1 2026 memo reads:
“A review was conducted of license plates searched in the system and the days between searches. If a plate was searched with more than 7 days between searches, further auditing was competed.”
That is a different question. The old screen asked how many times one plate was searched. The new one asks how far apart the searches were. A concentrated burst of searches on one plate inside a single week would trip the first test and not the second. The audits do not explain why the method changed.
The newest safeguard came from the vendor
The Q2 2026 audit reports a genuine improvement, and says where it came from:
“At the beginning of the 2nd Quarter of 2026, FLOCK introduced enhanced auditing capabilities.”
The system now automatically alerts LPD administrators to five categories: single-user plate searches, searches beyond a 30-day window, multiple case numbers for the same plate, exclusive external network searches, and narrow timeframes. In the quarter, 97 single-user plate searches and 88 beyond-30-day searches alerted. All 185 were reviewed and attributed to active investigations.
Two things follow. The alert most relevant to a single officer working one plate on his own now exists — and it was built by Flock Safety, the contractor, rather than added by the city. And “exclusive external network search” is now a named alert category, which means out-of-network searching is a recognized risk in the system’s own design.
What the audits do well
A fair reading of these documents does not support a picture of a department indifferent to misuse.
Hot List entries — standing watch lists for specific vehicles — cannot be created by individual officers. The audits state that during the 2022 rollout, LPD restricted creation to the Intelligence Unit, required authorization “vetted through two layers of supervision,” and set entries to delete automatically after seven days. Both units audit that process.
More directly relevant to the Shively case: Lexington chose not to accept other departments’ Hot Lists. As the audits put it, the decision was made “to not accept other Department ‘Hot List’ from showing alerts due to Lexington Officers having no knowledge of the case.” That is a deliberate limit on exactly the cross-agency exposure a case like Zahir’s raises, adopted four years before it.
Lexington also publishes its camera locations and these audits at all — which Louisville, citing Lexington as the transparent model, voted in April 2026 not to do.
Loose ends in the paperwork
Several memos contain errors that a reader should weigh, since these are the city’s accountability record.
The Q1 2024 PIU audit states it covered “the 1st Quarter of 2024, October through December.” The Q1 2026 PIU audit says it audited “the 1st Quarter of 2026, January through March,” then reports sampling “the months October, November, and December.” Both 2026 quarterly memos state “As of March 26, 2025, 125 ALPR cameras are being managed” — the prior year’s date. The Q2 2025 PIU memo is headed “2nd Quarter 2025” but says in its first line that it audited the first quarter.
There is also a third retention figure now on the record. The Q2 2026 audit says “The Lexington Police department stores data for 60 days.” The signed contract order form lists a “Retention Period: 30 Days” alongside an “Extended data retention” add-on described in the 2024 expansion quote as “Up to 1 Year.” Thirty, sixty, or up to a year — the documents do not agree, and as we reported Tuesday, that is a fair thing to ask the department to reconcile in public.
What is not established
None of this is evidence that anything like the Shively case has happened in Lexington. Every audit that can be downloaded reports no misuse and no complaints, and the Public Integrity Unit says it has received none.
The narrower finding is about what the record can and cannot show. On the public record, no one outside the police department has examined this system. The quarterly sample no longer scales with the volume of searching. The screen most likely to surface a high-volume pattern on a single plate was replaced in 2026 with a different test. And the two years of audits covering the program’s launch and expansion cannot be read, because the links are broken.
In Shively, an audit did not catch the officer. His superiors did.
The Times sent written questions to the Lexington Police Department’s public information office on Wednesday, Aug. 26, asking whether the ALPR program has ever been audited by anyone outside the department; what denominator the 60-entry sample is drawn from; why the repeat-plate screen changed in 2026; which of the three retention figures in the record is operative; whether the missing 2022–2024 audits can be restored; whether an outside agency can search Lexington-collected plate data and whether such a search would appear in LPD’s audits; and whether Flock’s new “exclusive external network search” alert has ever triggered. This story will be updated with the department’s response.
The Times has asked the Lexington Police Department whether the ALPR program has ever been audited by anyone outside the department, what denominator the 60-entry sample is drawn from, why the repeat-plate screen changed in 2026, how long plate data is actually retained, and whether the missing 2022–2024 audits can be restored. This story will be updated with the department’s response.
Sources
- City of Lexington, “License plate reader audits”
- Beth Musgrave, “KY officer charged with using Flock camera info 2,000 times to track a woman,” Lexington Herald-Leader
- DeFlock the Bluegrass petition, Bluegrass DSA
- Bluegrass DSA demand letter (PDF)
- The Lexington Times, “Flock opponents plan to fill Council chambers Thursday”
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance (Claude Opus 5) for The Lexington Times and finalized by the editor. All 27 audits listed on the city’s license plate reader audit page were downloaded and read; the 17 that are still retrievable are the basis for every figure reported here. Search totals, sample sizes and methodology quotations come directly from those memos.
Republishing: This is original Lexington Times reporting, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. You may republish this article, in full and unaltered, for free — including commercially — with credit to The Lexington Times and a link to the original.
