Mayor Linda Gorton will appoint an independent panel of outside experts in technology, civil rights and the law to review Lexington’s automated license plate readers, her office announced Friday, Sept. 4. She said she hopes to have the panel in place by the end of September.
It would be the first review of the camera program by anyone outside the Lexington Police Department since the readers went up in 2022. The Times reported on Aug. 26 that all 27 published audits of the system were written by two police units, and that no outside audit had been done in a period covering more than 400,000 searches.
“Over the past few months, I’ve listened to the public, and we’ve had numerous internal conversations about this technology. We have already discussed ways to tighten our controls to address concerns expressed by the public,” Gorton said in the release. “However, I think it’s important to take our due diligence to the next level by appointing an independent, unbiased panel.”
The panel “will examine best practices and evaluate if improvements are needed, if a new vendor should be considered, or if other action should be taken,” Gorton said. The city’s 125 readers are supplied by Flock Safety under a contract the Urban County Council approved 14-1 on April 25, 2024. The contract runs through Feb. 28, 2029, at about $400,000 a year, and lets the city terminate for non-appropriation on 30 days’ notice.
Gorton said the review is not aimed at the police. “No one has accused our police of doing anything wrong,” she said, adding that Police Chief Lawrence Weathers “fully supports this review” and had helped build “a strong program that strictly governs how our license plate readers are used, with audits that ensure police accountability.” She said questions had been raised “locally and nationally about the technology itself,” and added: “I want to take politics out of this discussion, and focus on facts.”
The announcement came about 80 minutes after the Times reported that Gorton had told a Lexington resident at a fundraiser Thursday night that she planned to name such a panel. Jacob Keeton, an aide to the mayor, told the Times at 9:01 a.m. that an announcement was coming. The release does not say who will choose the panel’s members, whether its findings will be made public, or whether it can recommend ending the contract. The Times asked the mayor’s office those questions Friday morning and will update this story if it responds.
The release also pushes back on what it calls “considerable misunderstanding and misinformation” about the readers. It says the cameras capture only a still image of a plate, a basic vehicle description and the date, time and location of the reader, with no video and no facial recognition, and cannot be used for traffic enforcement. Since March 2022, the city says, the readers have helped locate 32 missing people, recover more than $5.5 million in stolen vehicles, seize 166 weapons and charge 821 people. Those figures match what the police department told the Times in written answers on Aug. 28.
In those same answers, police said they had turned off the Flock setting that let officers search cameras nationwide, and confirmed two April 18 searches run for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which the department said were tied to a criminal pick-up order. The audits the mayor cited are sampled by the department’s Public Integrity Unit, which has checked a fixed 60 entries a quarter since mid-2025, and the city has published no Public Integrity Unit audit for any quarter of 2023.
Pressure on the program has built over the past two weeks. Twenty people addressed the council on Aug. 27, 17 of them asking the city to end the program, and 4th District Council member Emma Curtis said she would have voted against the contract. A Shively police officer was charged Aug. 26 with running more than 2,000 searches on one woman’s plates. State lawmakers from both parties questioned the cameras at an interim committee meeting in Frankfort on Sept. 3, and two Northern Kentucky cities, Fort Mitchell and Independence, have voted to remove theirs.
Gorton is seeking a third term against Raquel Carter in the Nov. 3 general election. The council’s next regular meeting is Thursday, Sept. 10.
Sources
- City of Lexington news release, Sept. 4, 2026: Mayor to appoint independent, external panel to review automated license plate reader technology
- City of Lexington, License plate reader audits
- LFUCG Legistar, R-163-2024 (Contract #094-2024, Flock Safety)
- The Lexington Times, Sept. 4, 2026: the morning tip
- The Lexington Times, Aug. 28, 2026: LPD written answers and RTIC visit
- The Lexington Times, Aug. 28, 2026: two Flock searches for ICE
- The Lexington Times, Aug. 28, 2026: Flock council testimony
- The Lexington Times, Aug. 26, 2026: the 27 audits
- The Lexington Times, Aug. 25, 2026: what the contract says
This article was drafted with AI assistance (Claude Fable 5.1) for The Lexington Times from the mayor’s office’s Sept. 4, 2026 news release and the Times’ prior reporting, and finalized by the editor.
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.
