LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Louisville Metro Council’s Public Safety Committee voted Wednesday against requiring the city to disclose locations of its license plate reader cameras, rejecting a proposal by District 6 Democrat J.P. Lyninger in a bipartisan 7-2 vote. The measure will return to the full M etro Council next week for consideration. Louisville has deployed more than 200 license plate readers, predominantly supplied by Flock Safety, but police officials have consistently refused to reveal their locations. The secrecy stands in contrast to Lexington’s approach of publishing license plate reader locations online, a fact Lyninger highlighted during Wednesday’s committee hearing. Lexington operates 125 license plate readers throughout Fayette County, with full transparency about where the devices are positioned. “And last I checked, Lexington has not descended into chaos due to the fact that this information is public,” Lyninger said during the meeting. The proposal’s defeat came despite significant scrutiny of Louisville’s camera network, including recent investigations revealing that half of 177 criminal citations involving license plate readers in 2025 were issued to Black residents, compared to roughly a quarter of Louisville’s population. Police and some council members argued that revealing camera locations would aid criminals and encourage vandalism. Deputy Chief Emily McKinley testified that four cameras had been damaged after previous location disclosures. But Lyninger disputed the security argument, suggesting that criminals do not meticulously plan escape routes around surveillance cameras. “I don’t think that we’ve got a city full of Moriarties,” he said, invoking the fictional nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. The debate occurs amid broader concerns about license plate reader misuse. A Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting investigation found that a DEA agent used a Louisville police officer’s account to conduct 150 immigration-related searches of the Flock database, leading to policy changes and the discipline of three officers. The ACLU of Kentucky and other civil liberties advocates have called for transparency, noting that camera locations are essential to analyzing whether the devices are disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Kentucky lawmakers are moving to establish statewide guardrails on license plate reader use. House Bill 58, sponsored by state Rep. John Hodgson of Fisherville, passed the legislature last month, mandating that agencies adopt written policies for the cameras, limit data retention to 90 days and restrict data sharing to specific law enforcement purposes. This article was generated by AI (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) based on source material from KY Center for Investigative Reporting, enriched with 2 web searches. The original source is available at https://www.lpm.org/investigate/2026-04-17/louisville-lawmakers-dont-want-to-say-where-citys-license-plate-readers-keep-watch. The post Louisville rejects bid to disclose license plate reader locations appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less