It’s racist, shortsighted to bunch Lexington’s Flock cameras in poor, minority neighborhoods | Opinion
What if you, a public agency, were planning a project and people were really worried about it? Then you unveiled that project and all their fears turned out to be exactly right?
Welcome to the Saga of the Flock Cameras brought to you by the Lexington Police Department. To recap, city and police officials have pushed this pilot program for a year, saying they are an easy way to fight crime. The Flock cameras take photos of license plates and run those license plates against various databases. As of April 12, Lexington police have said the cameras have helped them locate 152 stolen vehicles, 18 missing persons and has led to the arrests of 245 people.
Activists and community members have pushed back, noting the cameras would probably target poor and minority neighborhoods, leading to the kind of racist overpolicing that we thought we were trying to correct.
This week, the police unveiled the locations of the expanded Flock cameras, now up to 100, and lo and behold, they are nestled in groups in our poorest neighborhoods, while vast swathes of Lexington have not a one.
Before you start yelling, I understand they have been placed in places with the highest crime statistics. Two thoughts on that. I find it hard to believe there’s no crime on Nicholasville Road between UK and Brannon Crossing, the most commercially important corridor in the city, which includes Fayette Mall. There have been three fatal shootings at the mall between 2019 and 2020, alone.
Wealthy neighborhoods like Chevy Chase sometimes get robbed because they are wealthy; surely it would be useful to have some cameras there. It’s also hard to believe there’s never any crime in the entire pie slice between Broadway/Harrodsburg and Limestone/Nicholasville all the way to the Jessamine County line. Especially since the vast number of arrests from Flock appear to be for stolen vehicles.
So that seems like poor implementation. Then there’s perception. If I was a weary and sensitive police department, tired of being accused of brutality and racism, then why not spread the cameras out a little more for the sake of fairness? You don’t really know where criminals drive around, and it seems like a broad net would catch more fish than bunching cameras tightly together, practically on top of each other, as they are positioned on streets on the North Side. This would have the added benefit of ... the perception of not being so racist.
(Let’s not forget the issue of turning a mid-size town into a surveillance state. Too many crime shows have inured us to the idea that we’re always being watched, not least by the little spy boxes we hold in our hands all day long that track our location, our words, our deepest desires.)
This is an expensive and divisive program that police believe is working for them. But they’ve missed an important opportunity to build community trust over it, instead ensuring that our most vulnerable citizens feel further harassed and policed because of their economic status and the color of their skin.
Herald-Leader reporter Taylor Six contributed to this story.
This story was originally published May 4, 2023 at 10:52 AM.
