I am not a fan of the surveillance state. I wrote a book against police abuse and against the abuse of authority, and I meant it. I do not like being commanded. I do not take orders well; I would have been a poor recruit for the military, and I do not like a government that knocks on the door at two in the morning and calls it a rescue. I am not big on tolls; I am not big on a camera sending me a bill for a bridge I did not mean to take, and I spent years on the radio, including with Scott Sloan on WLW, arguing against red-light cameras. Many people who usually agree with me in Butler County are against Flock cameras. Some of the township trustees I know are against them. I understand the objection. I do not share it anymore, and the reason is a month I spent as foreman of a Butler County grand jury.
That is a qualification, not a conversion. The tool is not the same thing as the hand on the tool.
Tolls, red lights, and a bill in the mail
The Louisville bridges cured me of any romance about a camera and a mailbox. RiverLink, on the Lincoln, the Kennedy, and the Lewis and Clark, has no cash lane. A camera reads the plate, and the bill finds the registered owner. Cross without a transponder, and you pay the higher pay-by-plate rate. As of July 2026, a two-axle car was $5.57 pay-by-plate against $2.79 with a transponder. [1] I got that bill once, four or five dollars in the version I remember, because I was in the wrong lane and would rather have used the other bridge. I did not like it. I had not agreed, in any way that felt like an agreement, to be invoiced by a lens.
I feel differently about the tolls on the drive to Washington and the drive toward Chicago. I pay them. Twenty-five or thirty dollars, sometimes more, and I do not hunt the free road to save three bucks. The toll road is usually the direct road, and getting on and off a free highway through a thicket of signals is its own tax. Florida still gets me. Leave Orlando toward the parks, and a couple of those plazas always find the rental. Toward Cape Canaveral it is milder. I am not a fan of any of it. A road built with taxes should not be rented back to the people who already paid for it. That objection stands. It is not the same objection as a camera that tells a prosecutor which car left a parking lot after a shooting.
What a Flock camera actually is
Flock Safety, out of Atlanta, sells automatic license plate readers. The camera does not need an officer on the corner with a notepad. It photographs the passing vehicle, and the plate number, state, time, location, and the vehicle’s color and make become a searchable record. The company says it does not do facial recognition. People are not supposed to be the data. The car is. By the summer of 2026, the New York Times had the network at about 120,000 cameras, under contract to about 7,000 agencies, which the paper put at roughly 40 percent of American departments, in every state but Alaska. Other reporting put the scan volume near 20 billion license plates a month. Default retention had been about 30 days. After a run of documented abuses, Flock said it was cutting the standard window to seven days and locking accounts that searched abnormally. [2] [3] [4]
The abuse is not theoretical. The Washington Post found more than 50 cases of officers using the databases for personal searches, often men looking up wives, girlfriends, exes, and women they wanted to meet. Dozens of cities have canceled or suspended contracts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the whole arrangement invasive mass surveillance, and that description is fair for the capability. A camera that records every car records the innocent with the guilty. [4] [5] I am not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument with a trustee.
What the grand jury changed
I had always wanted to serve on a grand jury. I did not like the way the summons talks. “ Commanded to appear” is not a phrase I answer to with any pleasure. I am not a recipient of orders from a superior. I went anyway. I was selected foreman. Ohio law lets a county pay a grand juror up to forty dollars a day; the figure is set locally, and I served about twenty-six days. Over the month I took home a few hundred dollars. I spent it on books. I know which ones. They are on the shelf by the bed, and they mean more than books I bought with ordinary money. [6]
About half the time in that room was video. I estimate it’s about eighty hours of tape across the month, including witnesses on the stand and footage played against what they said. I wasn’t a fan of being summoned, and I wasn’t a fan of what I had to watch. Child-exploitation cases came in on phone video, messages arranging sex with a fourteen-year-old, the kind of evidence a detective can pull off a device. Other cases needed a place and a time. A license plate at an intersection in Middletown at 2:30 in the morning is a fact. A deputy sitting on that corner with a clipboard is a target. The drug runs between Dayton and Middletown do not slow down for a man with a pen.
One case is the one I still use when someone tells me a camera is only a toy for busybodies. Two men shot each other up after a fight that started in a bar parking lot. One of them was hit about fourteen times. They dropped a body at the emergency room at the Middletown hospital and left. The man on the stretcher would not say who shot him. Witnesses in that world do not rat each other out. Cars on the road, plates on the cameras, and the correspondence between those plates and the people who could then be found, and the guns that could then be collected, were the indictment. Without the plate reads, we did not have a case. We would have had a wounded man who would not talk, and a prosecutor with a theory.
That is the hole in the old model. Testimony used to carry more of the load because more people were afraid to lie under oath in a culture that still treated a lie as a sin, not a tactic. I do not trust unaided testimony the way a courtroom in 1955 could pretend to. People lie to your face. They lie about alibis, they lie about who was driving, they lie because the crowd they are going back to will punish the truth harder than the court will punish the lie. A camera does not join a gang. It does not forget the intersection. It does not get run over at 2:30 in the morning for writing down a number.
I have told the trustees who worry I will turn on them: I am not going to get mad at you for the cameras. I do not like a surveillance state as a lifestyle. I like a plate reader that makes an indictment possible when every human witness has a reason to go mute.
The qualification, which is the whole argument
Here is the line I will not blur. I trust this tool under a Republican administration. I do not trust it under a Democratic one.
I like law enforcement when it targets criminals. I like it in Butler County under Sheriff Jones. I like it in the Fourth Congressional District under Warren Davidson, in the Ohio Senate under George Lang, and in Columbus under a Republican majority. I like Washington under Trump in a way I didn’t before. I have been to the city several times since he went back to the White House, and I enjoy it now the way I enjoy Mount Rushmore, which is not a sentence I expected to write. The order is visible. The cops and the immigration agents look like they are doing the job in front of them rather than auditioning for a political faction. I like the FBI better with Kash Patel over it than I liked the FBI that raided Mar-a-Lago and treated a former president and his wife as a stage prop. Same building. Different hand on the warrant.
Democrats have already shown what they do with police power when they have it. The surveillance state, the early-morning knock, the selective prosecution, the use of a process crime to punish a political enemy: that was not a rumor from a pamphlet. It was the Obama years and the Biden years, in public. A Flock network in those hands is not a tool for a Middletown shooting. It is a map of where the opposition drove on Tuesday. The company itself has had to warn users off searches tied to reproductive-care laws in some states and off immigration searches in others, which admits the search box can be aimed at politics as easily as at a stolen car. [2] Officers have already aimed it at their private lives. [5] I would not give that keypad to an administration that has used the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and the Justice Department as factional weapons.
So the policy I actually hold is narrower than “cameras good” or “cameras bad.” Cameras, plate readers, and the data centers that make the search possible, under officials who can be thrown out of office and who are not already in the habit of aiming the state at their critics. If the other party takes the offices, the same hardware becomes a reason to rip the contract out. I would rather pass a clean rule now, retention short, searches logged, personal queries a firing offense, immigration and political queries banned by statute, than pretend the objection is the lens.
Data centers are a separate argument, and I have been on that side in Butler County while opposing the nosy state. A data center is a building that hires people and pays taxes and gives a county the computing power the next economy runs on. It is not a warrant. Treating every server rack as a spy camera is how you talk yourself out of the jobs and then act surprised when the investigative database lives in another state anyway. I support the centers. I do not support a government that uses every stream of data just because the stream exists.
Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, and the point of the order
I trust the places where the country still feels like itself. Mount Rushmore is the one I send people to if they have never gone. Better to go during the Sturgis rally, ride the Badlands, take the Iron Mountain road down toward Custer, see the buffalo, then drive up to Deadwood for a hamburger in one of those bars on the strip. The fries taste better next to a street where the old gunmen walked, and a sheriff holding a hard town is still the right picture of the job: Devils Tower, the Tetons, Jackson Hole: same sensation. America is a physical place, not a policy memo.
I have been to the bookstore at Rushmore with my oldest daughter. Everyone else was ready for the car. We had done the avenues and the little passage in the hills, and she and I stayed and carried books out. They are on the shelf. Grand jury service sits in that same part of my memory, which will sound strange to anyone who has not done it. A few hundred dollars, a stack of books, and a month of looking at what people actually do to each other when they think no one can place the car. Since that month I have been back to Washington, and I like the city more than I did. The obelisk and the Masonic ornament do not bother me the way they once did. A country that can put Trump back in that house, after the lawfare and the raid, has earned some patience with its marble.
I do not trust people as much as I used to, not under oath and not in a parking lot. I trust a timestamp. I trust a plate. I trust a data center that keeps the record long enough to indict and not long enough to build a dossier on a life. I do not think the camera network is a Chinese social-credit poster, and I do not think the machine on the other end is HAL, waiting to lock the pod bay doors. The rational machine does not wipe out the creature that can pull its plug. It behaves more like a working dog than like a coup. That is my view of the technology, and it is open to evidence. It is not open to the slogan that every lens is a prison.
If you want the practical version, it is this. Vote for the sheriff, the prosecutor, the trustee, and the president who will aim the cameras at the shooting in the bar lot and not at the donor list. Say yes to the Flock contract with a short retention and a public log of searches. Say no, immediately, if the people in charge have already shown they will use a warrant as a campaign. Churches on Sunday will not replace a plate read at 2:30 in the morning, and a plate read will not replace a county that still elects the hand on the switch. You need both. I have seen cases where you do not get a ticket if you only have the sermons and the witnesses.
Notes
[1] RiverLink tolls the Abraham Lincoln Bridge, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, and the Lewis and Clark Bridge with no cash lanes. Cameras match the plate to the registration and mail an invoice if there is no transponder account. As of the July 1, 2026 adjustment, a two-axle pay-by-plate toll was $5.57, against $2.79 with a transponder. Toll Wiki, “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink,” citing the bi-state rate resolution; RiverLink pay-by-plate instructions.
[2] Flock Safety’s network was reported at about 120,000 cameras and about 7,000 law-enforcement customers, roughly 40 percent of U.S. departments, in every state but Alaska. Searches can be run across agencies. The system prompts users away from reproductive-care searches in jurisdictions that bar them and away from immigration searches in others. Kashmir Hill and Fernando Alfonso III, “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
[3] Reporting in 2026 put Flock’s volume near 20 billion license-plate scans a month. A scan can include plate, state, time, location, color, make, and model. The company says the cameras do not use facial recognition. Default deletion had been about 30 days. TechSpot, “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month,” June 30, 2026. In August 2026, Flock said it would shorten standard retention to seven days and lock accounts showing abnormal search behavior. Associated Press, “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash,” August 13, 2026.
[4] The Marshall Project, “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech,” October 3, 2026, summarizing the Washington Post’s count of more than 50 unauthorized searches, often personal, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s description of ALPRs as invasive mass surveillance. The Institute for Justice’s tracker, cited there, counted 247 full cancellations of ALPR programs.
[5] Same Marshall Project account, October 3, 2026, on officer misuse. See also AP, August 13, 2026: more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions had canceled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated Flock cameras since the start of the year, by a DeFlock count.
[6] Ohio Revised Code 2939.04: grand-juror pay is fixed by the board of county commissioners and may not exceed forty dollars a day, paid from the county treasury. The per-day figure in the essay is the author’s recollection of Butler County service, within that statutory cap. The supervisor may be selected by the common-pleas judge under R.C. 2939.02.
Bibliography
Associated Press. “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash.” August 13, 2026.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Atlas of Surveillance, and EFF writing on automated license plate readers as mass surveillance. https://atlasofsurveillance.org
Hill, Kashmir, and Fernando Alfonso III. “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
Institute for Justice. Automated license plate reader cancellation tracker, cited in The Marshall Project, October 3, 2026.
Marshall Project. “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech.” October 3, 2026.
Ohio Revised Code, sections 2939.02 and 2939.04. Grand jury foreman; compensation.
RiverLink. Official payment and account pages for the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River bridges. https://riverlink.com
TechSpot. “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month, cities are starting to push back.” June 30, 2026.
Toll Wiki. “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink.” Rate table including the July 1, 2026 adjustment.
Wisconsin Right Now. “Shootings, Stabbings, A Kidnapping Attempt: Flock Cameras Helped Crack These Waukesha County Cases.” September 29, 2026. Local case summaries in which a plate reader identified the suspect vehicle.
WIS-TV. “Inside Richland County’s Flock network: 94 murders solved amid mounting privacy debate.” September 29, 2026. Sheriff’s office figures: 687 investigative successes, 296 vehicles recovered, 94 homicides assisted by ALPR data since 2023. One department’s numbers, not a national rate.
Rich Hoffman
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
