Trempealeau County is having an argument it didn’t expect to have — and it might end up deciding who wears the sheriff’s badge next year.
At the center of it: Flock Safety cameras — three automatic license-plate readers posted on Highways 93, 35 and 53, with three more proposed in the county’s 2026 budget — quietly logging every vehicle that passes them. What started as a routine law enforcement purchase has turned into one of the most contentious issues at the County Board in recent memory — contentious enough that the full board voted 15-1-1 to censure Supervisor Andy Parrish after a heated Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee meeting where his motion on the cameras was tabled before he could present it. The board says the censure was about conduct, not cameras.
Whatever anyone thinks of how Parrish handled it, what he was trying to say deserves attention: by his count, more than 5,000 outside organizations and agencies had searched the county’s Flock data in a single month. The county has not released the underlying record that would prove or disprove him.
Why Flock deserves the scrutiny
The concerns aren’t complicated, and they don’t require a law degree to understand.
Nobody voted on this. The cameras were funded through existing budget processes, not a direct County Board vote specifically authorizing a surveillance network — a distinction that matters when you’re talking about logging every car that passes.
Your data hasn’t always stayed local. Until this spring, Flock’s system allowed law enforcement agencies nationwide — with different laws and different standards — to search Trempealeau County’s camera data. Sheriff Erica Koxlien shut that setting off after public pressure. What remains is a request-by-request sharing list the county has never made public — and a setting one sheriff switched off, the next sheriff can switch back on, with nothing in the contract or any written county policy to stop it.
It logs everyone, not just suspects. Unlike a traffic stop or a warrant, a license-plate reader doesn’t need probable cause. The county’s own signed contract sets a 30-day retention window — but within that rolling window, every vehicle that passes a camera is logged, creating a short-term record of residents’ routine movements before it’s purged.
It’s a contract, not a commitment. The county’s agreement runs through the end of the year, according to County Board Chair Andy Todd. That’s a decision point, not a foregone conclusion.
For the record: the county’s corporation counsel reviewed the program in June, found no wrongdoing in how the cameras were approved, and found some of Parrish’s May statements incorrect. That review answered a narrower question than the one that matters here — whether the board should have voted at all.
“But the good outweighs the bad” — does it?
The most common defense of Flock is that it solves crimes, and therefore any privacy cost is worth paying. It’s a fair point to raise — but it deserves a fair answer, not just an assumption.
The honest response is: outweighs it for whom? The benefit is diffuse and hard to measure — a camera that may help recover a stolen vehicle or locate a suspect after the fact.
The cost is concentrated and certain. Every single resident, guilty of nothing, gets logged every time they drive past a camera, with no judge or warrant involved. That’s a trade where the burden falls on everyone, and the benefit is claimed by a system built to share data across a national network — a system whose sharing log this county has never made public. “It helps sometimes” is not the same as “it’s worth the trade-off” — and it’s a much lower bar than the one law enforcement tools are supposed to clear.
“You’re already being tracked by your phone anyway”
This one gets repeated a lot, and it sounds clever, but it doesn’t hold up. Yes, cell phones generate location data. But that data is collected by private companies under terms people at least nominally agreed to, and since Carpenter v. United States, accessing it for an investigation generally requires a warrant.
Flock is different: it’s a private company’s network that the county pays into and deputies search — no warrant, no judge, no written county policy, only the vendor’s own prompt asking for an investigative reason — running on public money on public roads. “A different kind of tracking already exists” isn’t an argument for adding another one with fewer safeguards — it’s an argument for taking privacy more seriously, not less.
The sheriff’s race just got more interesting
That debate has landed squarely in the middle of the Republican primary for Trempealeau County Sheriff, where three candidates — Sheriff Erica Koxlien, Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl and Blair Police Chief Kent Johnson — are competing on the Aug. 11 ballot. No Democrat filed, so the primary decides the office.
For most of the campaign, none of the three had said they would end the program. Koxlien has defended the cameras as a public-safety tool — while also narrowing how they can be searched. Dahl, who has handled the office’s day-to-day relationship with Flock, has not said publicly that he would end the contract. And Johnson spent weeks calling the day-one shutdown claim misinformation.
That was the race in June. It isn’t anymore: in a video posted to his campaign page, Johnson said the claim is now correct — that if elected he would not just turn the cameras off on day one, but cover them up, because he doesn’t trust what Flock could still see through cameras the county only leases.
It’s a significant break from the pack, and it could be the thing that separates Johnson from his opponents: the three candidates are now asked about Flock at every stop, which they were not in April. It also draws a sharper contrast heading into the primary. Voters have a choice between a sheriff appointed in December by Gov. Tony Evers — a vacancy the governor was required by law to fill, and an appointment Dahl also applied for — a chief deputy with more than three decades in law enforcement, 26 years of them in this county’s office, and a police chief positioning himself as the one willing to listen and change course.
The test comes July 30
The Republican Party of Trempealeau County is set to bring all three candidates together for a forum, where the party will decide who it endorses heading into the primary.
That endorsement decision will say a lot about what the local party values most right now. Does it go with the candidate who broke from consensus after hearing from residents on an issue tied directly to constitutional concerns? Does it stick with the incumbent? Or does institutional experience — decades inside the department — carry the day?
Whatever the party decides, the Flock debate isn’t going away. The contract runs to April 8, 2027, and the notice that would end it falls due about nine weeks after the winner is sworn in — which means the renewal question lands on the new sheriff’s desk, not on a lame duck’s. And because no Democrat filed, Aug. 11 isn’t the preview; it’s the whole election. The voters’ only say in who makes that call comes on Aug. 11 — and the question is whether the person they choose walks in with the answer already settled, or willing to change it when their constituents ask.