BLAIR — The night after his own fundraiser, Kent Johnson turned on a phone camera and took back something he had said.
For weeks, the Blair police chief and candidate for Trempealeau County sheriff had been pushing against a claim moving through the county: that he intended to switch off the county’s Flock Safety license-plate readers his first day in office. He called it misinformation. He said so, by his own account, adamantly.
In a three-and-a-half-minute video posted to his campaign’s Facebook page, he stopped pushing.
“There was misinformation put out a while ago that I said that I would turn the cameras off on day one, and I very adamantly announced to everyone that that was incorrect,” Johnson said. “Well, now I’m telling you that it is correct.”
A month ago I never would have guessed that I would be saying this. But I’m going to say it now, and for those of you who know me, you know I don’t say it unless I mean it.
Kent Johnson, campaign video, July 2026
It is an unusual thing for a candidate to do three weeks out from a primary — not soften a position, but reverse one, on the single issue that has consumed county government this year, and reverse it toward the side he had been arguing against.
Johnson credits the change to the people who came to his meet and greet. He said he had spent the evening and the following day asking residents a narrow question — not whether the cameras worked, but whether they made people feel safer.
They didn’t, he said.
He returned twice to a distinction that has become the core of his objection: that residents have a right to be secure in their persons and effects, and a separate right to feel secure in them. The county’s cameras, he concluded, were costing the second without clearly buying enough of the first.
“We are doing harm as well as good,” he said. “We all knew that before. Good may outweigh the bad.” He said what he had not appreciated until recently was the scale of harm caused by misuse of the systems, and that Flock’s continuing expansion of its technology was making that worse rather than better.
His objection lands on ownership. Johnson said he would not use the cameras while a private corporation holds the controls, and left the door open to some future system with tighter monitoring and better security guarantees. Then he went a step past shutting them off.
“Not just shut them off, but also cover them up,” he said, “because I really don’t trust what Flock could still see through their cameras that we are only leasing.”
Three candidates, three records
Johnson’s reversal leaves the three Republicans on the Aug. 11 ballot in measurably different places on the county’s most contested issue.
Johnson has now said he would end the program outright.
Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl has been the office’s day-to-day steward of the system. County records obtained by the Pioneer under the open records law show Dahl handling the county’s operational relationship with Flock — asking the company in April 2025 whether camera locations were public records, and telling Flock that August that the office had put three additional cameras into its 2026 budget proposal. He has not publicly said he would end the contract.
Sheriff Erica Koxlien has kept the system while narrowing it. After public pressure this spring, she disabled the setting that allowed law enforcement agencies nationwide to search Trempealeau County’s camera data. She has defended the cameras as a public safety tool and has not said she would let the contract lapse.
Neither Koxlien nor Dahl responded to questions about the contract renewal before deadline.
Whether he could actually do it
He could, on the county’s own reading of the law.
County Board Chairman Andy Todd has been direct that the cameras are the sheriff’s call and not the board’s. “The board cannot do anything under the constitution, it’s all about the sheriff,” Todd told WXOW, adding that it is up to the sheriff whether to take them down. Critics of the contract dispute that framing and argue the board controls the money. But on Todd’s account, a sheriff who wants the cameras gone does not need permission.
The calendar cooperates. Todd has said the county’s current Flock contract expires Dec. 31; the signed agreement produced to the Pioneer sets the term to April 8, 2027, with notice of non-renewal due about March 9. On either date the decision falls to whoever takes office after November.
Why the primary is the election
No Democrat filed for sheriff, and no third-party candidate qualified for the ballot. Whoever wins the Aug. 11 Republican primary will stand unopposed in November.
That makes the primary the entire race. It also means the county’s decision on the Flock contract, whose non-renewal notice falls due about March 9, 2027 — roughly ten weeks after the winner takes office — will be settled in practice by whoever turns out on a Tuesday in August.
Who Kent Johnson is
Johnson has run the Blair Police Department since August 2020, sworn in under then-Mayor Ardell Knutson. It is one of the smallest departments in the county — three to four full-time officers, the chief among them.
His campaign says he has worked in law enforcement since 2002 and served in the Navy during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He is a certified instructor in firearms, tactical response and casualty care. He has taught concealed-carry qualification courses, ran a free firearms safety class for women earlier this year, and co-taught active-threat training for area fire and EMS crews on rescue task force procedure — introducing medical care into a mass casualty scene rather than waiting for it to be cleared.
He was suspended by Mayor John Rawson for roughly two months in early 2022 after a complaint by a Blair officer. The complaint was withdrawn and Johnson returned to duty that March.
Not only here
Johnson is joining a line that has been forming across the state.
At least 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies used Flock cameras this year, according to a Wisconsin Examiner investigation. Since then Dane County, Verona, Monona, Fitchburg, Appleton, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay have ended or declined to renew, and UW-Madison’s police department has started pulling cameras off campus.
Misuse drove much of it. A Milwaukee officer was charged after allegedly running the system more than 170 times to track a woman he was dating and her former partner. The detective assigned to investigate him was later charged for doing the same kind of thing.
The retreat is not universal. Green Bay extended its contract five years in December 2025 for roughly $1.3 million. Galesville’s council voted to keep its camera.
Johnson closed the video the way he opened it, talking to neighbors rather than voters. He said his own children work in industries that bring them into contact with the system. He said the people who talked to him made the decision for him.
The primary is Aug. 11. The contract runs to April 8, 2027, and the notice that would end it falls due around March 9 — about ten weeks after the next sheriff is sworn in. Somebody will inherit a signature nobody voted on.