WHITEHALL — Whoever wins the Aug. 11 Republican primary for Trempealeau County sheriff will inherit a choice no elected body ever separately voted to create: whether to keep the county's three Flock Safety license-plate cameras — and the county's own records say the deadline lands on the winner's watch.
The timing comes from the contract itself. The signed agreement, obtained under the state public records law and published by the Pioneer, runs on a 24-month term that began “upon first installation and validation” — and on April 9, 2025, the day the first two cameras were validated, Flock put the result in writing to the sheriff's office: “The contract term is 4/9/25 - 4/8/27.”
The deal does not simply end then: it renews automatically for another 24 months unless either party gives “notice of non-renewal at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of the then-current term” — about March 9, 2027, two months after the next sheriff takes office Jan. 4, the first Monday in January set by state law. The records produced to the Pioneer contain no amendment to those terms. On the terms of the produced agreement, the cancel-or-keep decision belongs to whoever wins this election.
November settles nothing: no Democrat, independent or third-party candidate filed, according to Ballotpedia's listings, so the primary winner runs unopposed barring a write-in campaign. County Board Chair Andy Todd argues the choice is the sheriff's alone — “The board cannot do anything under the constitution, it's all about the sheriff,” he told WXOW in July — while critics, including Supervisor Andy Parrish, argue a board that appropriates money can stop; corporation counsel has not published an opinion.
Not just shut them off, but also cover them up.
Blair Police Chief Kent Johnson, in a video posted to his campaign's Facebook page
The system is small — three cameras on Highways 93, 35 and 53, $11,650 the first year, $9,000 a year after, $20,650 over the deal — recording each passing vehicle's plate, color, make and model and purging the data after 30 days.
Of the three Republicans on the ballot — Blair Police Chief Kent Johnson, Sheriff Erica Koxlien and Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl — one has said the cameras would come down; one has kept them but narrowed who can search them; one has run them since they went live and has not said.
Kent Johnson: shut them off, cover them up
Johnson is the only candidate who has said the cameras would come down — a position he reached in reverse. For weeks he called claims that he would switch the cameras off on day one misinformation; then, in a video posted to his campaign's Facebook page in late July, he took it back.
“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 in the video. “Well, now I'm telling you that it is correct.”
Johnson calls it a change of mind after listening: at his meet and greet, he said, he asked residents not whether the cameras worked but whether they made people feel safer, and concluded they did not. His objection settled on ownership — he would not run a surveillance system a private company controls — though he left the door open to a future system with tighter safeguards.
“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.”
The reversal came less than three weeks before the primary — and gave Johnson his only clear separation from his opponents.
Erica Koxlien: keep the cameras, narrow the reach
Koxlien inherited the system whole: appointed in December 2025 by Gov. Tony Evers when Brett Semingson retired — an appointment Dahl also sought — she took office more than a year after Semingson signed and eight months after the cameras went live.
She has defended the cameras as a public-safety tool, as the Pioneer has reported, and she is the only sheriff who has changed how they operate: this spring, after public pressure over who could see the data, she disabled a sharing setting. The Trempealeau County Times, which first reported the change, described a setting that had let agencies nationwide view images from the county's cameras during vehicle searches — the sheriff's decision, the Times said, not the board's.
The county's own records describe the reach in shifting terms. Flock's December 2024 onboarding advice was to auto-approve share requests “on a statewide level”; in February 2025, Semingson told Galesville's mayor the database was “searchable by Sheriff's Office deputies, and all other agencies who have six or more cameras in their arsenal,” plus “any other law enforcement agency who may ask.” The records do not show which setting the county ran, or which one Koxlien changed; the Pioneer's request for the audit log remains open.
On July 8, Koxlien presented an informational session on the cameras to the Law Enforcement Committee. But nowhere in the public record the Pioneer has reviewed — including the July 30 candidate forum, whose livestream records no camera question — has she said whether she would keep the contract past its term. She did not respond to questions for the July 25 report.
Wayne Dahl: ran the system, hasn't said what he'd do with it
Dahl did not choose his role: Semingson designated him the county's first Flock administrator in December 2024, and the relationship ran through him from then on — all 21 of Flock's automated share-request notices were addressed to Dahl.
When the cameras went live in April 2025, Dahl emailed patrol, dispatch, detectives and sergeants their login instructions, attaching what he called “an initial operating procedure for the Sheriff's Office” and writing that “the Flock system is only to be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes and will be audited from time to time.” That procedure — log a reason for every search, submit to periodic audits — is the only written internal limit on the system's use in the county's records. That August, he told Flock the office had put three more cameras in its 2026 budget proposal.
In October 2025, Flock alerted its Wisconsin law-enforcement contacts to a bill by Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee, to ban law-enforcement plate readers outright, with narrow exceptions, and require warrants for plate-reader and security-camera data; the legislation “would significantly inhibit public safety in Wisconsin,” Flock wrote, urging agencies to contact their legislators. The copy in the county's production shows no addressees, and nothing in the records shows the office acted on it. Introduced as Assembly Bill 576, the bill died in committee when the session ended in March.
Dahl is endorsed by three retired sheriffs, including Semingson, who signed the Flock contract. In the public record the Pioneer has reviewed, he has not said whether he would keep, expand or end the program; he did not respond to questions for the July 25 report.
How the county got here
The cameras arrived without a separate vote by any elected body: a cold sales email on July 29, 2024, answered by Semingson in 23 minutes; a pitch on Aug. 15; $12,750 added to the sheriff's 2025 budget request that same morning; a committee discussion Sept. 11 with no motion; a budget adopted Nov. 12 with the camera money inside; a contract signed three days later.
In June, corporation counsel — the board's own attorney — found “no wrongdoing or significant errors in process” in the purchase, while calling “multiple statements” by Parrish, the cameras' chief critic, “clearly incorrect,” without saying which. Parrish's claim that more than 5,000 outside organizations and agencies accessed the county's network in a single month remains his characterization of records he says he has reviewed; the audit log itself has not been released.
The records do document demand: New Berlin police asked to search the county's data on Nov. 29, 2024 — before the county had a working camera, and five days before its Flock account was even activated. Across 21 automated notices through November 2025, at least 118 agencies appear, all but two from Wisconsin — from the Buffalo, Jackson, Pepin and Dunn county sheriffs and La Crosse police to the state Justice Department and Capitol Police to departments hundreds of miles away in Mequon, Kenosha and Sheboygan — plus two in Minnesota. Each notice lists at most 10 requests, so the true number is higher; the records do not show which were granted.
The dispute boiled over July 8: after the Flock presentation and Koxlien's session, the committee voted 4-1 on Supervisor Scott Leonard's motion to table Parrish's camera-removal item before he could speak; the meeting then broke up without a recess motion being seconded or carried, per county security footage. On July 20, the board censured Parrish — 15 in favor, one opposed, one supervisor recorded by the Trempealeau County Times as not voting. Todd says the censure was about conduct, not cameras; the Pioneer found the record supported one of its four charges.
The company, and the state
The decision comes amid a statewide reassessment: a Wisconsin Examiner analysis published in August 2025 found at least 221 Wisconsin agencies used Flock in the first five months of that year, and this June the Examiner reported Dane County, Verona, Monona, Fitchburg, Appleton, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay dropping their contracts. Closer to home, Galesville's council voted this year, the Times reported, to keep the county camera on the city pole where Semingson sought the mayor's permission in 2025 — the only vote any elected body in this county has taken on one of these cameras.
Misuse cases have driven much of the retreat. In July, former Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala was sentenced to 12 months' probation and a $500 fine, with a 180-day term in a community reintegration center stayed, after pleading guilty to misdemeanor attempted misconduct in public office, reduced from a felony; he resigned from the department after he was charged in February. Prosecutors said he ran 179 Flock searches on two license plates — a woman he had dated and her former partner — logging the same one-word reason each time: “investigation.” A Milwaukee detective who investigated him and a Menasha officer face related charges, pending as of late July; charges are not convictions.
What happens next
The primary is Aug. 11. The winner takes office Jan. 4 — and, under the contract the county signed, has until roughly March 9, 2027, to end the camera program or keep it into 2029. Only one of the three has said what he would do.