My public comment to the Johnson City Commission at their meeting on Thursday, September 17, 2026
Mayor, Vice-Mayor, Commissioners, Staff: Good evening.
Tonight, I want to connect two issues: the Last Call Ordinance and Flock cameras. Both were presented as public-safety solutions. I continue to oppose both because the math doesn’t add up.
I want to start by saying clearly that crime going down is good news. JCPD deserves credit for its work, and we should all be glad to see fewer offenses in Johnson City.
But when we talk about the crime data presented tonight, I think we need to separate two questions.
- First: Did crime go down between 1-4 am? Yes.
- Second: Do these data prove that the Last Call Ordinance caused those decreases? No.
This is a before-and-after comparison, and correlation does not mean causation. Crime can change due to policing, staffing, economic conditions, and many other factors. The Chief himself acknowledged that.
And the City’s own numbers give us a reason to be cautious and not boast of impacts on the order of 40 or 50%.
The math doesn’t work like that, because declines in incidents downtown must be benchmarked against the citywide declines, presumably unrelated to the last call ordinance (which was focused on downtown only). So, I did the math on the data released by the city.
The citywide decline is about 30% total, with downtown at 34%, thus a modest 4% better than average (under 8% better than areas not affected by the ordinance). In the most positive light, downtown fared better by 7-18% across most incident types (albeit with very small numbers, which statistics aren’t good for!). Drunkenness, as expected, is better by 21%… but disorderly conduct is significantly lagging behind the rest of the city. Those decreased by 60% outside of downtown and by only 10% downtown.
And even if we eventually establish that changing alcohol-sale hours contributed to some reduction in crime, a positive outcome does not automatically justify the method. There were other ways to address late-night public safety without imposing this restriction on every business in the city.
The same principle applies to Flock.
Last week, Deflock Johnson City published an analysis of a City-obtained network audit log. They reported that more than 3,000 outside agencies conducted searches that included Johnson City’s network during the 30-day dataset, with more than a million searches recorded. That’s one search every 2.5 seconds nonstop day and night. And contrary to the Commission’s assurances that still appear on the city website, those searches are not limited to Tennessee agencies. 90% come from outside the state! How do you explain that?
Johnson City must eliminate the Flock system and rethink this aspect of public safety from the ground up. Public safety matters. So do privacy, accountability, due process, and public trust.
We all want a safer Johnson City. The question is how we get there and whether we make those decisions with good evidence, public involvement, and respect for the people affected.
Thank you.
