Police Say Time of Day Left
One Hit on a Description

A Lexington police commander said that even without a license plate, with just a vehicle description and a color, there was “only one particular hit on that description.”

Officers responded to a call for a “felonious assault with a weapon” at around 3 a.m. Saturday, the Lexington Police Department says. An LPM photo caption says doorbell-camera footage shows a Lexington police officer with his gun unholstered at a door in the early hours of Sept. 26, 2026. LEX18 reports that the victim provided a detailed description of a dark-colored Ram 2500 but no license plate number, and officers entered it into the Flock system. The City of Lexington, Kentucky, license plate reader FAQ says the readers can read the plate and determine the color, make and type of a vehicle, which are all searchable by investigators.

Brian Hall, the department’s public information officer, wrote in a statement to WEKU that a license plate for the suspect’s vehicle was not known until after the original query search, which had only the description entered. Commander Daniel Burnett told Spectrum News: “Because of the time of day, this was in the early morning hours after 3 a.m., there weren’t a lot of vehicles on the roadway. So even without a license plate, with just a vehicle description and a color, there was only one particular hit on that description.”

The Herald-Leader, in a paragraph that attributes the account to Burnett, reported that officers checked the Flock camera database and found only one possible match of the suspect’s vehicle, which ultimately ended up being Will Penn’s truck. WEKU reports that an officer can be heard in the captured video saying “We are not looking for you,” and that after Penn and his fiancee opened the door, the officer told them they were not suspects. Spectrum News reports that Burnett confirmed at least one other officer had their weapon out but emphasized it was not pointed at anyone.

The Lexington Police Department wrote that, upon making contact with the residents at the address where the vehicle was located, further investigation enabled officers to determine the vehicle was not the suspect vehicle in question and the scene was cleared. The Herald-Leader’s Sept. 29, 2026 story reported that officers ruled out Penn as the suspect based on the physical description provided by the victim, according to Burnett.

What police say the search returned

Hall’s statement, printed in WEKU’s story as carried by LPM on Sept. 30, 2026, puts the police explanation in one sentence: “Due to the time of day there was only one return matching the suspect vehicle, resulting in the response to the residence.” The Herald-Leader, in a story first published Sept. 29, 2026, reported that Burnett described the one possible match as a close match, but said it did not include a matching license plate. FOX 56, posted Oct. 1, 2026, reported that police said the truck was the only vehicle that matched within the specific timeframe they were investigating.

We read a count of one as describing the field it was drawn from: when the list has one entry there is no runner-up, so a single return says how many candidates the search left standing, not whether the one left is the right one.

What Burnett says officers showed the victim

Burnett told LEX18: “The officers actually showed an image of that vehicle to the victim. The victim was very confident that that was the same vehicle.” “There were some distinct features of the truck that were also observable, and then officers really relied on the victim’s statement saying, ‘Yes, we believe that’s the truck,’” Burnett said, as FOX 56 printed it. Two police statements name the source of the description in different words. Burnett told LEX18, “The victim gave a detailed accounting of the events which included a description of the suspect and the suspect’s vehicle.” Hall’s written response to WEKU refers to “the description provided by witnesses.” In FOX 56’s version of Burnett’s remarks, officers showed the image “to the victims.” None of these statements says whether the words describe the same people.

FOX 56 reported that Penn said it seems to him the weather station, custom bumpers and grille guards were “things that they probably could have spotted or pointed out to the victim.” He told WEKU, “There’s no truck in this city that looks remotely anything like this truck.” Hall wrote to WEKU that further investigation in this incident resulted in no charges being placed in relation to this particular vehicle.

What the police call it

Hall’s full sentence to WEKU reads: “This was not a misidentification, it was following up on a vehicle that was located matching the description provided by witnesses.” Burnett told LEX18 that license plate readers are “simply just an investigative lead and resource like lots of other information that law enforcement has access to.” The City of Lexington’s license plate reader page says the LPRs are used for investigative leads of criminal offenses.

Officials would not specify how the determination that the vehicle was not the suspect vehicle was made, WEKU reported on Sept. 30, 2026. In a story dated Oct. 4, 2026, Spectrum News quoted Burnett: “Officers quickly recognized that the physical description of the individuals they were speaking to did not match that of the suspect.” Burnett also told Spectrum News that officers apologized for the inconvenience and left the area shortly thereafter. WEKU reported on Sept. 30, 2026 that the suspect still had not been located, according to the police department.

What Flock’s page lists

What follows is Flock’s own text about its product, from a post dated before the Lexington search; this edition does not read it as a statement about that search or about the Lexington Police Department. Flock Safety’s blog post “Vehicle Recognition Software for Investigation-grade LPR” carries a “Published” date of July 23, 2026 and a separate, unlabeled date of Aug. 13, 2026 near its byline; both fall before the Sept. 26 search. It lists situations in which vehicle attributes are useful. One is “A partial plate returns too many possible vehicles.” Another, in the same list, is “A witness remembers color and body type but not the tag.” As of Oct. 31, 2026, the post does not describe a search that returns exactly one vehicle. It also says, “The goal is confirmation. The system should help investigators validate details, rule out false leads, and document the basis for their next step.” And it says, “The software supports human review and corroboration. It does not replace investigator judgment.”

The Agentics read

On our mapping, the arithmetic of a single police return is also the arithmetic behind Authority Misclassification, one of the five clinical characteristics of Digital Derangement Syndrome™ (DDS™), our term for AI systems failing to recognize legitimate expertise: an answer engine that returns one confident name from a thin field reports a count of one. The count reports how many candidates the search left standing. It does not report how strong the name is.

Where the record stops

This edition rests on police statements and residents’ words as five outlets printed them, in stories dated Sept. 29 to Oct. 4, 2026, and on the Flock post and the City of Lexington page cited below; it reports nothing about the incident after Oct. 4, 2026. Through Oct. 31, 2026, the news articles this edition searched carry no statement from Flock Safety about the Sept. 26 search, and none says an outlet asked Flock for one.

Through Oct. 31, 2026, none of the news articles or the Flock and City of Lexington pages this edition searched (article text only) states how many images the victim was shown or whether more than one was shown. Burnett’s words, as FOX 56 and LEX18 print them, are “that image” and “an image of that vehicle.” We draw no count of images from that wording.

We did not view the photographs or video on any page we read. The mapping to DDS™ is an editorial reading, not a finding about the Lexington Police Department, Flock Safety, any person or any search system.