Protecting Predators: Understanding the Logic of Northern Kentucky’s Criminal Regime
Linguistic traces, historical memory, and ideological abuse converge in a system built to shield predators and punish the vulnerable.
In my effort to better understand the logic of Northern Kentucky’s criminal regime, I’ve used a number of unconventional tools—linguistic analysis, psychological frameworks, political theory—and developed an investigative model I believe could one day assist future investigators, from federal agents and prosecutors to journalists and intelligence analysts.
Let’s begin with the political theory. Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince, wrote:
“Once evils are recognized ahead of time, they may be easily cured; but if you wait for them to come upon you, the medicine will be too late… At the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes… it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed this idea in The Social Contract:
“Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth; with age they become incorrigible… Reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise; people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated.”
In other words: reform demands not tweaks, but a reconstitution of people’s customs and ideology. I’ve written before that Northern Kentucky operates not just with corrupt individuals, but with a regime logic—a shared ideology that protects those in power, particularly predatory men. In this post, I’ll dig deeper into that logic by turning to local history, psychological theory, and linguistic cues buried in plain sight.
Institutional Memory and the “Three Counties”
Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties share more than proximity. All three were originally one jurisdiction—Campbell County, founded in 1794—before Boone split off in 1798 and Kenton in 1840. The counties share institutional memory, bureaucratic personnel, and overlapping law enforcement initiatives like the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force.
This interjurisdictional entanglement is not just bureaucratic—it’s cultural. During the Civil War, Newport (Campbell’s seat) was home to a military barracks under General Joseph Hooker. Hooker notoriously allowed prostitutes near the base—so many that the term “hooker,” as historian Richard Challis notes in a paper for the Journal of Kentucky Studies, entered the English language from here.
Language reveals what institutions conceal. The normalization of prostitution in Northern Kentucky became more than a vice—it became infrastructure. For decades, Newport functioned as a hub of organized crime, with sex trafficking as a key economic driver. That legacy hasn’t died; it’s adapted.
Tim Nolan, Robert Poole, and the Protection of Predators
In 2018, former Campbell County Judge Tim Nolan was sentenced to 20 years in prison for human trafficking and sex crimes. He targeted women recovering from addiction—particularly at a Covington shelter and drug court programs—and used their vulnerability to control them. I have noted in other posts the reflexive, fascistic logic that our local leaders have attached to people suffering from addiction.
“Tim Nolan knew vulnerability when he saw it,” one victim said. “He used my addiction as a tactic for control.”
This wasn’t isolated. It was part of a pattern. Nolan moved between jurisdictions, and the protection he enjoyed mirrored that of Robert Poole—a Boone County attorney sentenced in 2021 for offenses tied to none other than Nolan. My own efforts to obtain open records related to Poole’s case have been illegally blocked by the Boone County Sheriff’s Office. They are clearly hiding something.
Newport, historically, refused extradition requests and was known for harboring fugitives. One of Al Capone’s gunmen used this protection racket. My own great-grandfather reportedly fled murder charges in Tennessee in 1937 and found shelter here. This protectionist culture is part of the region’s institutional DNA.
A Family Case the Media Obscured: William Blankenship’s Conviction
On February 28, 2024, William Blankenship—my uncle who lived in Campbell County—was convicted for sex crimes in Kentucky following an investigation that began with his arrest in Hamilton County, Ohio in February 2020.
Despite the seriousness of the charges and the regional implications, The Cincinnati Enquirer deliberately obfuscated my family’s identity in its reporting. Key facts were omitted—chief among them: my grandfather was a former law enforcement officer and served as treasurer of the Campbell County Fraternal Order of Police “for many years,” as one current member told me in an email.
This concealment was not incidental—it served a function. It protected the institutional credibility of the local law enforcement apparatus and prevented public scrutiny from landing on deeper familial and jurisdictional ties. The failure to report these connections raises serious questions about whether William’s actions—and others potentially connected to them—were part of a wider, organized pattern of abuse and protectionism.
There was an obvious organized crime component related to my uncle’s case that was never pursued, which actually involved myself as a victim. Law enforcement had both actionable intelligence and historical precedent, yet chose not to act on leads that would have implicated others. This is not just a failure of prosecution—it’s a sign of systemic shielding.
When placed alongside the cases of Tim Nolan and Robert Poole, a chilling pattern emerges: a network of predators protected by silence, influence, and institutional memory.
Speech Patterns, Law Enforcement, and Ideological Loyalty
Linguistic cues often reveal what official documents don’t. Consider the case of Covington Police Officer Devyn Harris, who crashed his car while off-duty in Villa Hills on February 8, 2022. He requested Officer Sean Dooley at the scene. On body cam, Dooley referred to Harris as “a great fucking dude.”
Despite later confirming Harris was drunk, officers never conducted a breathalyzer test. Former Chief Bryan Allen later claimed there was “no probable cause” to seize Harris’s phone, despite texting and driving being declared the cause of the crash.
Former Villa Hills Sgt. Tyler Brockman instructed officers in a text message:
“Per the Chief, do not disseminate or discuss the collision… All information will need to be put out by myself or Chief.”
This is not law enforcement. It’s loyalty enforcement.
The Ideology of Abuse as Governance
To understand why some men are protected while others are punished—why corruption is ignored in one case and weaponized in another—we must name the underlying ideology. As Lundy Bancroft argues in Why Does He Do That?, the mindset of abuse is not a matter of pathology, impulse, or loss of control. It is an ideological system. It operates with rules, values, and a self-reinforcing logic.
This belief system rewards men who dominate. It dehumanizes those who resist or expose them. It casts dissent as instability, and it treats submission as the expected norm. In this system, the abuser is not just protected—he is exalted.
This ideological foundation—what Bancroft calls the abuser’s mindset—maps disturbingly well onto the institutional culture of Northern Kentucky. The region’s political-legal ecosystem protects angry, controlling men because it is designed to. The police, courts, and bureaucracies do not fail when they dismiss abuse, ignore trafficking, or obstruct investigations. They are operating exactly as they were built to operate.
This is the truth at the heart of the Northern Kentucky regime: the problem isn’t a broken system. It’s a working one—built to serve predators, and to punish those who expose them.
Conclusion
From linguistic traces to institutional memory, from court records to personal testimonies, the throughline is clear: Northern Kentucky’s political and legal system is not a collection of bad actors—it is an interlocking regime with a coherent ideology of control, protectionism, and predation. And as Rousseau warned, once that ideology is rooted, reform becomes not just difficult—but dangerous.
What’s required now isn’t deference. It’s rupture.