A federal judge just threw out a drug case because an officer ran a plate through Flock. Apex runs the same search.
On October 1 a Tulsa County deputy’s warrantless plate lookup cost the government its whole case. He saw a California plate, began following the car, and ran it through Flock. The system asked him why and he typed “traffic violation” and “investigation,” when the court found all he knew was the plate’s home state. A month of a stranger’s movements came back, more than fifty records across several states. Judge Sara E. Hill called it “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that “serves up the information to law enforcement on demand,” held the search unconstitutional, and suppressed everything that followed as fruit of the poisonous tree. Apex is contracted at exactly 30 days, has no warrant requirement, and no published standard an officer must meet. The ruling, the quotes and the honest limits →
That ruling landed the same day Apex’s Public Safety Committee took these cameras up, spent the session on “discussion only” and recommended nothing. The Mayor said he is looking for a middle ground between safety and privacy. The committee returns Thursday, December 3 with a recommendation, and the contract ends January 31. Three regular Council meetings are left before then, October 27, November 10 and December 17, and they are the only places a resident gets three minutes on the record while all three options are still open. Why a late review favors renewal →
Independent resident-led advocacy project. Built from public records, council materials, and direct civic engagement.
The Chief’s case for these cameras is public safety. On October 1 a federal judge made warrantless plate lookups a liability to prosecutions: a deputy ran a plate without a warrant and the government lost every piece of evidence it had. Apex has no ALPR ordinance, no warrant requirement and no published standard an officer must meet before pulling 30 days of a vehicle’s history. If an Apex case rests on one of those lookups, this is the motion filed against it. That is a question for the Town Attorney, and it should be answered on the record before anyone signs a renewal. Read the ruling →
Email Council: ban it, or require a warrant →Council approved five more years of drone software without ever seeing the drone policy.
Residents asked for APD’s drone use policy in August. On October 13 Mayor Pro Tem Mahaffey asked for it again, and nobody could produce it. Council passed the Axon contract 4 to 1 anyway. Flock is still undecided, and two votes will settle it.
What happened
- The policy was asked for and never shown. The town attorney said APD’s governing documents are “some public, some not.” Council voted without reading them.
- The term grew. Axon sent a new quote the day of the vote: five years from November 1.
- Concerns got talked down. Ed Gray argued against things nobody said, like drones peering in windows, and called residents’ concerns “panic, paranoia.”
- Claims nobody has backed up. A public drone lookup for residents, and a “critical gap” if the vote waited. Neither has been shown.
- ALPR is still open. The committee made no recommendation on Flock.
Where each member stood
- Voted noShane Reese. “The urgency should be matched with comprehensive reporting.” On record for removing Flock.
- Voted yesTerry Mahaffey. Asked for the policy. Voted without it. On record for removing Flock.
- Voted yesSue Mu. Asked about surveillance and got a question back. Swing vote on Flock.
- MotionArno Zegerman. “An efficiency tool.” Asked for a way out of the five years. Swing vote on Flock.
- Voted yesEd Gray. Led the case. Sent the policy question to his own committee, after the vote.
- Tie onlyMayor Gilbert. Co-signed the recommendation. Asked to livestream committee meetings.
What’s next · add these to your calendar
Published October 3, 2026 · United States v. Kyle, No. 26-CR-00189-SEH (N.D. Okla.), Opinion and Order filed October 1, 2026 · Judge Sara E. Hill · the full 38-page opinion
A federal judge just threw out a drug case over a Flock search
On October 1, the same day the Apex Public Safety Committee met and recommended nothing, a federal judge in Oklahoma suppressed every piece of evidence in a federal drug prosecution because a sheriff’s deputy had run a license plate through Flock without a warrant. The Chief’s case for these cameras is public safety. This is a public safety argument against the way they are used, and it comes from the bench.
“We do not expect people we know—let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement—to randomly approach us to say: ‘Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.’”
Judge Sara E. Hill, United States v. Kyle, at 35. Apex’s own records show 1,070 outside organisations with access in April, 808 of them out of state.
The facts are the ordinary part. A deputy parked beside a highway, saw a Mazda with a California plate, and began following it, in the court’s words, “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.” He ran the plate. The system asked him why and he typed “traffic violation” and “investigation.” A month of a stranger’s movements came back. The court called the system “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that “serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.”
Apex has no ALPR ordinance, no warrant requirement, and no published standard an officer must meet before pulling a vehicle’s history. The Department’s own audit is full of free-text reasons typed by officers. If an Apex case has been built on a warrantless 30-day lookup, this is the motion that gets filed against it. That is a question for the Town Attorney, and it should be answered on the record before anyone signs a renewal.
It is a federal district court, so it binds this case and no other. It is not binding on any judge in North Carolina, and Apex sits in the Fourth Circuit where an Oklahoma district court carries no precedential weight. The government can appeal. Other courts have reached different conclusions and the question is genuinely unsettled. And it is not a holding that cameras are unconstitutional: what was suppressed was a warrantless search of a month of stored history by an officer with no basis for it. We are residents, not lawyers. The full limits are set out on the ruling page.
Published October 2, 2026 · Committee date stated by the committee on October 1 · Corrected October 18 against the Town’s adopted 2026 Council meeting schedule
The clock is the argument now
For ten months the answer to every question about these cameras has been that a review is underway. On October 1 the review met, spent the session on discussion only, and recommended nothing. It returns December 3. The contract ends January 31. Everything Council will be asked to decide now has to happen in the gap between those two dates, and that gap is 59 days with the holidays inside it.
Scroll the timeline sideways to read it.
The December 3 date is the one the committee gave in the room on October 1. Council dates come from the Town’s adopted 2026 meeting schedule, filed under G.S. 143-318.12. It lists October 27, November 10 and December 17, and no meeting on November 24. Corrected October 18: we first used the usual 2nd and 4th Tuesday pattern, which put meetings on November 24 and December 8. Neither exists. The 2027 schedule has not been filed.
Why a late review favors renewal
This is not a complaint about pace for its own sake. Timing decides which outcomes stay reachable. The Mayor named three options in August: continue with Flock, change vendors, or discontinue ALPR in Apex. Two of those three are easy to do quickly, because they need nothing but a signature on a renewal or a new order form. The third is the only one that requires work, and it is the one a compressed schedule removes.
Discontinuation means deciding what happens to seven installed cameras and three undeployed units, what the Town does about the draft Year 2 purchase order, whether an ALPR prohibition goes into the Town Code and what it covers, and what happens to Apex officers running searches through other agencies’ networks. None of that can be drafted, reviewed by the Town Attorney, read by residents and voted on between a December 3 recommendation and a January 31 expiry. Renewal can. It needs one agenda item.
So the practical effect of a December recommendation is that the option residents have asked for becomes the one option there is no time to execute, and nobody has to vote against it. It just runs out of calendar. That is why the asks below are about the schedule and the paperwork rather than about anyone’s position. A process that cannot reach an outcome has decided it.
We are not claiming the schedule was set in order to produce that result. Committees slip, agendas fill, and October to December is an ordinary gap for a two-member committee that meets quarterly. The point is about the consequence, not the motive. Whatever the reason for the date, the effect on which options remain executable is the same, and it is fixable: say now, in writing, how a discontinuation recommendation would actually be carried out if Council chose it.
On the Town calendar and the Council Committees page, not only in the document centre. A recommendation residents first read on the night it is made is not a recommendation residents can respond to.
If Council chose to end the program, what are the steps, the costs and the dates? Written down in advance, discontinuation stays a real option on a short calendar. Left undescribed, it cannot survive one.
A purchase order signed during a review settles the review. Hold it until Council has voted in public on a recommendation residents have had a chance to read.
Published October 2, 2026 · Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer agency submissions, NC Department of Public Safety, National Insurance Crime Bureau, and Apex PD’s own June 9 presentation
About that 60%
Chief Johansen told the committee that vehicle thefts are down 60% since the cameras arrived. He gave no dates, no counts and no comparison period. We pulled Apex’s own submissions to the FBI, month by month, back to 2016, and did the same for nine neighboring agencies. The decline is real. The attribution is not.
A town of about 79,000 going from 36 thefts to 13 over nine months is a real change in a real number, and the arithmetic reproduces on the window the coverage implies. What has no evidence behind it is the claim that seven cameras caused it. Thefts fell in every comparable town in this region, by anything from 10% to 82%, and every one of those towns runs plate readers of some kind. The size of the fall has no relationship to the number of cameras.
One month is doing a lot of the work
He gave no dates, so the window has to be inferred. Take the roughly ten months in the coverage at face value and it runs from December 2025, which is the month APD’s own slide gives for alerts being activated. On that window Apex went from 36 thefts to 13, a 64% drop, slightly larger than the figure he quoted. Now take one month, August, off both ends: 24 against 12, a 50% drop. August 2025 held 10 thefts, nearly a quarter of that entire year, and August 2026 held none, so that single pair of months carries 10 of the 23 vehicles behind the headline. When a result moves fourteen points on the strength of one month, the result is partly a property of the window.
There is a name for what is underneath this. Apex’s baseline was a spike, 54 thefts in 2023 against a long-run average near 17, and spikes come back down on their own. Criminologists call it regression to the mean, and it is a well-documented way a local program gets credited with a decline it did not cause. Apex has not reached a new low either. From 2016 to 2021 the town averaged 17.3 thefts a year, and the 2026 pace annualizes to about 18. January through July of 2026 produced more thefts than the same months in 2019.
Change in reported motor vehicle theft, January to July 2026 against the same months in 2025, across ten Triangle police agencies. FBI Crime Data Explorer, retrieved October 2, 2026. Every agency shown uses plate readers in some form. Wake Forest’s 25 cameras and September 2023 date come from the Town’s own announcement. Cary runs its own ALPR on Axis hardware rather than Flock, which is our local understanding and is not yet confirmed from a Town of Cary record. The rest are from vendor portals, news coverage and crowdsourced mapping, and are approximate. Morrisville we could not establish.
Three process asks, all answerable from records the Town already holds. Publish the counts behind the 60%, with the exact dates of both comparison periods and the system they came from. Put the regional comparison in the December 3 packet, because a review that looks at Apex alone cannot tell a camera effect from a regional trend. And reconcile the 111 stolen-vehicle hot list hits the Department reported in April with the six vehicle thefts its FBI submissions show cleared across 2025 and the first eight months of 2026. The two are not strictly comparable, which is itself worth hearing on the record.
Updated October 12, 2026 · Drawn from ABC11, CBS 17 and WRAL coverage of the October 1 meeting, the Town’s published committee agenda, and the Apex Police Department’s own June 9 presentation to Council
The committee met, recommended nothing, and goes again on December 3
October 1, in a third-floor training room, in front of a two-member committee that publishes no minutes. Residents packed it, by ABC11’s account. No recommendation came out. The Mayor said he is looking for a middle ground on privacy and public safety. The Chief was asked to come back with clearer answers on where Apex plate data goes and who can access it. The next meeting is the one that produces the recommendation to the full Council, and the contract decision follows that.
On the middle ground
“We’re not there yet, but I think it’s important that we took the time and we got to look at the balance of public safety, privacy.”
Mayor Jacques Gilbert, after the October 1 meeting, to ABC11
We take the intention seriously and we still think the position is unavailable. A middle ground requires two things that can be traded against each other and then held in place. Here only one side of that trade is enforceable. The cameras are installed and the data is flowing. The privacy half consists entirely of settings.
Listen to how the Chief framed the fix: “What can we do in terms of retention periods? What can we do in terms of sharing? What can we do in terms of restricted access to tighten all that up so you don’t have as much concern?” Read literally, that is a question about reducing concern rather than about limiting what the system can do. And every lever in it is one the Department or Flock can pull back without telling anyone, because none of it is written into the Town Code.
We have the proof of that already. The 9,700 searches by federal accounts in APD’s own Network Audit did not happen because a safeguard was missing. They happened under the policy that was in place, with a 30-day retention period and the sharing configuration the Department had in place. Tightening those same settings is not a remedy for a system that produced that record while configured the way it was. A protection a department can quietly undo is not a protection. It is a preference.
And the middle ground has already been tested in this state, forty minutes from here. On May 11 the Mayor of Pittsboro moved to keep that town’s cameras through the contract period with conditions attached: no new cameras without board approval, standing bans on traffic enforcement, immigration enforcement, reproductive care investigations, facial recognition and monitoring gatherings, 30-day retention, monthly internal audits, public reporting, and a board review before expiry. That motion failed. The board then voted 4 to 1 to terminate outright and to bar town funds from continuing it. Read that list again and compare it to Apex, which is already at 30-day retention. Pittsboro’s board was handed a stronger policy than Apex operates under today and decided it was not enough. Who else has said no, and what they actually did →
What the Mayor told a reporter
“Do we continue with ALPR flock in our town? Do we consider moving to a different provider for ALPR? Or do we just discontinue ALPRs in Apex?”
Mayor Jacques Gilbert to WRAL, August 2026
That is the right list. Continue, switch vendors, or stop. Removal is on it, in the chair’s own words, and we should say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. The problem is not that the Mayor refuses to name the option. It is that the option appears in an interview and not in the document that reached residents, and that nothing published about October 1 shows it was examined. The meeting produced no recommendation and no written finding on any of the three.
What the notification told residents
“Our goal is to review the technology, understand the operational benefits, discuss policies and safeguards, and provide recommendations to the full Council.”
Mayor’s notification to residents, announcing the October 1 meeting
Review the technology. Understand the benefits. Discuss the safeguards. Recommend. Every item on that list is compatible with keeping the cameras, and discontinuation is not among them. The version residents received is the narrower one. We are not claiming that was deliberate. We are saying the two descriptions differ and the narrower one is the one that reached the public.
Fixing that gap is still the whole ask, and December 3 is the last chance to say it before a recommendation exists. Put the three options in the published agenda in the Mayor’s own words, and produce a written finding on each. If discontinuation gets examined and rejected, residents should be able to read the reasoning. A recommendation that arrives with no record of what was considered is indistinguishable from one that never considered it.
What the law already requires on December 3
The committee is not an informal huddle. Under G.S. 143-318.10(b), a body of a city composed of two or more members that exercises an advisory function is a public body. This one has two members and its stated output is advice to Council. Three things follow.
- ✓The open session is open, and you may walk in. G.S. 143-318.10(a): each official meeting of a public body shall be open to the public and any person is entitled to attend, subject to the closed session exceptions in G.S. 143-318.11. A committee may lawfully close part of a meeting, for example to take legal advice on a contract, but it has to do that in open session and state the reason.
- ✓Minutes are mandatory and they are public records. G.S. 143-318.10(e): every public body shall keep full and accurate minutes of all official meetings, and those minutes are public records under G.S. 132-1. The statute allows them to be audio or video rather than written. Either way they must exist, and this committee publishes none.
- ✓You can put yourself on the notice list. G.S. 143-318.12(b)(2): any person who files a written request with the Town Clerk must be sent notice, at least 48 hours ahead, of meetings not shown on the filed schedule of regular meetings. Email notice carries no fee. The Town may require non-media requesters to renew quarterly, so diary it. Under G.S. 143-318.12(e), a public body whose website is maintained by its own staff must also post notice of such a meeting online before it happens.
What we do not claim. We are not alleging a violation. October 1 was posted on the Town’s document centre as a special meeting agenda, which is more notice than the committee gave for earlier sittings, and the Town has a month to post December 3 the same way. We have not seen minutes for October 1 and we are asking for them rather than assuming none exist. We do not know whether minutes of past committee meetings exist, only that the law requires them and that none have been published. We do not know whether this committee has a filed schedule of regular meetings, which decides whether notice runs under G.S. 143-318.12(a) or (b)(2), so we are asking the Clerk. The Council’s Rules of Procedure language on committee membership and the Mayor’s role in committee votes is not published online, so we do not characterise it.
Two members sit on it. That is not who will be in the room.
A two-person committee does not brief itself. Somebody prepares the packet, somebody presents the operational case, and somebody answers the cost questions. On a public safety technology review that means Town staff and almost certainly the Police Department, and it may mean a representative of Flock or Axon, or materials written by one. None of those names are published anywhere, and neither is the packet.
Residents should know who is presenting before the meeting, not after. That is not a favour to ask for, it is a records request. The agenda packet, the briefing materials, the meeting invitation and attendance list, and any communications with Flock or Axon about December 3 are public records under G.S. 132-1. So is any deck a vendor has offered to show the committee. We are asking for all of it, and the email below is written to do that in one send.
The fairness ask follows from the answer. If the department or a vendor gets time in front of this committee, residents should get the same amount of time in the same meeting. Not a debate, and not a stunt. Equal minutes. A review that hears one side in a room with no agenda, no minutes and no livestream is not a review, it is a briefing with a recommendation attached.
G.S. 143-318.14(a): any person may photograph, film, tape-record or otherwise reproduce any part of a meeting required to be open. The committee may say where to put a tripod so it does not interfere. It cannot tell you not to record. There is no speaking right at a committee meeting and no livestream, so this is the answer to both. Walk in on December 3, record the open session, and publish it. The record the committee does not keep in public becomes a record anyway.
On the speaking question, be precise about what is and is not owed. G.S. 160A-81.1 gives residents a comment period at a regular Council meeting, not at a committee. The committee can choose to hear residents, and Council can tell it to. There is a live opening for that: at the April 21 work session the Council directed staff to turn its committee discussion into formal policy drafts, and one member summed up the whole point of these bodies as “a committee can’t kill an idea, only council.” If that is true, write it down. A rule requiring public comment at any committee meeting on a matter headed to Council would outlast this contract, this vendor and this committee.
Discontinuation is not hypothetical, and misuse is not either
Asheville ended its Flock contract and its 11 cameras are coming down. The city suspended access, searching and sharing, and ordered a review of future surveillance policy. Reporting notes the vote left the door open to other ALPR vendors, so this is a Flock termination, not a technology ban.
An officer was arrested and accused of using Flock to look up her boyfriend’s ex-wife more than 30 times. Reported by WRAL.
CMPD officer Seth Elliott, 25, is accused in court documents of sharing Flock information with the subject of an active drug investigation. He is on leave and facing a criminal charge.
Two audits found former employees listed as active users in Raleigh Police’s Flock system, per WRAL Investigates.
A retired officer interviewed about the Charlotte case made the point better than we can: agencies without their own Flock agreement can request access through agencies that have it. That is the same structural gap Apex’s own audit shows, where roughly 3,000 outside organisations query these cameras every month and 9,700 federal searches reached them between January and April. The safeguard being offered is a settings page. The failure mode is a person with a login.
This is a process request. It does not attack anyone on the committee and it does not require a Council member to commit to a position today. It asks that the review Mayor Gilbert described to a reporter is the review that actually happens, on the record. October 1 produced no recommendation and no written finding, so there is still time, and December 3 is when that stops being true.
Continue with Flock, switch providers, or discontinue ALPRs in Apex. All three analysed, each one answered in writing, so residents can read why an option was rejected. On option two, seven towns tried switching vendors this year and the cameras stayed up.
Post the December 3 notice on the Town calendar and the Council Committees page, not only in the document centre. Publish the agenda in advance, and publish the October 1 minutes that G.S. 143-318.10(e) already requires. Provide a public comment opportunity before any recommendation is finalised.
Publish the attendance list and the briefing packet in advance. If the Police Department or a vendor presents, give residents the same number of minutes in the same meeting.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, writing on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly
It is worth knowing what he was actually arguing about, because it is closer to Apex than the bumper sticker version
The line is almost always quoted as a warning about privacy. It was not written about privacy. Franklin was writing during a tax fight. The Pennsylvania Assembly wanted to tax the Penn family’s lands to pay for frontier defence during the French and Indian War, and the Penns kept ordering the governor to veto it. Then they offered the Assembly a lump sum of money, on the condition that the Assembly concede it had no authority to tax them at all.
So the “little temporary Safety” was literal: a one-off payment. And the “essential Liberty” being traded away was the legislature’s own authority to govern. As Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution put it to NPR, it is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security, and it means something much closer to the opposite of how it is normally used. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Franklin treated a community’s ability to defend itself as the essential thing, and he thought trading away the body that decides how to do that was contemptible.
Read that way, it lands harder here, not softer. Apex never voted on mass licence plate surveillance. There is no ALPR ordinance and no drone ordinance. Retention, sharing, audit rights and who may query these cameras were set by contract and by a vendor’s settings page, and the Council’s authority to decide those things by law was simply never used. A four-year extension signed on a consent agenda is the modern version of the deal Franklin refused: take the convenient thing on offer, and concede the authority to govern it. The argument for a hearing, an ordinance and a recorded vote is not an argument against public safety. It is an argument that the body Apex elected is the one that decides. The full context, on NPR →
Not a live feed. Projected from APD’s own stated rate of 60,000 plate reads a day and the 1,700 hotlist hits they reported to Council. See the math →
Updates
Every update has its own page link. See all updates, with links you can share → · Follow by RSS
Surry for Privacy joins the coalition. They are residents in Surry County working to end the Sheriff’s Flock program and remove the county-operated cameras, and they have put the county’s own purchase records, invoices and use policy online. Sign their petition. See the coalition →
Council approved the Axon contract 4 to 1, with Shane Reese the lone no. It covers DroneSense drone software and an interview room camera system, and a quote sent the same day now runs it five years from November 1. Mayor Pro Tem Mahaffey asked whether APD’s drone policy exists and is public. The town attorney said “some are public, some are not,” and Council voted without it. Ed Gray argued against concerns nobody raised and claimed a “critical gap” nobody showed. On Flock, the Public Safety Committee made no recommendation and returns December 3. Read the full breakdown →
On October 1, the same day the Apex committee met and recommended nothing, Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma granted a motion to suppress in United States v. Kyle and threw out all the evidence in a federal drug prosecution. A sheriff’s deputy had run a license plate through Flock without a warrant and pulled back more than fifty records of where that car had been across multiple states over a month. The court held that the search “intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” and that everything after it was fruit of the poisonous tree.
The facts track Apex uncomfortably closely. The deputy had 30 days of history across many states, and Apex is contracted at exactly 30 days. The system asked him for a reason and he typed “traffic violation” and “investigation” when all he knew was that the plate was from California, which is what a logged reason field is worth as a safeguard. The remedy was suppression, so this is a public safety argument too.
The limits matter and we set them out in full: district court, binds this case only, no precedential weight in North Carolina, appealable, and other courts have gone the other way. The ruling, the quotes and the honest caveats →
The committee told the room on October 1 that it would return to the ALPR item on December 3. The contract ends January 31. That leaves 59 days for a recommendation, a Council agenda, a public reading and a vote, with Christmas inside it. The Town’s adopted 2026 schedule has only one regular Council meeting in December: Thursday, December 17, two weeks after the recommendation. (Corrected October 18. We first said December 8, from the usual 2nd and 4th Tuesday pattern. December is the exception.)
Timing decides which outcomes stay reachable. Renewing needs one agenda item. Discontinuation needs a plan for seven installed cameras, the draft Year 2 purchase order, and an ordinance, and none of that gets drafted, reviewed and voted in eight weeks unless somebody writes it down now. The timeline, and the three calendar asks →
Note on the date: ABC11 reported November 5. That is not what the committee said in the room, and we were there. Nothing is posted on the Town calendar yet either way.
Residents packed a third-floor training room on October 1, by ABC11’s account. The published agenda listed the ALPR item as “discussion only,” while the Axon drone item on the same agenda was flagged for a committee recommendation. No recommendation came out on either. Mayor Gilbert told reporters the committee is looking for a middle ground between public safety and privacy, and that “we’re not there yet.” Chief Johansen was tasked with coming back with clearer answers on where Apex licence plate data goes and who has access to it.
We will say the obvious thing about that last item. Residents answered it in August from the Department’s own Network Audit: 9,700 searches by federal accounts reaching Apex cameras between January and April, 1,070 outside organisations with access in April, 808 of them out of state. The Chief is being asked in month twenty to establish something his own files already record. What happened, and what December 3 decides →
Chief Johansen told the committee that vehicle thefts are down 60% since the cameras arrived, with no dates, no counts and no comparison period given. We pulled Apex’s own submissions to the FBI Crime Data Explorer, month by month back to 2016, and did the same for nine neighbouring agencies.
The decline is real and we say so. What has no support is the attribution. Apex’s largest ever drop in vehicle theft came before the cameras existed, 54 in 2023 to 29 in 2024. Then 2025, the first camera year, rose to 41. The 60% measures from December 2025 and excludes that rise, and moving the window one month drops the figure to 50%. Meanwhile Wake Forest fell 59% with 25 cameras live since 2023, Cary fell 33% running its own plate readers, Knightdale fell 10% with more cameras than Apex, and North Carolina fell 22.6%. Read the full rebuttal, with both charts and every source →
ApexCameras.tech joins the coalition. They are a resident group here in Apex, and on September 2 they published Ten Cameras, One Decision, an evidence briefing written to the Mayor and Council ahead of the January contract decision. Two groups, two documents, and we keep them separate so either set of numbers can be checked against the other. See the coalition →
Mayor Jacques K. Gilbert spoke with DeFlock Apex and confirmed that the Public Safety Committee meeting on the Flock contract will be held Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 3:00 PM. The meeting had previously been indicated for September 24. We have updated every reference on this site to the new date.
As of this update the meeting still does not appear on the Town calendar or on the Town’s Council Committees page, which is where the Town says notice for each committee meeting is provided. The chair has now given the date and time to a resident. The public notice has not followed. G.S. 143-318.12(e) requires online notice of a meeting like this, and there is time to post it.
The committee is chaired by Mayor Gilbert with Council Member Ed Gray. Its charge covers the Flock contract, ALPR technology generally, and the Axon agreement amendment.
Five weeks after our July 12 records request, the Town produced the document it had never released: APD’s Flock Network Audit, which logs every search by an outside agency that reaches Apex cameras. Nine monthly files, roughly 6.6 million rows, 1.4 GB.
Between January 2 and April 1, 2026 two federal accounts appear in it: US Postal Inspection Service, 9,683 searches, and Wright Patterson Air Force Base, 17. Median reach 2,882 networks per search. These are the two agencies the Chief called “2 errant Federal shares caught/cleared in audit.” On January 29, the day he told Council “we do not share with federal entities, hard stop,” federal accounts ran 166 searches that reached Apex cameras. In the 29 days up to that statement, 2,604. The last federal search was April 1 at 11:35 a.m. UTC.
Three more findings from the same production. The public transparency portal the Chief pointed Council to shows 144 searches for the 30 days ending August 17; APD’s own Organization Audit shows 868 for the identical window. Council was told the network is “about 1,000 police agencies”; the audits show 3,587 distinct outside organizations actually queried Apex cameras in January through March, and roughly 3,000 every month since. And about 3,300 searches reaching Apex cameras since January carry immigration reasons, including 196 between August 1 and 18, run by outside agencies rather than by Apex officers.
What the record does not show, and we will not claim: which specific plates were returned to those federal accounts. A Network Audit entry establishes that a query included Apex cameras. Three of the Chief’s six “zero” slides also hold up under his own files, and we say so plainly on the evidence page. The contract terms are finally readable too: a 24-month term ending January 31, 2027, no automatic renewal, no notice deadline, and a draft Year 2 purchase order for $35,000. The 9,700 federal searches, as a CSV →
Apex’s search record shows officers querying the plate network for federal matters with no federal sharing relationship in place. October 21, 2025: “R. wanted by HSI for trafficking fentanyl,” reaching 6,571 networks and 94,700 cameras. September 19 and 21, 2025: four searches reading “Charles H. wanted for Federal Warrant.” HSI is a component of ICE. Fentanyl trafficking is a criminal matter, so this is not immigration enforcement, and it does not contradict APD’s claim of zero immigration searches. It contradicts the June 9 slide that reads “We CHOOSE not to share our images/data with federal LE/agencies.” A federal agency never needed a share. It needed an officer to run a plate. See the full search record →
On August 13 Flock announced a shorter default retention period, mandatory case codes, and a wider audit tool rollout. Every one of those is a setting a company or a police chief can reverse. None of it is binding on Apex, and Flock explicitly grandfathers existing customers at their current retention period, which here is 30 days. Apex PD’s own search record shows at least 4,506 searches in twelve months, and the reason field Flock now says it will require was already being filled in, by officers whose entries nobody outside the department ever checked. Read the full line-by-line rebuttal →
Residents filled the Council chamber on August 11 and the town opened overflow seating on the third floor. Eight residents spoke against surveillance technology. One spoke in favor. Before public forum began, Council pulled item CN4 off the consent agenda and referred it to the Public Safety Committee. CBS 17 covered the meeting, and Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus spoke during public forum. Read the recap →
Item CN4 on tomorrow night's Council agenda adds a police drone program and an interview room camera system to the town's Axon contract, and extends that contract to June 30, 2030. It sits on the consent agenda, which passes in one motion with no discussion unless a Council member asks for it to be pulled. Apex has no drone ordinance, no published use policy, and no retention rule. We have not seen the contract, so the dollar amount, drone count, and program scope are unknown the night before the vote. That is the problem. Read the full breakdown →
Correction, August 12: CN4 added Axon Air DroneSense software and an interview room system for a drone capability APD already has. It was not a purchase of aircraft. The four-year term, the missing dollar figure, and the absence of any drone ordinance stand. Corrected page.
DeFlock Raleigh is live, and the pattern we documented in Apex turns out to be the pattern in the state capital. Raleigh PD has operated at least 32 Flock cameras since 2022, paid for by a federal grant that never required a Council vote. On November 1, 2022 the Chief told Council about the program under an agenda item titled “Comments Made.” No motion. No vote. Not one question asked. A single RPD search reached more than 76,000 devices across 6,200 networks. “ICE” is logged as the stated reason for at least two searches, even though RPD’s governing directive never mentions immigration at all. Their annual audit goes to the Chief of Police and nobody else. Two towns, one vendor, the same playbook: install first, tell Council later, call the vendor’s settings a policy. Apex is not an isolated case, and neither is Raleigh. See the coalition →
We pulled the FBI’s numbers for Apex back to 2011. As the town nearly doubled in size, the crime rate fell about 40 percent. Apex bought its first Flock cameras in 2023, at the lowest crime levels the town has ever recorded. Whatever made Apex safe, it was not the cameras. The next council meeting is Tuesday, August 11, and no ALPR vote is scheduled, which is exactly why the record matters now. See the chart →
DeFlock Apex is now allied with DeFlockILM, the resident campaign fighting Flock in Wilmington and New Hanover County, and with the national DeFlock network. Separate local fights are becoming one statewide push to remove Flock and ban ALPR mass surveillance. Chatham County and Pittsboro have already ended their contracts; campaigns from the Triangle to the coast are now comparing public records and coordinating. See who we stand with →
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that geofence warrants are a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. Justice Kagan, writing for the majority: individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone location records, even when held by a third party, even for a limited time. The ruling extends Carpenter's erosion of the third-party doctrine to location data disclosed voluntarily. Combined with the January 2026 Norfolk ruling, the legal trajectory for warrantless, consent-free ALPR network participation is increasingly difficult to defend. The Court remanded for a "reasonableness" analysis, so the search may still be upheld on those facts, but the constitutional principle is now settled: location data from a third-party tech company is protected. SCOTUSblog →
Apex Police posted a single ALPR arrest on Facebook to justify the entire surveillance program. Three people with property crime warrants were picked up near NC 55. That is one anecdote, not evidence. Every peer-reviewed study that has tested the claim that ALPR reduces crime found no significant reduction. The comment section reversed: opposition now outnumbers support on APD's own page. APD's pinned disclaimer about "bots and inauthentic accounts" was widely mocked. Multiple commenters independently called the post AI-written or propaganda. APD compared ALPR to your smartphone to deflect from the fact that a government agency with arrest power is tracking residents without a warrant. Facebook post · Read the peer-reviewed evidence →
DeFlock Apex meets with the Police Chief and Town Manager to discuss surveillance policy, guardrails, and the path forward.
Chief Johansen defended ALPR technology at length but did not defend Flock, telling Council he has no attachment to the vendor and would research alternatives. Several Council members separated the technology from the vendor and voiced specific concerns about Flock. Council voted unanimously to refer ALPR policy and program updates to the Public Safety Committee, the first step in a formal review tied to the contract decision ahead. The Town also confirmed it has not signed the pending contract for 10 additional cameras. Watch the full meeting →
APD presents to Town Council. Key disclosures: the two March federal agencies were the US Postal Inspector's Office and the USAFB Police Department, called "errant" shares "caught/cleared in audit." Federal agencies are now automatically excluded by Flock's default settings. APD claims 0 federal agencies currently, 0 searches for immigration or abortion enforcement, and 0 policy violations. What was not disclosed: when federal access began, who approved it, what those agencies queried. The presentation also claims ALPR is "already reducing crime" with no trend data, before/after comparison, or independent evidence. Read our full analysis →
Mayor Jacques K. Gilbert called DeFlock Apex and acknowledged resident concerns. In a written statement, he said he supports ALPR as a law enforcement tool (citing 29 years as a police officer), wants multi-layered safeguards and accountability through policy, and plans to meet with Chief Johansen to gather more information. He has not publicly stated a position on Flock, but is aware of the problems with the system. See the Mayor's statement →
The FBI has published an RFP seeking $36 million for nationwide access to license plate reader data, with Flock named as one of the few vendors that could fulfill the contract. The system would cover all 50 states with near real-time alerts. The RFP is for the FBI's Directorate of Intelligence. Ars Technica · 404 Media
DeFlock Apex will meet with the Town Manager and the Police Chief to discuss policy and transparency portals.
A California class action lawsuit alleges Home Depot uses Flock Safety cameras in its parking lots to capture every vehicle’s license plate, make, model, and location, feeding the data into a searchable database accessible to law enforcement nationwide. The complaint names Flock directly and details incidents where Flock secretly re-enabled “nationwide” sharing settings without authorization. Apex PD already has a signed access agreement for Lowe’s Flock cameras (July 2024) — the identical retail-to-law-enforcement pipeline now facing litigation. ClassAction.org · Read complaint →
Public records dump reveals 994 Flock sharing relationships in March (2 federal), growing to 1,070 in April (federal removed). Records also show private-camera sharing and outside hot-list sharing. Full findings below.
DeFlock Apex launches.
Pittsboro Commissioners vote to end Flock. July 1 removal deadline.
Chatham County ends Flock contract. First Triangle municipality to terminate.
Apex Police Chief presents Flock to Council. System live ~90 days, 10 cameras.
