Your car is in a police database right now. 3,000 agencies you have never heard of can search it.
Drive past one of Apex’s seven plate cameras and your plate, the time and the location are stored and searchable for 30 days. About 60,000 reads a day in a town of 74,000 people. Apex Police’s own audit records roughly 3,000 outside organisations querying these cameras every month, and 9,700 searches by federal accounts between January and April, including 166 on the day the Chief told Council that Apex does not share with federal entities. There is no ordinance, there was no public hearing, and there has never been a vote.
Two dates now matter. Tuesday, September 22 is the next regular Council meeting, 6:00 PM at Town Hall, and it is the last one with a guaranteed public comment period before the Public Safety Committee meets on October 1 at 3:00 PM. Arrive by 5:30 on the 22nd. The sign-up sheet goes out before the 6:00 start, and if your name is not on it you do not get to speak. Three minutes, and you do not have to be an expert. The three options the Mayor named, and what is missing from the review →
Independent resident-led advocacy project. Built from public records, council materials, and direct civic engagement.
On August 11 the chamber overflowed and eight residents spoke against surveillance technology, to one in favor. Two days later Flock announced new "protections" that do not apply to Apex, because Flock keeps existing customers at their current retention period and Apex is contracted at 30 days. The policy question now sits with the Public Safety Committee, which meets October 1 at 3:00 PM and publishes no agenda and no minutes. State law already requires it to keep minutes and to meet openly. Ask for both in writing, and tell Council the ask has not changed: remove all ALPR. Read the rebuttal →
Email your Council membersUpdated September 2, 2026 · Date and time confirmed by Mayor Gilbert to DeFlock Apex on September 2, 2026. Also drawn from WRAL and CBS 17 interviews, the Mayor’s resident notification, the Town’s committee roster, and the Town calendar
Two dates decide this: September 22 and October 1
On Tuesday the 22nd the full Council meets and residents have a guaranteed right to speak. On Thursday, October 1 a two-person committee meets at 3:00 in the afternoon, with no published agenda and no obligation to hear anyone, and settles what the full Council will be asked to choose between. The second meeting is the one that shapes the outcome. The first is the only one where you get a microphone.
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.
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.
Fixing that gap is the whole ask, and it is the thing to say on the 22nd. 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 October 1
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. There are weeks left before October 1 and the Town has time to post the notice. 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 October 1 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 October 1, 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. Say it on the 22nd, and put it in writing before then.
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 October 1 notice on the Town calendar and the Town website. Publish the agenda in advance and the minutes the law 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
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.
