Audit charts
High-resolution charts from the Flock usage audit (July 2025 through June 2026). Right-click to save.
Everything a reporter needs to cover Flock ALPR surveillance in Apex and across North Carolina. Every document here was obtained through public records requests and is free to cite, quote or republish without asking us first. No embargo, no exclusivity, no conditions.
Attributable to DeFlock Apex, a resident-led project, or to a named spokesperson on request. Use them as written or ask for something tailored to your angle. If you need a resident who is not us, we can connect you with people who have spoken at Council on the record.
“On January 29 the Chief told Council there was no federal sharing, hard stop. The Town’s own audit logs show federal accounts ran 166 searches that reached Apex cameras that same day. We are not alleging anyone lied. We are saying the department did not know what its own system was doing, and that is the more troubling answer.”
“Not one of the 4,506 searches we documented came from Apex. Every one was recovered from a records request to another department, because when an Apex officer searches the network, the towns whose cameras get swept keep the log. We had to ask seventy other governments what our own police department was doing.”
“We spent months drafting a governance framework on the premise this could be made safe under strict enough conditions. The record changed our minds. A company that can rewrite its own safeguards in a blog post cannot be governed by conditions, and a system nobody voted for cannot be fixed by tuning it.”
“Seven towns in five states dropped Flock this year and the cameras stayed up, because they switched vendors instead. The problem is mass plate surveillance adopted without consent. A different logo on the pole is the same dragnet with a new sales rep.”
“While towns argued about their own contracts, the General Assembly made the state program permanent inside a budget section, across roughly 78 percent of North Carolina roadways, with 90-day retention. Nobody cast a recorded vote on plate readers. That is how the biggest expansion in the state happened without a debate.”
Reporting we think is there and have not seen anyone do. We will hand over everything we hold on any of these, including raw files, and we do not need a credit or a heads up.
The Town produced nine monthly Flock Network Audits covering January 1 to August 18, 2026, roughly 6.6 million rows and 1.4 GB. We published two extracts. Nobody has analysed the full set. Questions in there: which out-of-state agencies query Apex most, what reasons they state, and whether the stated reasons cluster in ways that contradict how the program is described publicly.
The Town has said the additional-camera expansion is unsigned, while a contract and purchase order routed as CONT-2025-0777 was executed by Flock on January 16, 2025 and dated February 1, 2025 on the Town side. We have asked which instrument covers which cameras and have not had a clear answer.
If cameras are operating under an instrument the Town describes as unsigned, that is a procurement story rather than a surveillance story, and procurement stories move councils.
North Carolina General Statute 20-183.31(a) requires a department operating an ALPR system to adopt a written policy covering retention, sharing, oversight, internal access and auditing. Apex’s system went live and ran for months. We have asked for the policy and the date it was adopted.
The question for any NC department, not just Apex: did the written policy exist before the cameras were switched on, and can they produce it with a date.
369 North Carolina cities and towns have reported ALPR cameras. The records method below works on any of them, and it works from the outside: you request another department’s audit log and you learn what your target department has been searching. One reporter with a template could establish statewide search volumes that no individual town has disclosed.
The state program ran 140 camera locations and more than 152 million plate reads in about eight months as of March 2026. The strongest public justification offered is 227 stolen vehicle alerts from three cameras in state rights-of-way over seven months, per Raleigh Police. Nobody has published the alert accuracy rate for the state program, or its cost per recovered vehicle.
The central finding of this project came from a structural quirk worth understanding, because it is reproducible in any jurisdiction and it does not depend on the cooperation of the department you are investigating.
Outside coverage of the Apex ALPR program and this campaign, and the canonical list. Some outlets are paywalled. If you have covered this and are not listed, email contact@deflockapex.org and we will add you.
All documents obtained via public records requests to the Town of Apex or sourced from public Council materials.
Pending share request records (16 batches) and additional contracts are available on the main site under the Network tab, or upon request.
High-resolution charts from the Flock usage audit (July 2025 through June 2026). Right-click to save.
We are residents, not a newsroom, and we would rather be corrected than be trusted on faith. Three things you can hold us to.
For press inquiries, source document requests, interviews, or help reading a Flock audit export:
contact@deflockapex.org
Response within a few hours on weekdays. We can provide: raw audit exports too large to host here, our records request templates, residents who have spoken at Council and are willing to be quoted by name, and high-resolution charts. We do not do off-the-record briefings, because everything we have is already public.
DeFlock Apex is an independent, resident-led project. We are not affiliated with any political party, organization, or vendor, we take no money from anyone, and we have no financial interest in any company named on this site.
