u/makgeolliandsoju

If you were in the mayor's Facebook thread this week, you saw a few hundred neighbors weigh in on Flock's new "safeguards", but one one question that they mayor kept posting: are you against Flock, or against ALPR technology in general?

We know what he's doing. He's trying to advocate for a swap. I just spoke with him a few minutes ago. He is NOT pro-Flock, but he is pro-ALPR. We know this.

Now to the the announcement itself. Flock cut its default data retention to 7 days, made case codes mandatory, added Evidence Mode, and rolled out a wider audit tool. The coverage called it reform. It is nothing more than a toggle. We know that the Chief wants 30 days and NC Law allows for 90.

So, this is not an actual shift. It's a setting, and a setting is something a company or a police chief adjusts internally and can adjust right back on a Tuesday, no public process. Every item on Flock's list is a setting. A company revising its own defaults doesn't fix a consent problem.

A few specifics:

• The 7-day number is not Apex's number. Flock's own announcement says existing customers keep their current retention. Apex's contract is 30 days. Unless APD affirmatively opted into 7 days and can show it in writing, nothing about the storage of your movements here changed. The reform everyone's reporting on may not have reached Apex at all.
• Flock made our argument for us. They now say over 90% of searches happen within a week. They set the 30-day default nine years ago and defended it as careful balance. If the value lives in week one, weeks two through four were never solving cases. They were building inventory.
• "Mandatory case codes" is fixing a blank field. Apex PD's own search log, obtained under public records law, shows at least 15,335 searches in 11 months. 28% recorded no reason at all. Blank is the single most common entry in the log. That's roughly 4,300 searches of a national tracking network with nothing written down, and no apparent consequence. The field already existed. Making the same box mandatory doesn't make the entry in it true. The ACLU documented officers in Oregon defeating the exact same requirement by typing "investigation" and "hehehe." The full log breakdown, with source documents, is here: deflockapex.org/audit.html
• "Evidence Mode" runs into NC law. Flock's new feature preserves data past the 7-day window when an officer ties it to a case number. This is actually worse because that can be toggled on and now the cap goes away. Except North Carolina already sets the rule, and it asks for more than a typed code. Under G.S. 20-183.32, holding plate data past the statutory limit requires a search warrant or a sworn statement naming the specific camera, plate, dates, and case. A case code picked from a drop-down, from the same log where 28% of entries are blank, is not a sworn filing. The statute wins. Detail and citation on the page
• On the "if you've done nothing wrong" point: a camera seeing you drive by isn't the issue. A searchable, shareable database reconstructing where your car has been is. A single Apex search reaches thousands of outside networks and up to 100,000 cameras. Shorter storage of a dragnet leaves it a dragnet.

I put the whole announcement, read line by line against Apex's own records, on one page: deflockapex.org/flock-updates

Now, back to the question that the mayor is asking. Flock or ALPR?

It's the wrong question, and it's worth understanding why it keeps getting asked. If the problem is Flock, the fix is a different vendor. If the problem is warrantless mass surveillance adopted without our consent or controls on data ownership, a new logo on the same pole solves nothing. Axon's platform carries the same residential-camera risks.

So it's not Flock versus another vendor. Not whether Apex is safe (we're consistently ranked one of the safest towns in the country, and that was true before the cameras). The question is whether any mass ALPR system, from any company, was ever justified by demonstrated necessity and adopted. It wasn't. Flock changing its own settings doesn't change that. Swapping the vendor wouldn't either.

I just talked with CBS 17 about the Flock changes this week, so this story isn't staying inside one Facebook thread. But the room that matters is Council Chambers. Public forum is Tuesday, August 25, 6:00 PM, Town Hall.

A company revising a settings page is not a substitute for you speaking on the record. If you want help preparing, it's all at deflockapex.org.

ANNOUNCEMENT: CN4 has been removed from the agenda today!!!

EDIT/ADDITION: Here is the breakdown on what the Chief/Council is trying to sneak through tomorrow: https://deflockapex.org/cn4-drones

EDIT 2: Randy (Town Manager) emailed me back and informed me that APD already uses drones and that this is the software component which, in my mind, makes this even worse. No consent vote!

You can email council from the link. DO NOT APPROVE!

Tomorrow night, Apex plans to hand Axon a four-year contract for a police drone program. It's item CN4. You won't hear a word of debate about it, because it's parked on the consent agenda, a stack of items passed in one motion, no discussion, no separate vote. Unless a council member pulls it, drones-as-first-responders becomes town policy through 2030 in the time it takes to read a list out loud. And residents can't pull it. Only they can.

Sit with that. A police drone program, four years, approved the same way the town approves a tree-trimming contract.

This is the same Axon the chief named in June as the company that could replace Flock. So while the license plate camera question sits in a committee nobody can watch, the vendor relationship keeps growing in the room, on the consent agenda, in the quiet part of the night when they're counting on an empty gallery. CN4 isn't license plate readers, to be clear. It's drones and interview-room cameras. But it's the same company and the same move: surveillance filed under "routine."

And the Flock cameras? Not gone. Paused. A pause is a staff decision, reversible any day, and the expansion contract is unsigned, not dead. Council didn't vote it down on June 9. They referred it to the Public Safety Committee, which isn't in the town's official boards directory, posts no agendas, posts no minutes, and is working from a list of questions that all assume the cameras stay. Removal was never on their list. The one place this is supposedly being "handled" is the one place you're not allowed to see.

Here's what that adds up to. The decisions are being moved to the rooms you can't watch and the votes you can't stop, and they're betting you got bored over the summer.

Prove them wrong. The one lever they can't take from you is Public Forum. Three minutes, any resident, any topic, on the record, on camera, in front of every council member. An empty room on a night like this tells them the neighbors moved on. A full one tells them we're still counting.

What to do Tuesday:

• Be in the room. Tuesday, August 11, 6:00 PM. Apex Town Hall, 73 Hunter Street, Council Chambers, 2nd floor.
• Sign up for Public Forum and speak. Three minutes. Your own words. Name CN4. Ask why a four-year drone contract is being passed without discussion. Ask why the Flock decision is happening where no one can watch.
• Come as yourself. The town asks big groups to pick one person to speak for everyone. Don't. Ten neighbors at the mic is not the same as one neighbor speaking for ten. The single "group representative" is how they turn a crowd into a footnote. Volume is the point.
• Can't speak? Still show up. A full gallery is an argument on its own.

To be listed in advance, contact Town Clerk Allen Coleman: allen.coleman@apexnc.org, 919-249-1260. There's also a Public Forum sign-in at the meeting, so get there early. If you truly can't make it, it streams on the Town of Apex YouTube channel, but seats filled is what moves this.

They referred it to a committee and counted on us losing interest. Tuesday, 6 PM, is where we show them we didn't.

Inspired by "Shepard Safety", what if we turned the camera's the other way?

Welcome to Overwatch (https://deflockapex.org/overwatch).

https://preview.redd.it/iccr4epu1lfh1.png?width=552&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b709889fdfc55ba17923021ea505bc83e9e0aae

OVERWATCH is a parody. It copies the look and the features of an automated license plate reader dashboard, then aims those features at the officials who approved Apex's program, the town staff who run it, and the police department that searches it. Flip to Resident Mode and it shows the same thing done to ordinary residents.

The purpose is simple. It is hard to feel what a surveillance system does when you are not the one being watched. This flips the camera so everyone can see it from the other side.

• Every plate read, location, timestamp, association, and prediction is fabricated.
• Plates use a synthetic internal format, not real North Carolina plates. No real vehicles are tracked.
• No home addresses are used. Only public buildings and public roles appear, and only as commentary.

I want to tell the story of this town over the last 25 years, because it matters for the surveillance decision Council is about to make.

Around the turn of the century, Apex was a small town of maybe 20,000 people. By 2010 we were about 37,000. By 2020, nearly 59,000. Today the town puts us over 85,000. We more than quadrupled.

Normally when a town grows that fast, crime grows with it. Here it didn't.

Apex today is measurably one of the safest towns in the country. In 2023, the FBI recorded 39 violent offenses and zero murders in a town of about 74,000. Our violent crime rate is roughly one-seventh the national rate. MoneyGeek ranked us the safest town in North Carolina.

Sit with that timeline. For a quarter century this town grew from a village into a small city and stayed safe the entire way. No plate readers. No camera network logging who drives where. We built one of the safest communities in America the ordinary way, by being a place people wanted to live in and look after.

The plate scanners are new. They showed up only in the last couple of years, at the safest point in that entire 25 year story. So whatever made Apex safe, it wasn't them. The safety was already here.

Now look at what the cameras actually do here.

APD told Council the system reads about 60,000 vehicles a day. Over the roughly six months it has been live, that is about 10.8 million plate reads. Ten point eight million scans of our cars, in the town I just described.

Out of all of that, APD reported 1,700 hotlist hits. That is 0.02 percent. For every one hit, the system scanned more than 6,000 vehicles that had nothing to do with any investigation. And when Council asked what those hits produced, APD cited about ten cases with no case numbers, no court outcomes, and nothing anyone can independently verify.

That is the whole argument. In one of the safest towns in America, they scanned ten million cars to point at ten stories they won't let you check. Necessity was never shown. It never has been. If the results were there, they would have shown them by now.

And here is the part that makes vendor shopping beside the point. Every one of APD's searches reaches beyond Apex. A single search runs against as many as 100,075 cameras across 6,896 separate agency networks nationwide. When our police run a plate, they are not checking a few cameras on our roads. They are reaching into a national dragnet. Swapping Flock for another company does not shrink that network or answer the question. The question is whether a town with our track record needs mass plate surveillance at all.

Last thing, and it is the one that gets me most. This was never voted on. There is no ordinance. The limits are settings a police chief can change whenever he wants, not law. We built a safe town for 25 years by choosing what kind of place we wanted to be. This time nobody got to choose.

The 10-camera expansion contract is still unsigned. The next council meeting is August 11.

Records, audit logs, and the full breakdown are at deflockapex.org.

This has nothing to do with crime. This is about control and manipulation.

It’s over for ALPRs. The writing is on the wall. Ban the technology from Apex, and move on the other topics.

This is why we need to get Flock out. This is why we need a full ban on ALPR. This is why we need policy.

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-colorado-police-wrong-suspect/

I spent a few weeks in China in the 2000s and 2010s. I remember the cameras, the feeling of always being a little watched. My friends and I joked about it, because it wasn't ours. We got to fly home, to the place where you could get in your car and go and nobody kept a record of it.

That record is being kept here now. License plate cameras in Apex log where every one of us drives, and share it far beyond this town. Not people accused of anything. All of us. The school run, the doctor's office, the long way home. And none of us ever said yes. No vote, no law we approved. Just choices someone made for us, that can change any time.

I know the response. Your phone tracks you more. Maybe. But you chose your phone, and you can leave it on the counter. You can't choose not to drive to work. And your phone company can't do anything to you but lose your business. This record sits with the government and moves to agencies with real power over your life. That's not a company you can walk away from.

Every reassurance we're given is just a setting. A toggle someone can switch, or forget to switch. Other towns learned that the hard way, systems they thought were locked down got reached anyway. You don't build a free life on a promise.

The law is catching up. Last week the Supreme Court said police can't treat this kind of location data as a free-for-all, that you keep a right to your own movements even when someone else holds the record. And more than fifty towns have shut these cameras off in the past year. I don't want Apex to be the last one holding this after everyone else walked away.

We talk a lot about loving freedom. Freedom isn't only for people who did something wrong. It's the ordinary thing of moving through your own town without a record following you home. A decision this personal belongs to us.

Tonight was a solid council meeting. And wow, great turnout from fellow citizens. We had more folks show up than ever.

Here is my read:

- The chief spoke about ALPR. I have already detailed my take on his talk. There were many things I disagreed with and some things were stretches or using fear to justify ALPR but he was reasonable.

- Council asked questions that clearly positioned them against Flock. This was the first time I heard it voiced.

- The Chief did not defend Flock. He did defend ALPR.

- Ed opened the motion to refer this to the Public Safety committee which is the start of voting to terminate.

- Sue, Shane, Ed, and Arno all expressed real concern about Flock. Terry didn’t weigh in but that was an intentional tactic.

My read is that Flock is coming down.

Now the work starts to ensure any future tools have extremely tight guardrails, termination clauses, ToCs that can’t be altered, and really privacy controls.

I am 100% against all ALPRs but I’m not confident that current council will align. That’s a 2027 election issue.

For now, we get Flock out. Then we fight the next battle.

Keep the fight up!

I've now read the entire 33-slide presentation APD is giving Council on June 9. ( Link: https://deflockapex.org/docs/june-9-2026-alpr-council-presentation.pdf )

And honestly?

The most interesting thing isn't what's in it.

It's what's missing.

This was supposed to be an ALPR program review.

Instead, a huge portion of the presentation is spent defending the program, defending APD, addressing "mischaracterizations," defending transparency, defending oversight, and reassuring the public that everything is fine.

If the program is as successful as claimed, why spend so much time defending it?

APD claims:

• ALPR is reducing crime
• ALPR is increasing prosecutions
• ALPR is deterring criminals
• ALPR is making Apex safer

Okay. Show us the evidence, not the anecdotes, not the PowerPoint.

The evidence.

• Where are the case numbers?
• Where are the audit reports?
• Where are the false-positive rates?
• Where are the search logs?
• Where are the independent reviews?
• Where is the crime trend analysis proving the system is reducing crime?

And here's something else.

Notice what the Chief talks about.

ALPR. ALPR. ALPR.

Not Flock.

Not the nationwide network.

Not the sharing ecosystem.

Not the platform.

Not the vendor.

Not the future capabilities.

Just ALPR.

Because "Do license plate readers help solve crimes?" is an easier conversation than:

"Should Apex participate in a growing surveillance network that can track hundreds of thousands of vehicles and share information across roughly 1,000 law enforcement agencies?"

The presentation itself confirms:

• ~60,000 vehicle reads every day
• A searchable 30-day database
• Sharing with roughly 1,000 agencies
• Two federal sharing incidents that were only discovered after the fact

Yet we're asked to trust the conclusions without seeing the underlying proof.

That's backwards.

The burden is not on residents to prove why they deserve privacy.

The burden is on government to prove why this level of surveillance is necessary, effective, and properly controlled.

This Tuesday matters.

A lot.

If you care about transparency, accountability, privacy, mission creep, or simply making sure Council hears more than one side of the story.

Show up.

📍 Apex Town Hall
🕔 Meet at 5:15 PM
🕕 Council Meeting at 6:00 PM

You don't have to speak.

Just be there.

A room full of residents asking hard questions is far more powerful than any slide deck.

Read the documents yourself:

https://deflockapex.org

Don't let this discussion happen without the public in the room.

We all need to stand together, fight together, and ban this nonsense.

Looking at you u/jeffjacksonnc

We gotta fight it locally, folks.

deflockapex.org

We had three of us up there, all going from different angles, all making solid arguments to get rid of Flock (and ALPR) in Apex.

Get involved.

deflockapex.org

Apex Town Council is very aware that residents are concerned about Flock and ALPR surveillance. Mayor Gilbert has acknowledged those concerns in writing, and said Chief Johansen is expected to give another ALPR presentation soon.

That makes this the moment to show up.

• When: Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 6:00 PM
• Where: Apex Town Hall, 73 Hunter Street, Apex, NC 27502 (Council Chambers, 2nd floor)
• How to speak: Arrive early and sign in within the first 10 minutes of the meeting. Individual comments are limited to 3 minutes. If a group of four or more people designates one spokesperson, that person may speak for up to 9 minutes.

If you cannot attend in person, you can submit a written public forum comment by 3:00 PM on the meeting date by emailing public.forum@apexnc.org. You need to include your name and address for the record.

You do not need to be an expert. You do not need a perfect speech. Just say clearly that Apex should remove Flock and pause any ALPR program until Council holds a full public review and adopts a very defined, limited-scope policy with real enforcement teeth: strict limits on use, data sharing, private-camera access, audit logs, retention, violations, and accountability.

Policy proposal here.

Council is listening now. Silence will be read as consent.

More info and documents:
https://deflockapex.org