Getting Flock Out

This is the campaign page for getting Flock all the way out of Asheville. For a year, council’s answer to Flock criticism was a vendor swap: fold everything into Axon, wind Flock down, maybe keep “one camera” through the contract’s end. As of August 19 there’s a live test of whether that changes: the mayor has called for a termination vote on August 25. This page has the eight demands that turn a termination vote into an actual exit, what one person can do this week, the cities that already did this work, and the reason to stay in your seat afterward: when Flock is out, the work is not done.

Aug 19, 2026: the mayor calls for termination. Score it against the exit test.

Mayor Manheimer issued a statement on August 19 calling for a vote at the August 25 council meeting to authorize city manager D.K. Wesley to terminate the Flock contract: “I have heard clearly from Asheville residents, and I’m calling on Asheville to turn off the Flock cameras and remove them, which requires terminating the Flock contract.” She rejected a moratorium as insufficient because “our contract does not allow for the removal of the technology unless we terminate the contract,” and called for “a transparent policy over the handling and deletion of data” collected by the cameras, work she says Interim Chief Stepp “has already begun.” (WLOS · 828newsnow)

If council votes yes and the cameras come down, that is a real win, and residents caused it: the people who showed up, Turner’s public documentation that the wind-down had stalled, the Week of Action, and months of national reporting the statement itself cites. Credit it. Then hold it to the standard this page already set, because the statement, measured against the four-part exit below, covers roughly a part and a half:

Exit requirement	In the mayor’s proposal?
1. Terminate the agreement in writing	✅ Yes: that’s the ask, and she’s right that a moratorium wouldn’t do it
2. Verified physical removal by a date certain	⚠️ Removal, yes; no date, no verification mechanism named
3. Terminate every APD Flock user account, search license, and National Lookup enrollment	❌ Not mentioned in the statement or any coverage of it. This is the part that actually ends network access; Austin removed every camera and kept searching
4. Written data-deletion certification from Flock	⚠️ Partial: a “transparent policy” on data handling and deletion is promised, but a city policy is not a vendor certification

Two more things the statement doesn’t touch: the county’s Flock cameras (the sheriff’s network APD can still reach), and the 7.5-year Axon contract, which stays exactly as it was, still unreleased, with fixed Axon plate readers already authorized under its terms with no new council vote required. Removing Flock’s poles while Axon’s contract allows equivalent poles is the vendor swap this page describes, unless council closes that door explicitly.

And it stays a statement until the vote. The record here is specific: promised outcomes around Flock have slipped before, most recently the removal condition Turner says her May 12 vote depended on. What turns this one real: a yes vote August 25, then dates, then the paper. The agenda posts Friday, August 21 at noon.

Updated after the August 20 agenda briefing (full write-up), which moved several pieces:

• The one-camera plan is dead, but demand 3 is not covered: the mayor disclosed that Flock changed its policy to require 10 cameras minimum for system access. Flock itself just proved this page’s core claim: the camera was a token; the product is the network. Read that beside Chief Stepp’s August 14 memo (below), which plans a Flock software license to “preserve access to the Flock network” with no cameras at all. The vendor closed the token-camera door and opened a license door, and APD’s written plan walks through it. Demand 3 (every APD Flock account and Lookup enrollment terminated, confirmed in writing) is therefore the live fight on Tuesday, not a settled one.
• Removal mechanics confirmed: “the cameras are technically not ours. They’re Flock’s, and they have to come remove them.” Termination is the removal trigger; a date certain and covered lenses until removal (demand 2, plus Roney’s cover-them-up ask, made at the briefing) are what’s still missing.
• The vendor swap is in writing: a staff memo read into the record says the city is “expanding and integrating Axon’s automated license plate reader capabilities” while Flock is “rightsized,” and the mayor confirmed Axon stationary readers are “in the pipeline.” Demand 7 is now the sharpest ask on this page.
• The resolution adds policy work: civil-liberties policy recommendations, an ACLU expert working with the chief, and a facial recognition restatement. Good, and all of it policy rather than ordinance; the tracker holds it.

What one camera actually keeps: everything

The critical technical fact, documented nationally: Flock’s search network is an agency-account feature, not a camera feature. An agency with National Lookup enabled searches the entire ~80,000-camera national network (and its data-sharing relationships persist) regardless of how many cameras it owns. The proof points:

• CBP searched 80,000+ Flock cameras while owning zero and holding no contract: access came through sharing invitations and an undisclosed pilot. (404 Media)
• The ACLU’s technical analysis: agencies enable national access “simply by selecting ‘Enable National Lookup’”: 450,000+ national searches in a single 30-day period. (ACLU-MA Data for Justice)
• Austin removed every camera and kept searching anyway, through requests to two neighboring towns’ systems, until journalists caught it. Council member Mike Siegel: “a violation of the intent of council policy.” (KUT)

So: a single Flock camera pointed at a wall until February still searches tens of thousands of cameras nationwide, and Asheville’s data relationships stay live. Camera removal without account termination is theater.

And Asheville’s officials have now confirmed the mechanism themselves, on the record, at the May 7, 2026 agenda briefing. Sage Turner, restating the plan back to the interim chief (video, 41:49): “really keeping one just means that we have some kind of access to the interface so that we can use those that are out there that aren’t even our cameras.” Chief Stepp: “Yeah, that’s kind of right. That exactly right.” Stepp’s own rationale (38:48): retaining access is “imperative” because “there’s so many agencies here locally that utilize that system.” And Bo Hess, arguing for the plan (43:23): keeping “that one Flock camera is a strategic public safety move,” since removing all of them “puts every single 100,000 residents at risk”: “until Axon has the type of database that we can access like Flock.” On the plan’s own terms, Flock exits only when Axon replicates the network: the camera is a token; what it preserves is the national search account. (The chief, in the same exchange, confirms the counts: the city owns 11, the county 22.) Kim Roney, same briefing, said it first: “I think even having one of them isn’t good for our community”, and asked for a wind-down timeline that was never given.

The wind-down as currently described

What’s on the record: Sage Turner says her Axon yes was conditioned on Flock ending, and describes the one-camera idea as a contract-lapse device (“through February,” suggesting it be pointed “at a wall”), with the Flock contract running to February 2027 (the mayor confirmed the date at the August 20 briefing; BPR reports the $72,000 agreement was set to expire at the end of January 2027). As of August 17, by her own account, the city’s Flock cameras remain up and she’s “calling colleagues.” Truthout attributes the “11 cameras might become potentially one” reassurance to a council member its link suggests is Bo Hess (unconfirmed; worth verifying). Meanwhile APD’s August 6 explainer interview, 2,000 words on how carefully Flock is used, says nothing about the wind-down, removal dates, or the transition at all.

And a live item: Turner’s August 13 update said the complete Axon contract would be made public the next day. Whether that release actually happened is unverified; checking it is the single most urgent records task on this site, because everything from retention terms to fixed-ALPR authority turns on that text. (her post)

The eight demands: what the August 25 motion needs to contain

Assembled from the cities that exited for real (and the ones that thought they had: see Evanston, where Flock reinstalled terminated cameras and the last ones came down only after press inquiry, six months later). The first four end Flock. The last four prove it happened and close the doors it leaves open. Every one is specific enough to put to a council member as a yes-or-no.

End Flock (the four-part exit):

1. Terminate the Flock agreement in writing: not “deactivate,” not “let it wind down.” (Evanston’s lesson: Flock contests soft exits.)
2. Verified physical removal of all 11 city cameras by a date certain, publicly confirmed. (Pittsboro’s motion said “no later than July 1.” Evanston’s lacked a deadline and paid for it.)
3. Terminate every APD Flock user account, search license, and National/statewide Lookup enrollment: the part every soft exit skips, and the part that actually ends network access. (The Austin lesson; the CBP zero-camera proof, both documented below.)
4. Written data-deletion certification from Flock, checked against the city’s Flock transparency portal. The mayor’s proposed “transparent policy” on data handling is a city document; this is the vendor, in writing, confirming Asheville’s 3.1 million plate scans are gone.

Prove it, and close the doors (the transparency demands):

5. Publish the paper. The termination letter, Flock’s written acknowledgment, the deletion certification, and a final list of every agency Asheville shared plate data with, posted on the city site, not summarized in a press release. A records request shouldn’t be required to confirm the city did what it voted to do.
6. Bind the informal channel. Policy language, with a penalty, restricting APD from requesting ALPR searches from other agencies as a workaround, because APD can already reach the Sheriff’s ~1,800-camera network and neighboring Flock towns exactly the way Austin reached Round Rock after its “removal.”
7. Close the replacement door. A separate, public council vote required before any fixed Axon plate reader goes up. Under the Axon contract’s baseline terms, Axon’s fixed ALPR poles (Outpost and Lightpost) are already authorized, needing no new procurement and no council vote: without this demand, “Flock removal” can mean identical cameras with a different logo, on the same corners, inside the same RTIC. And this isn’t hypothetical: emails released August 20 show Axon’s account rep marketing “Request a demo of our Fixed ALPR here!” in the signature of every message to APD, and a separate, never-announced contract for 20 Axon Fleet in-car plate readers in its “final signature stage” as of mid-July. (the lock-in terms)
8. Release the executed Axon contract. Promise Tracker row 12: its public release was promised for mid-August and hasn’t happened. Every question about what replaces Flock (retention, fixed cameras, data programs, exit rights) is answered by that text and nothing else. (the rider checklist to check it against)

The resolution, as posted: scored against the eight demands

For Tuesday itself, a guide to building your own comment from the record, the resolution section by section, where each member stands, and how to speak or write, with the amendments below as one worked example: Tuesday, August 25: Make the Vote Count.

The agenda posted Friday, August 21. The Flock item is New Business VI.A, not consent, so it gets its own discussion and public comment (agenda · resolution · Chief Stepp’s August 14 memo). Here is what the seven sections do, against the list above.

Demand	In the resolution?	What the text says
1. Terminate in writing	Yes	Section 1: “directs the City Manager to terminate the City’s contract with Flock Safety,” effective on adoption
2. Verified removal by a date certain	Partly	Section 1: “immediately request that Flock remove their hardware.” A request, no deadline, no public confirmation step. Evanston’s motion read the same way
3. Close APD’s search accounts and network access	No	Section 2 bars city employees from searching “data collected through the City’s Flock Technology,” meaning the city’s own eleven cameras. It says nothing about APD’s logins to the network, National Lookup, or searching other agencies’ cameras. Section 6 bars “a new agreement for Flock Technology” during the review, which matters below
4. Deletion certification from Flock	No	Section 3: existing data “shall be retained, preserved, or deleted in accordance with applicable law.” Retained is the first word. No deletion, no certification
5. Publish the paper	No	”Transparency and public reporting” is item 8 on a list of things the manager will study (Section 5)
6. Bind the informal channel	No	Not addressed. Nothing stops APD from asking the sheriff or a neighboring town to run a plate
7. A public vote before any Axon reader goes up	No	The resolution is about Flock only. Axon does not appear in it
8. Release the executed Axon contract	No	Not addressed

What the resolution adds that the demands did not ask for: Section 4 says the city “does not utilize any facial recognition technology” and bars linking Flock data to any outside facial-recognition system; Section 5 orders a review with ten items, including “an independent civil-liberties policy reviewer,” protections for “immigration enforcement, reproductive healthcare, First Amendment-protected activity,” and, as item 10, “whether the City should resume use of Flock Technology”; Section 6 bars buying, leasing, activating, or deploying Flock technology during the review.

Read Section 6 beside the chief’s memo. The memo, dated August 14 and now a public agenda document, says APD “is not pursuing a full transition away from Flock” and is “exploring transitioning from its existing Flock camera deployment to a Flock software license that would preserve access to the Flock network without maintaining the same level of APD-owned Flock infrastructure.” That is demand 3 in reverse: the cameras go, the search access stays. Section 6’s ban on “a new agreement for Flock Technology” would block that during the review; Section 5, item 10, invites it back afterward. The question for Tuesday is whether council means Section 6 or the memo.

The memo also settles some numbers. It counts 86 Flock cameras in Buncombe County, 11 of them the city’s, says the county sheriff “currently uses Flock ALPR cameras,” and describes APD evaluating “consolidating the BCSO RTIC into the APD RTIC.” It dates the safeguards: searchers cut “from 18 to 12” in August 2026, sharing narrowed from the 500-mile radius to Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, retention cut from 30 to 21 days, all after the council’s May resolution (which the memo misdates to June). And it plans the replacement on a calendar: “By February 2027, APD expects to complete the planned reduction of its Flock contract and have the Axon ALPR infrastructure operational.”

The cities that already did this, so nobody has to guess

This isn’t theoretical; it’s the national record, and the full page on how cities won has the mechanics. The short version, closest to home first:

• Macon County, NC (July 2026): commissioners voted 5–0 to let the Flock contract lapse; twelve cameras came down immediately. The push came largely from Republican residents: this is not a partisan ask.
• Pittsboro, NC: the instructive sequence: a “keep with guardrails” compromise failed, then outright termination passed, with a removal deadline in the motion (“no later than July 1”). The full ask was the winnable ask.
• Hillsborough, NC: terminated unanimously; cameras out in five weeks. The NC benchmark for how fast this goes when a council means it.
• Austin, TX (the account warning): removed every camera, and APD kept searching Flock’s network through two neighboring towns until journalists caught it. Council member Mike Siegel: “a violation of the intent of council policy.” (KUT) This is why demand 3 exists.
• Evanston, IL (the paperwork warning): terminated, then Flock reinstalled cameras anyway; the last came down six months later, after press inquiry. This is why demands 1, 2, and 5 exist.
• And the wave itself: Guadalupe County, TX terminated its contract on August 7, citing “public scrutiny” (KSAT), and more than 20 jurisdictions ended or began ending Flock use in July 2026 alone, the most in a single month on record (WLOS). The 50+ community record, across the political spectrum: The National Wave.

The Axon side isn’t the safe harbor

The swap’s implicit pitch (“Axon is the responsible vendor”) doesn’t survive the record:

• Axon is a major ICE/DHS contractor: a $370M DHS body-camera contract, a 2025 adjustment supporting ICE’s tactical office, and a reported ~$220M ICE Taser deal in progress. The “protects your data from federal reach” framing coexists with the vendor’s federal book of business. (CNBC · NOTUS)
• Axon’s own AI ethics board collapsed in 2022: nine members resigned over the taser-drone plan, having “lost faith in Axon’s ability to be a responsible partner.” (NPR)
• Its Draft One AI report-writer is, per EFF’s investigation, “designed to defy transparency”: it erases the AI’s draft on export so no one can audit what the machine wrote versus the officer. (EFF)
• Syracuse made the same swap; local critics’ verdict months later: it “solved nothing.” (CNY Central) ACLU-Wisconsin’s Jon McCray Jones on vendor swaps generally: “Replacing Flock with another automated license plate reader company like Motorola Solutions or Axon doesn’t solve the underlying problem”; communities end up “playing a game of Whack-A-Mole with surveillance companies.” (ACLU-WI)

The Denver floor, and what Asheville’s baseline actually says. When Denver made this same swap, its council held the Axon deal to a 1-year term, a 50-camera cap, 21-day retention, no vendor-run national database, and per-query audit trails. Asheville signed 7.5 years, sight unseen, and we now have the default terms it rides on: the Sourcewell cooperative contract 101223-AXN and its embedded Axon Master Services Agreement. Absent Asheville-negotiated riders, the baseline provides:

• Subscriptions auto-renew for an additional five years at end of term: 2034 quietly becomes 2039;
• “Payment obligations are non-cancelable”; all sales final; no termination for convenience: exit only for Axon’s breach or budget non-appropriation, and early exit triggers a clawback invoice for the difference between bundle discounts and full MSRP;
• Fixed ALPR cameras (Axon Outpost and Lightpost) are already authorized under the contract’s ALPR amendment; replacing Flock’s poles with Axon’s would require no new procurement and no council vote under current rules;
• Axon’s default program using agency data for product improvement (revocable, but on by default);
• Facial recognition: silent, neither authorized nor prohibited in 112 pages;
• Pricing declared confidential, with the agency required to notify Axon before any public-records disclosure.

Every Denver protection would have to exist as an Asheville-specific rider. Whether any does is exactly what the unreleased contract would show; see Promise Tracker row 12: its promised public release did not happen.

What one person can do, this week and after

The May 12 vote proved showing up isn’t sufficient on its own; the August 19 reversal proved it isn’t optional either. Every mechanism that moved this (the April turnout, Turner’s public documentation, the Week of Action) was residents. Here’s the specific work left, sized for one person:

Before Tuesday:

• Read the resolution. It posted August 21 as New Business item VI.A, not consent (city agenda page). The scorecard above shows which of the eight demands it contains (one) and which it does not (six). Pick one of the six.
• Email council before the vote: avl-city-council@publicinput.com goes to all members and into the public record, and written comment is unlimited. State support for termination, then name the demands the motion is missing by number. The Speak at Council page has the full kit.
• Coordinate who covers which demand. Twenty people making one point uses twenty slots on one argument; eight people covering eight demands builds a record. The two that matter most Tuesday: demand 3 (Section 2 covers the city’s cameras, not APD’s network logins, and the chief’s memo plans a “software license” to keep them) and demand 7 (Axon is not in the resolution, and the memo puts Axon readers on a February 2027 calendar). Details.

Tuesday, August 25 (5 PM, City Hall, 70 Court Plaza):

• Arrive early and sign up immediately; the list order decides who speaks if comment is capped, and on May 12 the cap sent 21 people home. Three-minute structure, counterargument replies, and logistics: Speak at Council.
• The sentence to carry to the podium: “One camera pointed at a wall still searches 80,000 cameras nationwide. Removal without account termination is what Austin did, and Austin kept searching.”
• Support the termination out loud. Council members who vote yes should hear that residents notice; accountability that never says “good, thank you, now finish it” stops working.

After the vote, whichever way it goes:

• Verify, don’t trust. Watch for the removal date, photograph the poles coming down (DeFlock hosts the crowd-sourced camera map, so removals can be checked against it), and check the Flock transparency portal for whether APD’s network access actually ends. If the portal page disappears instead, that’s a finding too; send it to us via Get Involved.
• File the paper trail. The Records Center has pre-written requests for exactly this: the termination letter, the deletion certification, the data-sharing agency list, and the audit logs.
• Take demands 5 through 8 to the Public Safety Committee, September 24 (11 AM, virtual): ask for the wind-down status and the transparency portal’s National Lookup state as a written staff report, the thing every APD interview has omitted.
• Put the two-parter to every November candidate (Election 2026): “Will you vote to (a) terminate the Flock contract, remove all city cameras, AND end APD’s Flock search accounts with written deletion certification; and (b) require a separate council vote for any fixed Axon plate reader?” The a/b split separates real exits from vendor swaps.

There is always a way out, and this is what it costs

The contracts do not allow cancellation for any reason on 30 days’ notice, whatever the saying is. What they allow is a budget exit. Axon’s terms let the city terminate if funds are “not appropriated or otherwise legally available,” and the Sourcewell contract makes that effective “immediately upon notice,” with the hardware returned within thirty days to avoid paying the difference to list price. Flock’s standard terms allow non-appropriation termination “at the end of the applicable fiscal year upon thirty (30) days’ written notice.” Every council budget vote is therefore a vote on these contracts, and the June budget is the cleanest exit there is. The clauses, quoted, and the statutes behind them: What Axon Contracts Do.

When Flock is out, the work is not done

Say the vote passes, the poles come down, the accounts close, the certification arrives. What’s left standing is most of what this site documents:

• The RTIC itself: the hub Flock fed keeps operating toward its spring/summer 2027 launch, connecting body cameras, drones, Axon’s in-car plate readers, and private cameras through Fusus, under a 7.5-year Axon contract that runs to 2033 and, per its baseline terms, auto-renews for five more years unless someone acts.
• The contract nobody has read: still unreleased (row 12), still governing a data program the city is enrolled in by default, still silent on facial recognition in 112 pages, still authorizing fixed Axon plate readers without another vote. Getting Flock out while that text stays sealed is trading a vendor you can see for one you can’t.
• The county network: the Sheriff’s ~1,800 to 2,000 Fusus cameras, including ~1,500 in schools, untouched by anything council votes on Tuesday, and on the November ballot.
• The promises: no facial recognition, no ICE sharing, audits, dashboards; every one still a revisable policy rather than law. The structural fix has a name, CCOPS, an ordinance ~26 cities have passed, and no Asheville official has committed to it.
• The election: four of the six votes that built this are on the November 3 ballot. A Flock exit eleven weeks before Election Day is a data point; what candidates commit to in writing about the rest of the system is the answer.

Flock is the most visible piece and the most winnable fight, which is exactly why it can’t be the last one. The cities that treated the Flock vote as the finish line got the vendor swap; Syracuse’s critics said the Axon switch “solved nothing.” The finish line is structural: the contract public, the promises in law, the audits published, and no camera network, city or county, operating without a public vote and a public record.

The two vendors, side by side: Flock Safety and Axon.

Related: Speak at Council · Get Involved · Records Center · Promise Tracker (rows 11–12) · What Axon Contracts Do · How Cities Won · The National Wave · Sage Turner · Documents