Council took up the termination resolution previewed five days earlier and passed it 5 to 2 (city’s video, the Flock item from 2:11:57 to 4:07:49). Quotes below are from a machine transcript of the video, with speakers identified by voice analysis checked against the chair’s recognitions and the record itself; the vote tally, the no votes, and every load-bearing quote were then confirmed by watching the video. Every quote links its timestamp so you can hear it yourself. Obvious transcription slips are bracketed.
The vote
The resolution calling for the city manager to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety passed 5 to 2 at 4:06:11. Voting yes: Mayor Esther Manheimer, Kim Roney, Sage Turner, Bo Hess, and Maggie Ullman. Voting no: Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley and Sheneika Smith. Roney made the motion (2:26:09); Turner seconded.
What passed is the resolution as written at the briefing: terminate the contract, request that Flock remove its 11 cameras, stop city searches of Flock data, delete the data the law allows the city to delete, and send the city manager off on a review with ten study topics, including “whether the city should resume use of flock technology” (2:20:45). No member moved to amend it before the vote.
The second that never came
The night’s most consequential moment took one minute and produced no vote at all.
Right after the resolution passed, Roney moved to add a pause on buying new license plate readers while the city runs the review the resolution just ordered (4:06:19): “I move to have a moratorium on the purchase of new [ALPRs].” The city attorney advised that this needed a motion to add the item to the agenda (4:07:14); she so moved. The mayor asked: “Anybody have a second?” (4:07:34).
No one answered. “All right, the motion fails for lack of a second” (4:07:36). The mayor, declining it herself: “I’ve got enough faith in the manager to do what we just talked about” (4:07:29).
So the council that voted to end one plate reader contract declined, in the same ten minutes, to bind itself against buying more plate readers during its own review. What stands in place of that binding is the next section.
The Axon contract, confirmed from the dais
Ullman asked the question directly (4:01:00): “I guess I keep hearing the concern that this is a bait and switch… Is that happening? Do we, have we signed a contract with [Axon] for [ALPRs]?”
Mayor Manheimer answered (4:01:23): “we did, that is one of the things that we voted for. But we haven’t put them up… We have a contract with [Axon]. It covers a lot of things. We do not have stationary [Axon] license plate readers yet.”
City Manager D.K. Wesley then gave the assurance that stands where the failed moratorium would have been (4:03:22): “we do have a contract with [Axon]… before any conversation can happen around putting up the stationary fixed location [ALPRs]… absolutely not, we will not put those up until that community conversation happens.”
That is the arrangement the city left the room with: the contract that covers stationary Axon plate readers stands, the 162 vehicle-mounted Axon readers APD confirmed to local press on Aug 20 stand (828NewsNOW; the city’s own transparency portal listed 137 vehicles on Aug 26, a discrepancy we are tracking), and the barrier to new fixed cameras is the manager’s word, given verbally, bound by nothing council voted on.
What “deleted” means, from the chief
Answering Roney’s questions, APD Interim Police Chief Jackie Stepp put the retention mechanics on the record (2:24:26): “we do have a retention schedule. Flock is currently 21 days. Anything beyond 21 days [is] automatically purged… Anything that’s an active case investigation has been uploaded into evidence.com, and it is no longer stored in the Flock platform,” where it falls under separate statutory retention schedules.
So the deletion the resolution orders has a carve-out, stated plainly by the chief: data already moved into Axon’s evidence.com for active cases stays. That is normal evidence practice, and it is also a precision worth keeping when the deletion is described later.
Two commitments came out of the same exchange: staff agreed on the record to notify council when the data deletion is complete (2:23:54), and, asked whether the city would cover the cameras while waiting for Flock to remove them, staff said that is not currently planned but “we can evaluate that as an option” (2:23:21).
What the members said
More than two dozen residents spoke during the hour of public comment, nearly all supporting termination and nearly all asking council to go further; the themes were the Axon replacement, the 287(g) data-sharing routes, and the withheld Axon price list. The dais statements, in order:
- Sage Turner, seconding (2:26:15), reframed the resolution as a speed-up rather than a change of course: “Six of us already voted to cancel Flock, and this is [an] additional movement to speed up the process… I’m getting lots of questions about why I didn’t support it, when I did. We all did.” Before the vote she added (3:42:18) that “this exploration for me needs to cover” solutions for crime, and thanked APD “for not being one of those scary statistics… for maintaining this software while we had it under our purview, safely” (3:53:53).
- Vice Mayor Mosley, voting no (3:36:34): her concerns about “privacy, data sharing, civil liberties and accountability… are not new for me,” citing her years representing Johnnie Rush. But: “This whole thing feels deeply political to me. We are [in] the middle of an election season… My job is not to participate in political theater. My job is to govern… I cannot support this resolution in [its] current [form] tonight.” Asked whether anything could change her vote (3:39:49): “My general concern is that what we’re attempting to do quite frankly is a bait and switch, and I think we’re not giving our citizens credit for seeing that.”
- Sheneika Smith, voting no (3:40:31): “the language is only to cancel, remove, evaluate, review. But what else? What do we do for people who feel vulnerable?… tonight I hear privacy over conviction, privacy over safety, privacy over justice.” And later (3:54:45): “the time of pause is life-threatening in a lot of situations… I haven’t heard any resolutions. I haven’t heard about replacements. What do we do?”
- Bo Hess, voting yes, in the night’s longest statement (3:43:54): “I will support ending [Asheville’s] contract with Flock Safety because I do believe legitimate concerns have been raised about this company’s national network [and] its data sharing practices. However, ending one [vendor’s] contract is not the same as rejecting responsible technology, and I will not personally allow this decision to become a back door to weakening or defunding the [Asheville] Police Department… I plan on allowing our law enforcement to have every single tool at their [disposal].” He listed safeguards as already in place, “restricted access which we have, documented investigative purposes which we have, short retention periods which we have, controlled data sharing which we have… regular audits which we have,” and endorsed reviving a police oversight commission reporting to the public safety committee he chairs (3:49:47).
- Maggie Ullman, voting yes (4:03:57): “I feel like the tenor of the conversation is that all cameras, all surveillance, any data captured is bad, and I just kind of reject that. I have cameras at my house to keep me safe after I had violence at my house… to throw out all tools, body cameras, y’all, we fought really hard for those… I will support getting rid of these Flocks. I’m glad to hear the manager lay it straight that we’re going to have a conversation before any other action would happen. This isn’t a bait and switch.”
- Kim Roney, who moved the resolution, laid out her doubts about the technology’s record before the vote (3:51:01): “I have concerns about false positive alerts, about the homicide count shift, about the clearance benchmarks. It has not been shown to me that the clearance rates and justice have been realized by Flock cameras going up in Asheville.” Earlier she disclosed she had “forwarded a report to staff and council urgently recommending review for potential breach of [Flock’s] contract” (2:22:30).
Both no votes and two yes votes used or answered the phrase “bait and switch.” The phrase came from the public comment before them.
What to watch next
- Removal: the contract requires Flock to remove its 11 cameras on termination. Row 11 turns green when the cameras are verifiably down and APD’s Flock accounts are closed, not before.
- The deletion notice: staff committed to telling council when the Flock data deletion is complete. That notice is a public record when it happens.
- The manager’s review: ten topics, no deadline stated on the dais, and the resolution leaves “whether the city should resume use of flock technology” an open question.
- The Axon side: nothing that happened tonight touches the Axon contract, the 162 vehicle-mounted readers, or the RTIC. The only barrier to stationary Axon plate readers is the manager’s verbal commitment to a community conversation first.