The Sheriff's Audit Log

On May 12, 2026, the night Asheville’s council approved its own intelligence center, someone filed a public records request with Buncombe County for the audit trail of the Sheriff’s Office’s Fusus platform: every time a department account “accessed live or recorded video footage,” from January 1, 2024 forward (the request, on MuckRock). The county answered the next day with a spreadsheet, Fusus Audit, Jan 1 2024 to May 13 2026, and closed the request. Asked why eight of the sixteen columns were blank, the county cited G.S. 132-1.4, the criminal-investigations exemption, for information that “could compromise a case.”

What survived is still the most detailed public picture of what a real-time intelligence center does all day. This page is what the 337,838 rows say. The numbers below are counts from the released file; anyone can download it and repeat them. The method and the limits are at the bottom.

The one number

Of 225,439 camera events in the log, 130,003 were on Asheville Housing Authority cameras. Fifty-eight percent. More than all 51 school sites in the log combined (66,673), more than every camera the Sheriff’s Office owns on its own buildings (21,350), more than the private businesses that plugged in (7,413).

Whose cameras	Camera events	Share	Live views	Recorded views
Asheville Housing Authority (13 sites)	130,003	57.7%	124,006	5,872
Buncombe County Schools, Asheville City Schools, IC Imagine (51 sites)	66,673	29.6%	65,678	942
Sheriff’s Office and county buildings (25 sites)	21,350	9.5%	20,562	199
Private partners: Pack’s Tavern, the Miles Building, Western Carolina Rescue Mission, the NC Arboretum, Camp Dorothy Walls	7,413	3.3%	7,260	39

The single most-watched place in Buncombe County, by the Sheriff’s Office’s own count, is Pisgah View Apartments: 39,404 camera events. Then Hillcrest (27,212), Maple Crest (19,840), Deaverview (9,864), Aston Park Towers (7,320), Bartlett Arms (6,039), the Edington Center (5,338), Southern Street (3,465), Erskine (3,363), Klondyke Homes (2,248), Asheville Terrace (971), Altamont (25). The busiest school, A.C. Reynolds High, had 7,389. The county courthouse had 564.

Watching the Poor documented that about 500 cameras in public housing feed the network and that residents were never asked. This is what feeding the network means in practice: the people who live in these communities are the most-watched people in the county, by a wide margin, and the watching is the ordinary business of the center, not an exception to it.

Watching, not investigating

The log separates live viewing from pulling recorded footage. If the cameras were an investigative tool, the record would be mostly playback after incidents. It is the opposite.

Live views: 217,506. Recorded views: 7,052. Across every category, 95 to 99 percent of camera access is live. On housing cameras, 124,006 live against 5,872 recorded. On school cameras, 65,678 live against 942 recorded.
At least 9,617 hours of live watching are logged with a duration, and that is a floor: only 57 percent of live views carry one. Housing cameras account for 5,178 of those hours, about six hours of logged live watching every day for 864 days. Pisgah View alone: 1,926 hours. Hillcrest: 1,367.
The system appears to cap a single live view at one hour; the longest entry is 59 minutes 59 seconds. 4,636 live views ran 30 minutes or longer, 2,412 of them on housing cameras.
The entries come in runs. The longest is 762 consecutive live views of Pisgah View Apartments by one account, then 735 on Hillcrest, 681 on Hillcrest, 622 on Pisgah View. There are 129 runs of a hundred or more consecutive views on housing cameras. That is what a video wall looks like in a log: one person cycling through one complex’s cameras, over and over.

The Sheriff’s Office’s own rulebook names this. Policy 217 authorizes “proactive monitoring” and tells the center, for public events, to “look for suspicious activity leading up to and during the event” (the sheriff’s own policies). The log shows where proactive monitoring points: at public housing first, at schools second, and at the WNC Agricultural Center, the county’s event venue, which with 6,951 events is the most-watched site the Sheriff’s Office owns.

A few people, mostly

318 accounts appear in the log. 92 ever viewed a camera. 222 accounts logged in, most of them through the mobile app, and never opened a camera.
Three accounts produced half of all camera viewing (21.7, 14.7, and 13.2 percent). Ten accounts produced 87 percent. Fifty accounts produced 99.6 percent.
Fifty accounts ever viewed a housing camera; ten of them produced 91 percent of housing views. Fifteen accounts each logged more than a thousand housing-camera events.
The sheriff’s own account, Quentin Miller, viewed cameras 34 times.
70 accounts were created during the period. The field app, fususOPS, was used by 39 accounts for 2,498 live views; the rest is the desktop and mobile fususONE client.

This site does not name the individual deputies and analysts in the file; they are staff carrying out a policy, and the file is public for anyone who wants to check. The point is structural: the center’s daily output is a small number of people watching a small number of places for a long time.

What the log barely shows

Plate searches: 309 in 28 months, by 11 accounts, 120 of them by one. (This is the Fusus plate-reader function; the Sheriff’s Office also runs Flock readers, per Chief Stepp’s August 2026 memo, and Flock keeps its own audit log, which is a separate request.)
Clips downloaded and screenshots saved: 212, 125 of them from housing cameras, by 14 accounts.
Tips from the public through the platform: 24.
Evidence-vault recordings created: 82.
47,202 alarm events, all closed, on the Sheriff’s Office’s own organization; the file does not say what triggered them.

Set 309 plate searches and 212 saved clips against 217,506 live views. The investigative uses the public was told about are a rounding error in the system’s actual use.

The schools

Buncombe County Schools joined the network in 2021 by a memorandum the school board never voted on in public (Board of Education). The log has 51 school sites, and the Sheriff’s Office viewed their cameras live 65,678 times, with 942 recorded views. The district has said it controls the terms of deputy access; the log shows deputies looking into A.C. Reynolds High 7,389 times, T.C. Roberson 7,108, Erwin High 6,958, Erwin Middle 5,788, Cane Creek Middle 5,457, and watching, not pulling footage. Asheville City Schools: 3,013 live views, one recorded.

The partners

The businesses and nonprofits that plugged in appear by name, as their own organizations in the log: Pack’s Tavern (3,715 events, 317 logged hours), the Miles Building (3,279, 309 hours, including 109 camera movements), the Western Carolina Rescue Mission (348 events; the Rescue Mission is a homeless shelter), the North Carolina Arboretum (70), Camp Dorothy Walls (1). Among the county’s own sites: the Health and Human Services building at 40 Coxe Avenue (1,122), where people go for benefits, and Perry Lane Apartments (634). Before You Plug In explained what a business signs up for; this is what it looks like from the other end.

What the county withheld, and why it matters

The released file has sixteen columns. Eight are empty: the county withheld them under the criminal-investigations exemption. The most important is the date and time of each entry. Without it, nobody can say whether the six daily hours on housing cameras happen at 3 p.m. or 3 a.m., whether a 762-view run was one shift or one week, whether watching rises around protests or elections, or whether any account looked at a camera it had no reason to look at. Those are the questions an audit log exists to answer. The sheriff’s Policy 402 says plate-reader access is audited annually “along with sworn members of the FUSUS Advisory Committee”; no audit has been published. Request 17 asks for the timestamps and the audit reports.

Two things the county’s response does establish. It took the Sheriff’s Office one day to produce 28 months of access logs, which is the right answer to any agency that says audit records are too burdensome to release; Asheville has refused to release Flock audit logs at all (Promise Tracker). And the log does not include the Asheville Police Department. APD has its own Fusus account and, since 2023, access to this same county network (What Is the RTIC); its log is a separate request to the city, and the same columns would answer the same questions.

Method and limits

The file is a comma-separated export of 337,838 rows with these populated columns: user, user organization, object type, operation, client, object organization, location name, and duration. Counts above are exact counts of rows. A “camera event” is a row whose object type is Camera: live view, recorded view, clip download, screenshot, or camera movement. Durations were parsed from entries like “1m21s”; 124,907 of 217,506 live views carry one, so every hour figure is a minimum. The file appears to be in chronological order (logins precede views; views of one camera cluster), and the “consecutive” counts assume that order; the county withheld the timestamps that would confirm it. Events are not people watched: one live view may show one camera or a wall of them, and a person walking past a camera does not appear in this log at all. The log covers the Sheriff’s Office’s organization only; cameras shared into it from the housing authority and the schools are identified by the owner’s organization name. The requester is anonymous on MuckRock and is not connected to this site. A copy of the file is archived offline; the original is at the link above.

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