1. If Apex drops Flock and signs with Axon, the cameras do not come down
This is the section that matters most on September 24, because Mayor Gilbert named switching providers as one of the committee’s three options. It is worth knowing what that option has meant everywhere it has been tried this year.
The Guardian reported on August 20, 2026 that Axon has replaced Flock in at least seven municipalities across five states after residents forced Flock out. Three of them are documented in detail.
- Longmont, COCouncil let the Flock contract lapse in December. In March it voted unanimously to approve Axon plate readers instead, adding data protection and transparency requirements and a review after one year. As of late August the Axon contract still had not been finalised. Residents were not given a chance to respond to the police presentation before the vote. One resident told council, “You gave us no chance to rebut.” A software engineer who asked for time to review the Axon system was cut off by the speaking buzzer.
- Denver, COApproved swapping Flock for Axon in March, with a 21-day retention setting rather than Axon’s 30-day default. Still every plate, still no suspicion required, still no warrant.
- Syracuse, NYReplaced Flock’s readers with Axon’s. Local activists filed a public records request for the Axon contract and had not received it. Getting Flock’s cameras off municipal land took more than three months, and city officials eventually moved to unplug them themselves. Private cameras at a local Lowe’s and Home Depot were untouched by any of it.
Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel, ACLU, to the Guardian
On Axon replacing Flock city after city: “That’s not a coincidence.” He described the company as “waiting for Flock to fail and then rushing in.”
Axon has not been shy about it. On a February earnings call, Axon president Josh Isner said the company was hearing from customers, “some of whom came to us from other vendors,” that Axon’s track record on privacy and ethics was a deciding factor.
Now read why Longmont picked Axon, and then look at Apex. Longmont’s assistant chief said Flock’s policies were more likely to result in wider data sharing with other government agencies, and that Axon takes “the exact opposite approach.” The other reason was simpler: Longmont had a decades-long relationship with Axon already, for Tasers, body cameras and evidence storage.
Apex has exactly that relationship. Tasers, body cameras, evidence storage, drone software, and now an interview room system, all Axon, on an agreement the Town is being asked to extend to 2030. Apex is the textbook candidate for this swap. A committee that reviews Flock alone, in one meeting, with no published agenda, is precisely the process that produced the Longmont result.
What we are and are not saying
We are not claiming anyone in Apex has proposed switching to Axon plate readers. Nobody has, publicly. We are saying that “move to a different provider” is one of the three options the chair of this committee named out loud, that the incumbent vendor for everything else Apex Police uses also sells plate readers, and that the towns that have taken that option this year did not reduce surveillance. They changed the logo on it. If the committee is going to consider option two, residents are entitled to see that comparison in writing before it becomes a recommendation.
Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University who studies this technology, told the Guardian the thing Apex should have written on the wall of the committee room: “It’s important that if communities cancel their contracts that they don’t rush into contracting with a different vendor.” A Longmont resident put the lesson more plainly. He wished they had made clear from the start that “it’s not just Flock, it’s data governance.”
One practical thing for whatever Apex decides. The Guardian documented that Flock repeatedly failed to collect its cameras after cancellation. Oshkosh and Verona in Wisconsin, Evanston in Illinois and Dayton in Ohio ended up covering cameras with garbage bags, and Oshkosh’s were still standing four months after the contract was revoked. Any Apex cancellation should carry a removal deadline and a remedy if the vendor misses it.
2. What Axon already sells, if plate reading is the concern
Flock’s pitch is plate readers. Axon’s pitch is a platform that plate reading plugs into. Here is the stack, in Axon’s own descriptions. Every number in this section comes from Axon or its partners, is unaudited, and is marked as such.
8.1 billion
Plates read in total by Axon Fleet 3 in-car ALPR cameras, per Axon’s April 22, 2025 press release. Cumulative, not annual.
20,000+
Felony arrests Axon says Fleet 3 ALPR facilitated “in the past year alone,” along with 50,000 vehicle recoveries. Axon’s figures, unverified.
90%
Read accuracy Axon claims for Fleet 3, “equal to or greater than 90% in all conditions.” Which allows up to one read in ten to be wrong.
- Fleet 3In-car plate reading, with AI extracting vehicle colour, make and type alongside the plate. Announced with two fixed products in April 2025.
- Axon OutpostA fixed plate reader Axon says combines “live streaming, plate reading, and vehicle attribute recognition in a single unit,” mountable on poles, buildings, vehicles, trailers or trees, on solar or mains power. Announced and being sold. Axon has not published general availability.
- Axon LightpostA fixed plate reader Axon says was “developed in collaboration with Ubicquia,” running on Ubicquia’s platform and installable on an existing streetlight “in under an hour.”
- Axon FususAcquired in early 2024. Axon: officer location, alerts, dispatch data, “ALPR overlays and video feeds appear on a single live map,” pulling in fixed cameras, video management systems and legacy tools. Cross-source vehicle search across fixed, mobile and community cameras was announced in April 2025 as a forthcoming capability.
- Community ConnectThe private-camera layer of Fusus. Residents and businesses opt in, either by registering a camera’s location so police can request footage, or by installing an Axon device that puts a live feed on the Fusus map under owner-controlled conditions. It is opt-in, and we will say so. The question for a town is what happens to that consent over five years of asking.
- Ring Community RequestLaunched October 2025. An officer creates a geo-targeted request naming the location, timeframe, what is under investigation and a unique code; nearby Ring users get a notification and the request posts publicly in the Neighbors feed. Sharing is voluntary, and if a resident ignores it the agency is not told. Clips that are shared flow into Axon Evidence with chain of custody.
- Retail Crime HubPowered by Auror, embedded in Axon Evidence. Axon claims “structured incident data from over 26,000 retail locations,” searchable for offender and vehicle patterns, with one-click transfer of retail video into Axon Evidence.
- Skydio and DedroneSkydio drone video and telemetry stream into Fusus and Axon Air, with post-flight footage landing in Axon Evidence. Dedrone, acquired later in 2024, contributes airspace and drone-detection data. This is the drone-as-first-responder stack that item CN4 buys the software layer of.
- CitizenFeeds situational awareness and lets agencies message residents through the Citizen app, into Fusus. Axon does not claim Citizen video enters Axon Evidence, and neither do we.
3. Retention, search, and the parts Axon documents itself
Axon’s own product documentation is more useful than any critic’s summary, so here it is with the caveats attached.
- RetentionDefault plate retention is 30 days and is set by the agency. Axon: after that, “records are deleted and cannot be retrieved.” Denver chose 21 days. New Hampshire caps plate retention statewide at three minutes, which is the number to hold up when anyone calls 30 days modest.
- Search windowAxon’s search guide sets the maximum plate search range at one year, with a default query window of the prior 90 days, and notes that an agency’s retention policy may be shorter. So the year is a query ceiling, not a promise that a year of data exists. The platform is built to answer a question about a year of a person’s movements wherever an agency’s retention setting allows it.
- No warrantAxon’s own FAQ asks whether its search application requires a warrant number or other process limitation. The answer is a mandatory search-reason field, logged and auditable, which Axon says helps ensure the data is accessed only for appropriate reasons. That is a real control and it is not a warrant. It is the officer typing a sentence.
- Third-party accessAxon: “Any third party willing to sign Axon’s Partner API Terms of Use may use the Search API to support third-party integrations.”
- Agency sharingAxon says an agency can invite a specific partner agency to search its plate data on revocable terms, and that access is “governed, accountable, and never automatic.” That is a better default than what Apex’s own audit found under Flock, where roughly 3,000 outside organisations queried these cameras every month. It is still a setting, not a law.
- The off switchAxon documents that “ALPR is functioning whenever Fleet 3 is powered on. Even if Fleet Dashboard is not running or the MDT is off, ALPR will function.” It cannot be paused from inside the car and it does not follow whether the officer’s screen is on. It can be switched off, by an administrator removing a vehicle’s ALPR licence or ending the subscription. Both of those are true and both belong in the same sentence.
On August 17, 2026, a Seattle group touring the city’s Real Time Crime Center raised that always-on documentation, where SPD’s plate reading is supposed to be paused under state law. One advocate, software engineer Phil Mocek, said he does not believe the systems were actually turned off. That is his belief, not a record, and SPD has published nothing either way. What is documented is Axon’s design.
4. Axon’s own ethics board resigned over drones
Axon built an AI Ethics Board and staffed it with outside academics, civil liberties lawyers and community advocates. In June 2022, nine of the twelve members resigned at once.
The trigger was Axon’s announcement that it would develop Taser-equipped drones, pre-position them inside schools and other likely targets of mass shootings, and surround those targets with cameras streaming in real time. Axon had floated the idea to the board more than a year earlier. The board studied it and voted 8 to 4 to recommend against proceeding with even a limited pilot. Axon announced the program regardless.
From the resignation statement, June 6, 2022
“After several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the values that we have tried to instill.”
The signatories included Ryan Calo, Danielle Citron, Barry Friedman, Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Miles Brundage, Rebekah Delsol, Wael Abd-Almageed, Chris Harris and Mecole McBride. Axon paused the specific school drone project after the resignations. The board itself did not come back.
Why this matters on September 24: the item in front of the committee is Axon drone software. The people Axon hired to advise it on the ethics of Axon drones quit over Axon drones, after voting against a pilot. That is not an outside critic’s opinion. That is the company’s own governance structure failing in public and then not being replaced.
5. The FTC called Axon’s last acquisition a monopoly, and never got a ruling
In 2018 Axon bought VieVu, at the time its main competitor for body camera contracts with large metropolitan police departments. The Federal Trade Commission challenged the deal in a complaint approved by all five commissioners, saying it effectively created a monopoly and harmed both police departments and the communities that fund them.
Axon fought the FTC on constitutional and procedural grounds rather than on the antitrust question, and won unanimously at the Supreme Court in 2023 on the narrow issue of where such challenges may be heard. In October 2023 the FTC dismissed its complaint, with no consent decree and no conditions, rather than restart a five-year-old merger fight.
Be precise about this one
Axon was not found to have violated antitrust law, and it is fair for Axon to say the case was dropped. It is equally fair to say the case was never decided on the merits, and that the agency’s own stated finding of an effective monopoly was never withdrawn. What matters for a purchasing decision is the market condition, not the litigation outcome: when a town buys cameras, evidence storage, drone software, records software and now emergency call handling from one vendor, there is no second bidder to discipline the price at renewal.
6. Axon’s AI wrote police reports and deleted the evidence of what it wrote
Draft One is Axon’s product that generates a police report narrative from body camera audio. Until December 2025, when an officer exported the finished report, Draft One erased the original AI-generated draft. Nothing remained to show which sentences came from the machine and which came from the officer. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, reviewing public records, described the design as built to defeat audit.
Prosecutors reached the same place from the other direction. The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Washington told law enforcement agencies it would not accept reports written with AI assistance, citing hallucinations: wrong witness names, wrong officer names, and officers placed at scenes when they had only been on the radio. A prosecutor there described it as the kind of error that destroys an officer’s credibility on the stand. In July 2026 Forbes reported public records showing Draft One reports getting facts wrong. Axon changed the product in December 2025 so agencies can retain the unedited AI narrative.
Why this matters on September 24: the committee is reviewing an interview room recording system from the same vendor and the same evidence platform. The question to ask is whether the Apex agreement includes, permits or bundles AI report generation, and whether the District Attorney has been consulted. Nobody has asked this in public.
7. Axon just bought the 911 call layer
On February 18, 2026, Axon completed its acquisition of Carbyne, an emergency call handling and dispatch intelligence company, at a base price of $625 million. Axon had taken a roughly 11 percent stake in a funding round the previous summer, so its incremental cash outlay was about $550 million.
Read what that means as a stack. Axon already sells Apex the body cameras, the evidence cloud, the Taser platform, the drone software now in front of the committee, and the interview room system. Carbyne adds the call that starts the incident: caller location, call audio, live video from a caller’s phone, and the dispatch record. One vendor, from the 911 ring to the courtroom exhibit.
Apex has never evaluated that. The CN4 amendment was written before the acquisition closed, and no public document in this town discusses whether Axon’s ownership of the emergency call layer touches Apex 911 data, now or through any future module. That is a question for September 24, and it is a fair one regardless of anyone’s view on cameras.
8. Where Axon’s growth is coming from
$807.3M
Q1 2026 revenue, up 34 percent year over year, an Axon record
$220M
Five-year Taser contract ICE solicited in February 2026, for about 17,800 units, up from roughly 4,300 in the field
$2.5M
Axon’s federal lobbying spend last year, its highest annual total
Apex residents have spent this year asking who else can reach data collected in this town. That question does not stop at Flock. When a town signs a four-year agreement with a vendor whose fastest-growing customer is federal immigration enforcement, the sharing terms, the data residency and the termination rights are the parts of the contract that matter, and they are the parts nobody reads out loud at a committee meeting.
No ICE contract has been awarded, and this is a solicitation, not a signed deal. Apex’s agreement with Axon is separate from Axon’s federal business, and nothing here says Apex data goes to ICE. The point is narrower: this is the vendor’s direction of travel, and it is relevant to how long a term Apex should sign.
9. Ownership, money, and the part that needs stating carefully
Two documented facts sit at the edge of this story. Both are real. Both get exaggerated online, so here they are in the narrowest form the records support, with what they do not show stated plainly.
Fact one · Carbyne, 2015
Jeffrey Epstein quietly helped fund the company Axon bought this year
In March 2015, Epstein moved $1 million into a holding partnership controlled by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, then chairman of a company called Reporty Homeland Security. That partnership bought shares in the company, which was valued at about $4.5 million at the time and renamed itself Carbyne in 2018. Nicole Junkermann added $500,000 through the same vehicle. Per a document in the Justice Department files, Epstein’s own attorney wrote to him: “I thought we did not want your name associated with this investment.” Epstein’s name does not appear on the term sheets. He died in 2019. Barak announced he was unwinding the partnership that year and left Carbyne’s board in April 2020.
Carbyne’s chief executive says he was unaware of the investment at the time and that Epstein’s estate did not hold company stock. Barak’s attorney disputes the characterisation of the arrangement as secret, saying the partnership was one of several limited partners with no management role and a contractual right to confidentiality.
What this is not
There is no documented connection between Axon Enterprise and Jeffrey Epstein. None. Epstein money did not fund Axon, and Axon’s filings and earnings calls do not mention him. Epstein did not found or own Carbyne. He was an early undisclosed investor in a predecessor company eleven years before Axon bought it and nearly seven years before his death was followed by Barak’s exit. Anyone who tells you Apex is buying from an Epstein company is wrong, and we are not going to say it.
Fact two · Federal disclosure, 2026
The President’s disclosed portfolio bought Axon two weeks before ICE moved on Tasers
Donald Trump’s periodic transaction report filed with the Office of Government Ethics on May 14, 2026 lists a purchase of between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 of Axon Enterprise common stock dated February 10, 2026. Fourteen days later, ICE posted the $220 million Taser solicitation. The same filing also lists three Axon sales in the same quarter, including one of $50,001 to $100,000 on March 18.
What this is not
The White House says the President’s assets sit in a trust managed by his children, with third-party institutions holding sole authority over investment decisions and trades executed through automated processes. The filing is a flat list of more than 3,600 transactions with no account attribution, so it does not show who chose this trade. No charges have been filed, no contract has been awarded, and no reporting establishes that anyone knew about anything. We are not alleging insider trading. We are noting that the vendor Apex is being asked to commit to until 2030 now sits at an intersection of federal enforcement money and disclosed political holdings, and that a town signing a four-year deal is entitled to notice that.
Why this section is last and not first. This site wins arguments by only claiming what records prove, and the Apex audit findings are the strongest thing on it. The Epstein and Trump material is true and documented, and it is also the material a hostile reader will use to dismiss everything else. So it sits here, stated narrowly, with the limits attached. If you are quoting this page at a Council meeting, quote sections one through eight.
What to ask the Public Safety Committee
- DronesIs the DroneSense software in this amendment part of the product line Axon’s ethics board resigned over, and does the agreement permit Taser-equipped or otherwise weaponized drone integration at any point in the term?
- AI reportsDoes the Apex agreement include, permit or bundle Draft One or any AI-generated report narrative, and has the District Attorney been asked?
- 911 dataDoes Axon’s Carbyne acquisition reach Apex 911 call audio, caller location or dispatch records, now or under any future module?
- SharingWhat are the data sharing defaults across the Axon stack, who can query them from outside Apex, and can the Town audit that independently?
- TermWhy four years, through June 30, 2030, for technology this unsettled? What are the termination rights and the price escalators?
- Vendor swapIf the committee considers moving to a different ALPR provider, will it publish a written comparison first, including what happened in Longmont, Denver and Syracuse, where Flock was replaced by Axon and the plate reading continued?
- CompetitionWas this sole sourced? If Axon supplies cameras, cloud, Tasers, drones, interview rooms and now 911, what is the Town’s leverage at renewal?
Public Safety Committee
Thursday, September 24 · 8:30 AM
Apex Town Hall · The next regular Council meeting, with public comment, is Tuesday, September 22 at 6:00 PM
Send these questions to Council
Pre-written and sourced. Personalise before sending.
Sources
- Vendor swap after Flock cancellations: Sanya Mansoor, “Their cities dropped Flock surveillance cameras. They’re still being watched,” The Guardian, August 20, 2026. Source of the seven municipalities in five states, the Longmont, Denver and Syracuse accounts, the 21-day Denver retention, the Chad Marlow and Andrew Ferguson quotes, Josh Isner’s February earnings call remark, the Longmont assistant chief’s comparison of Flock and Axon sharing policies, and the camera removal failures in Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio. The Guardian reports that neither Axon nor Flock provided comment by press time.
- Axon ALPR product line and volumes: Axon press release, “Axon Announces New Fixed ALPR Camera Solutions and Next-Gen AI Advancements,” April 22, 2025, and the Police1 republication of the same text, which is labelled a press release and sponsored by Axon. The 8.1 billion figure is stated by Axon as a cumulative total. The arrest and recovery figures are Axon’s and are described as covering the prior year. None of these figures has been independently audited.
- Axon product documentation: Axon’s Fleet 3 ALPR FAQ and administration pages for the 30-day default retention, the per-vehicle ALPR licence control, the always-on behaviour and the 90 percent accuracy claim; Axon’s “Search in Axon Evidence” guide, last modified June 8, 2026, for the one-year maximum search range and the 90-day default window; Axon’s Fusus, Community Connect, Outpost, Lightpost, Retail Crime Hub and Skydio partner pages for the integration descriptions.
- Seattle Real Time Crime Center tour: Carolyn Bick, “A slippery slope: Advocates tour Real-Time Crime Center,” Northwest Asian Weekly, August 18, 2026, covering the August 17 tour by Community Not Cameras. Phil Mocek’s statement that he does not believe the systems were turned off is presented in that article as his belief.
- Fusus and Dedrone acquisitions: Axon’s February 1, 2024 announcement of the completed Fusus acquisition and its April 30, 2024 agreement to acquire Dedrone, with the consideration figures as reported in Axon’s SEC filings. Both were step acquisitions on top of stakes Axon already held.
- Retention benchmarks: ACLU and NYCLU positions as reported by the Guardian, including the New Hampshire three-minute statutory cap and the position that warrant requirements plus strict retention limits are the strongest available guardrails short of not deploying the technology.
- Ethics board resignations: Statement of Resigning Axon AI Ethics Board Members, June 6, 2022, published by the Policing Project at NYU School of Law. Contemporaneous coverage in TechCrunch, The Register and Security Magazine. The 8 to 4 vote against a pilot and the year-long prior consultation are described in the resignation statement itself.
- FTC and VieVu: FTC administrative complaint In the Matter of Axon Enterprise, Inc. and Safariland, LLC, docket 1810162; the FTC’s October 6, 2023 dismissal order and Axon’s own October 9, 2023 investor release; Axon Enterprise, Inc. v. FTC, 598 U.S. 175 (2023).
- Draft One: Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Axon’s Draft One Is Designed to Defy Transparency,” July 2025, and its December 2025 year in review; CNN Business, August 2025; Forbes, July 2026, on public records showing factual errors; King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office guidance to law enforcement agencies. Axon’s December 2025 change allowing retention of the original narrative is Axon’s own.
- Carbyne acquisition: Axon investor release, November 4, 2025, announcing a definitive agreement valuing Carbyne at $625 million; Axon Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, Note 14, stating the February 18, 2026 close, approximately $549.7 million cash paid for the remaining 89.3 percent, and the prior 10.7 percent stake; Axon FY2025 Form 10-K, Note 20, describing it as a step acquisition.
- Epstein and Carbyne: Haaretz, July 11, 2019, which broke the Barak partnership; Forbes, February 10, 2026, based on Justice Department files, including the March 2015 $1 million transfer through Barak’s holding partnership, the Junkermann $500,000, the $4.5 million valuation and the attorney email; Miami Herald, March 19, 2026, confirming the Southern Trust Company origin of the funds and reporting that Axon’s SEC filings and earnings calls do not mention Epstein. Carbyne’s CEO statement and Barak’s attorney’s response are quoted in that reporting. Barak’s April 2020 board departure is from Carbyne’s own announcement.
- Federal disclosure: Office of Government Ethics Form 278-T periodic transaction report for Donald J. Trump, filed May 14, 2026. Reporting by Sludge and NOTUS, May 14, 2026, and CNBC, June 29, 2026. The Trump Organization and White House statements about discretionary accounts and the family trust are quoted in that reporting.
- ICE solicitation and Axon financials: NOTUS, on the $220 million five-year Taser solicitation for roughly 17,800 units against about 4,300 currently fielded; Axon’s reported revenue of $796.7 million in Q4 2025 and $807.3 million in Q1 2026; lobbying totals as reported by CNBC.
- What we could not verify: Axon did not respond to Forbes or the Miami Herald on the Epstein question, and we have not independently confirmed whether Axon knew of the 2015 investment before buying Carbyne. We have not seen the Apex Axon agreement’s data sharing schedule, which is why it is a question above rather than a claim here.