The cameras in Apex, and what they become next

What Apex actually bought

This comes straight off the Order Form in the Flock Safety master agreement obtained by public records request. Not a summary, the line items.

APD told Council on June 9 that 7 cameras are installed, that they are fixed and cannot be remotely rotated, that they are aimed into traffic lanes to photograph the rear of passing vehicles, and that the department does not disclose their locations. The department also stated the system averages about 60,000 plate reads per day.

What one unit is, physically

Inside the housing

Flock does not publish a component list. An independent teardown by the Center for Human Rights and Privacy identified these parts in a Falcon unit. Their unit was an older revision, so treat this as the family of components rather than a guarantee of what is on a 2025 pole in Apex.

What it captures, per vehicle

Each trigger produces a set of still images and a structured record. From APD's presentation and Flock's own product description, one pass of one camera yields:

• The license plate number, read on the device
• Images of the rear of the vehicle
• Date, time, and which camera saw it, which gives location and direction of travel
• Vehicle attributes derived from the image: body type, make, colour, and distinguishing features such as roof racks, damage, or bumper stickers. Flock markets this as a vehicle fingerprint, and it is how the system tracks a car with no plate or a swapped plate.

APD says the cameras do not photograph occupants and cannot be searched by person, name or address. Both statements are consistent with what the product does. The camera is aimed at the back of the car.

What the software adds, and what Apex operators actually search

Hardware is the boring half. The searching is where the system becomes a surveillance tool, and Apex bought the paid add-on that widens it.

We do not have to speculate about how it is used here. APD's own Organization Audit, produced in August 2026, records 2,649 searches by Apex operators between June 1 and August 17, and it includes the filter each operator applied. Real examples from that file:

• Sedan, Nissan, white
• Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, Hatchback, Wagon, silver_grey
• Semi_Truck, white
• north_carolina, applied to 1,208 searches
• michigan, virginia

Two things follow. Attribute search is not a brochure feature here, it is in routine use: an operator can ask the network for every white Nissan sedan, no plate required. And the state filters show searches deliberately scoped to other states, which is a choice about reach, not a default.

The same file shows the search types: 1,846 lookups, 620 searches, and 183 run from the mobile app. The median search reached 2,298 networks. The largest reached 6,586.

Where a read goes after your car passes

What Flock keeps, and what Apex cannot see

Apex sets a 30-day retention window. Residents have been told that number as though it describes the life of the data. It does not. It describes how long Apex can look. Flock's own legal documents describe a different arrangement, and they are worth quoting exactly.

The licence Apex signed is perpetual and irrevocable

Read the two clocks side by side. Apex's access to its own footage ends after 30 days, and Flock's own summary confirms the customer can reach the data only “during the applicable Retention Period.” The rights Apex handed Flock are perpetual and irrevocable. Those are not the same clock, and only one of them was presented to Council.

Flock says outright that it keeps images to train its systems

So the answer to “does Flock keep pictures of our cars” is yes, by their own written policy. Apex PD averages about 60,000 reads a day. One percent of that is 600 images a day, roughly 219,000 a year from this town alone, feeding a private company's models. That is arithmetic on Flock's own stated ceiling, not a count of Apex images, and Flock says the images are stripped of identifying data first. It is still your car, photographed on your street, retained and used by a vendor for a purpose no resident was asked about and no council voted on.

Flock's own definition of what it holds includes audio and video

The Data Ownership page defines Customer Data, the thing that perpetual licence covers, as including:

• “Images, audio, and video captured by Flock hardware on your behalf”
• “All content you or your authorized users enter into the web interface”
• “Any data provided to Flock by third parties at your direction”

That third line matters more than it looks. Search reasons, case numbers, custom hot lists, anything an Apex officer types, and anything Apex's other systems hand over, all sit inside the same perpetual licence as the photographs.

And Flock's default retention is 7 days. Apex chose 30.

From the same LPR policy: “LPR data is hard deleted on a rolling 7-day basis by default; this may be increased or decreased on a case-by-case basis if a different schedule is required by a customer's law or policy.” The Chief has repeatedly presented 30 days as restraint, a third of what state law allows. Against the vendor's default it is more than four times as long. Apex did not accept a limit here. It asked for more than the standard.

Two Flock policies, live today, that contradict each other

This is not our inference. These are two documents on Flock's website right now.

A good faith belief is Flock's own judgment. One page says Flock cannot act on its own judgment. The other reserves the right to. Both are current. A town that wants to know which one governs its residents' data has to ask, and Apex has not asked.

There is a third document to hold against the claim that “all sharing is off by default, and can only be initiated by you.” Apex's own Network Audit shows 9,700 searches by two federal accounts between January and April 2026, which the Chief later described as “errant” shares caught in an audit. Errant means nobody at APD believes they turned them on. Footnote4a reported in April that Flock restored direct FBI access after telling communities it had no federal contracts, and concluded: “Flock manages access to the network. Not the city. Not the PD.” Either sharing can only be switched on by the customer, or two federal agencies searched Apex cameras for three months without the customer switching anything on. Both cannot be true.

What the CEO says, next to what the company writes down

Garrett Langley, Flock's chief executive, sat for a sixteen-question interview with WDIV in Detroit on August 18, 2026. Read three of his answers against Flock's own legal documents.

On deletion, be careful, because the CEO is on record the other way

We have seen it claimed that Flock's chief executive admitted the company keeps data past the retention window. We have looked, and we cannot find him saying that. What he has said publicly, repeatedly and recently, is the opposite: that retention is the municipality's choice and that the data is deleted when the window closes. If you are going to argue with Flock, do not argue with a quote that does not exist. Argue with the three things the company has written down instead.

• Evidence Mode. Announced by Flock the same week as the retention cut. Data tied to a case can be moved into long-term storage, indefinitely. So the deletion clock has an official exception, switched on by the agency, and in North Carolina G.S. 20-183.32 caps preservation at 90 days without a search warrant or a sworn written request naming the camera, the plate, the dates and specific articulable facts. A case code in a drop-down is not that.
• The machine-learning carve-out. Flock's LPR Policy states plainly that it uses a fraction of LPR images, under one percent, for improving its services through machine learning. That is retained data, by their own admission, sitting outside the deletion narrative.
• The perpetual licence. Deletion is a policy. The licence in section 4.1 is a contract term, and it is irrevocable and perpetual. Policies can be revised by the company that wrote them. This one already was, by blog post, on August 13.

That is the argument that survives a hostile reading. “They secretly keep everything” does not, and the moment it is said out loud the department gets to spend the meeting correcting you instead of answering for 9,700 federal searches.

What it becomes next, and who decides

The important thing about this system is not what it does today. It is that what it does tomorrow is a purchasing decision and a settings change, and neither one requires a vote in this town. The original deployment never got one.

Read Flock's own product comparison, on Flock's own website, describing what separates it from competitors:

That is the sales pitch, and it is also the problem stated out loud. The capability set on the poles outside your neighbourhood is not fixed by anything Apex signed. It is updated remotely, continuously, by a company in Atlanta, at no additional cost and therefore with no new purchase order, no council agenda item, and no notice to you.

The catalogue Apex is one line item away from

Every item below is a current Flock product, sold on the same platform Apex already subscribes to. Flock packages the lot as a “Safe City Subscription”: “One contract. One invoice. Get cost-effective access to every Flock solution today.”

Flock's promises, against Flock's record

Flock's LPR page makes specific commitments. Two of them are worth holding up against documented events from this year.

This is the whole argument in one table. Every protection anyone has offered residents of this town, on retention, on federal exclusion, on facial recognition, on who is in the network, exists as a setting in a private company's product, changeable by that company or by a police chief, and never once put to a vote here.

How to recognise one

APD will not publish the locations, so residents have been mapping them. If you want to know what is on your route:

• Look for a small dark rectangular box on its own pole, usually 8 to 12 feet up, angled down toward one lane rather than at the road generally.
• There is almost always a small solar panel above or behind it, and no conduit running down the pole.
• They sit at entrances and exits to neighbourhoods and at main approaches into town. APD said placement is based on crime data and "key points of ingress and egress."
• Flock units carry a small maker's label. Other vendors sell similar-looking hardware, so a box on a pole is not automatically a Flock camera.

The DeFlock crowdsourced map plots reported ALPR locations nationwide, including around Apex, and Finding Flock and this spotting guide have photographs of installed units from several angles. If you photograph one in Apex, send it to contact@deflockapex.org and we will publish it here with credit. We would rather show you the actual poles in this town than a vendor's product shot.

Sources

• Apex's contract and line items: Flock Safety master services agreement and Order Form, and purchase orders, obtained by public records request. Posted on our documents page.
• Apex's search behaviour: APD Organization Audit, June 1 to August 17, 2026, produced August 2026.
• Outside and federal search volume: APD Flock Network Audits, January 1 to August 18, 2026. Extracts on our documents page.
• Camera count, aim, retention, reads per day: APD's June 9, 2026 presentation to Town Council.
• CEO statements: “We asked Flock CEO these 16 questions. Here’s what he said,” WDIV Local 4 Detroit, August 18, 2026, interview by Lauren Kostiuk.
• Flock’s contract language on data ownership, the perpetual licence, and sharing: Flock Safety, Data Ownership, last updated August 21, 2026, and Customer Terms and Conditions.
• Machine-learning retention, 7-day default deletion, disclosure on good-faith belief, privileged administrator access: Flock Safety, License Plate Reader Usage and Privacy Policy, last updated June 30, 2026.
• Product line and capabilities: Flock Safety, license plate readers and FlockOS.
• Component teardown: Center for Human Rights and Privacy, Dissection of a Flock Safety camera, by Mike Katz-Lacabe.
• Identification guides and photographs: Finding Flock, Spotting Flock Safety's Falcon cameras, DeFlock map.