Eight residents spoke against surveillance technology. One spoke in favor. Before public forum even began, the town pulled a four-year Axon contract amendment off the consent agenda and sent it to the Public Safety Committee. That is where Apex actually stands.
Last night the floor seats in the Council chamber filled, and the town opened overflow seating on the third floor. A few weeks ago this was a handful of neighbors and a records request. Last night it was a room the building could not hold.
Before public forum even began, the town pulled Consent Agenda item CN4 and referred it to the Public Safety Committee. Consent items pass in a single bundled vote with no discussion. This one was headed for exactly that. It didn’t happen.
Be precise about this, because the wording matters and because we got part of it wrong before the meeting. Here is the motion as it appeared in the agenda packet: approve the First Amendment to the Master Services and Purchasing Agreement between Axon Enterprise, Inc. and the Town of Apex, effective through June 30, 2030, “to expand the Apex Police Department’s technology platform by adding Axon Air DroneSense software and an Axon Interview Room System.”
So this was not a vote to buy drones. Apex already has the aircraft. CN4 was the software layer, and the software layer is the part that turns aircraft into a program. DroneSense is what streams live video to dispatch, lets a drone be flown remotely from a browser, manages a fleet, logs flights, and routes the footage into Axon’s evidence cloud alongside body camera video. A drone in a closet is equipment. A drone plus this software is a surveillance program.
Two things about how the item was presented. The motion carried no dollar amount on its face. Two items earlier on the same consent agenda, a $1,200 body scan software subscription for the police wellness program listed its cost right there in the motion text. And the item quietly raises the question nobody has answered in public: Apex is already flying drones. Under what ordinance?
Residents spoke one after another, and the arguments were substantive.
One speaker laid out the data-security problem: Apex has already suffered a data breach, the town’s own sign-up system in the room that night was exposing information, and this is the same government asking us to trust it with millions of license plate scans. Another walked through how our Flock network shares data with more than a thousand agencies across the country, and how federal access keeps happening through back channels even after residents were told it wouldn’t. Another made the financial case, that these vendors embed themselves in a police department, make themselves feel indispensable, then raise prices year after year while money that could fund parks and roads goes to them. Another explained how this data feeds predictive-policing software that recycles past bias into future decisions. And one took apart the old line, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” better than I’ve heard it done, that we all hold information back to protect the people we love, and that concentrating everyone’s movements in one place is the danger, not the safeguard.
None of this is a trade against safety. Apex crime fell about 40 percent between 2011 and 2023 while the town nearly doubled in population, and all of that happened before the first cameras went up. The chart and the FBI source data are here: Apex got safe before the cameras.
ABC and CBS covered the meeting. Gamers Nexus, one of the most respected independent tech-investigation outlets on the internet, sent Steve Burke, who spoke during public forum and broke down the security failures in plain terms. I sat down with Steve for an interview after the meeting. Having someone with that depth of technical credibility in the room, as a neighbor, mattered.
The cameras are not gone. They are paused, and the policy question now sits in a committee that publishes no agenda and no minutes. One item came off the consent agenda. That is one night.
But the direction is clear. The first meeting on this drew a few speakers. Last night the town needed a second room. Eight to one is not a close vote, and Council heard all of it in public, on the record. The way we keep winning is the way we won last night. We show up. We speak for ourselves. We do not delegate it to someone else.
If you were there, thank you. If you weren’t, the next meeting is your chance.
Public forum is open to any resident. Three minutes, no sign-up required in advance, no expertise needed. Speak for yourself.