Every update on the Apex Flock contract and the police drone program. Each one has its own link. Use the Copy link button to send someone straight to it. To get new ones automatically, add our RSS feed to any feed reader, or paste it into any free RSS to email service to get them in your inbox.
Surry for Privacy joins the coalition. They are residents in Surry County working to end the Sheriff’s Flock program and remove the county-operated cameras, and they have put the county’s own purchase records, invoices and use policy online. Sign their petition. See the coalition →
Council approved the Axon contract 4 to 1, with Shane Reese the lone no. It covers DroneSense drone software and an interview room camera system, and a quote sent the same day now runs it five years from November 1. Mayor Pro Tem Mahaffey asked whether APD’s drone policy exists and is public. The town attorney said “some are public, some are not,” and Council voted without it. Ed Gray argued against concerns nobody raised and claimed a “critical gap” nobody showed. On Flock, the Public Safety Committee made no recommendation and returns December 3. Read the full breakdown →
On October 1, the same day the Apex committee met and recommended nothing, Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma granted a motion to suppress in United States v. Kyle and threw out all the evidence in a federal drug prosecution. A sheriff’s deputy had run a license plate through Flock without a warrant and pulled back more than fifty records of where that car had been across multiple states over a month. The court held that the search “intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” and that everything after it was fruit of the poisonous tree.
The facts track Apex uncomfortably closely. The deputy had 30 days of history across many states, and Apex is contracted at exactly 30 days. The system asked him for a reason and he typed “traffic violation” and “investigation” when all he knew was that the plate was from California, which is what a logged reason field is worth as a safeguard. The remedy was suppression, so this is a public safety argument too.
The limits matter and we set them out in full: district court, binds this case only, no precedential weight in North Carolina, appealable, and other courts have gone the other way. The ruling, the quotes and the honest caveats →
The committee told the room on October 1 that it would return to the ALPR item on December 3. The contract ends January 31. That leaves 59 days for a recommendation, a Council agenda, a public reading and a vote, with Christmas inside it. The Town’s adopted 2026 schedule has only one regular Council meeting in December: Thursday, December 17, two weeks after the recommendation. (Corrected October 18. We first said December 8, from the usual 2nd and 4th Tuesday pattern. December is the exception.)
Timing decides which outcomes stay reachable. Renewing needs one agenda item. Discontinuation needs a plan for seven installed cameras, the draft Year 2 purchase order, and an ordinance, and none of that gets drafted, reviewed and voted in eight weeks unless somebody writes it down now. The timeline, and the three calendar asks →
Note on the date: ABC11 reported November 5. That is not what the committee said in the room, and we were there. Nothing is posted on the Town calendar yet either way.
Residents packed a third-floor training room on October 1, by ABC11’s account. The published agenda listed the ALPR item as “discussion only,” while the Axon drone item on the same agenda was flagged for a committee recommendation. No recommendation came out on either. Mayor Gilbert told reporters the committee is looking for a middle ground between public safety and privacy, and that “we’re not there yet.” Chief Johansen was tasked with coming back with clearer answers on where Apex licence plate data goes and who has access to it.
We will say the obvious thing about that last item. Residents answered it in August from the Department’s own Network Audit: 9,700 searches by federal accounts reaching Apex cameras between January and April, 1,070 outside organisations with access in April, 808 of them out of state. The Chief is being asked in month twenty to establish something his own files already record. What happened, and what December 3 decides →
Chief Johansen told the committee that vehicle thefts are down 60% since the cameras arrived, with no dates, no counts and no comparison period given. We pulled Apex’s own submissions to the FBI Crime Data Explorer, month by month back to 2016, and did the same for nine neighbouring agencies.
The decline is real and we say so. What has no support is the attribution. Apex’s largest ever drop in vehicle theft came before the cameras existed, 54 in 2023 to 29 in 2024. Then 2025, the first camera year, rose to 41. The 60% measures from December 2025 and excludes that rise, and moving the window one month drops the figure to 50%. Meanwhile Wake Forest fell 59% with 25 cameras live since 2023, Cary fell 33% running its own plate readers, Knightdale fell 10% with more cameras than Apex, and North Carolina fell 22.6%. Read the full rebuttal, with both charts and every source →
ApexCameras.tech joins the coalition. They are a resident group here in Apex, and on September 2 they published Ten Cameras, One Decision, an evidence briefing written to the Mayor and Council ahead of the January contract decision. Two groups, two documents, and we keep them separate so either set of numbers can be checked against the other. See the coalition →
Mayor Jacques K. Gilbert spoke with DeFlock Apex and confirmed that the Public Safety Committee meeting on the Flock contract will be held Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 3:00 PM. The meeting had previously been indicated for September 24. We have updated every reference on this site to the new date.
As of this update the meeting still does not appear on the Town calendar or on the Town’s Council Committees page, which is where the Town says notice for each committee meeting is provided. The chair has now given the date and time to a resident. The public notice has not followed. G.S. 143-318.12(e) requires online notice of a meeting like this, and there is time to post it.
The committee is chaired by Mayor Gilbert with Council Member Ed Gray. Its charge covers the Flock contract, ALPR technology generally, and the Axon agreement amendment.
Five weeks after our July 12 records request, the Town produced the document it had never released: APD’s Flock Network Audit, which logs every search by an outside agency that reaches Apex cameras. Nine monthly files, roughly 6.6 million rows, 1.4 GB.
Between January 2 and April 1, 2026 two federal accounts appear in it: US Postal Inspection Service, 9,683 searches, and Wright Patterson Air Force Base, 17. Median reach 2,882 networks per search. These are the two agencies the Chief called “2 errant Federal shares caught/cleared in audit.” On January 29, the day he told Council “we do not share with federal entities, hard stop,” federal accounts ran 166 searches that reached Apex cameras. In the 29 days up to that statement, 2,604. The last federal search was April 1 at 11:35 a.m. UTC.
Three more findings from the same production. The public transparency portal the Chief pointed Council to shows 144 searches for the 30 days ending August 17; APD’s own Organization Audit shows 868 for the identical window. Council was told the network is “about 1,000 police agencies”; the audits show 3,587 distinct outside organizations actually queried Apex cameras in January through March, and roughly 3,000 every month since. And about 3,300 searches reaching Apex cameras since January carry immigration reasons, including 196 between August 1 and 18, run by outside agencies rather than by Apex officers.
What the record does not show, and we will not claim: which specific plates were returned to those federal accounts. A Network Audit entry establishes that a query included Apex cameras. Three of the Chief’s six “zero” slides also hold up under his own files, and we say so plainly on the evidence page. The contract terms are finally readable too: a 24-month term ending January 31, 2027, no automatic renewal, no notice deadline, and a draft Year 2 purchase order for $35,000. The 9,700 federal searches, as a CSV →
Apex’s search record shows officers querying the plate network for federal matters with no federal sharing relationship in place. October 21, 2025: “R. wanted by HSI for trafficking fentanyl,” reaching 6,571 networks and 94,700 cameras. September 19 and 21, 2025: four searches reading “Charles H. wanted for Federal Warrant.” HSI is a component of ICE. Fentanyl trafficking is a criminal matter, so this is not immigration enforcement, and it does not contradict APD’s claim of zero immigration searches. It contradicts the June 9 slide that reads “We CHOOSE not to share our images/data with federal LE/agencies.” A federal agency never needed a share. It needed an officer to run a plate. See the full search record →
On August 13 Flock announced a shorter default retention period, mandatory case codes, and a wider audit tool rollout. Every one of those is a setting a company or a police chief can reverse. None of it is binding on Apex, and Flock explicitly grandfathers existing customers at their current retention period, which here is 30 days. Apex PD’s own search record shows at least 4,506 searches in twelve months, and the reason field Flock now says it will require was already being filled in, by officers whose entries nobody outside the department ever checked. Read the full line-by-line rebuttal →
Residents filled the Council chamber on August 11 and the town opened overflow seating on the third floor. Eight residents spoke against surveillance technology. One spoke in favor. Before public forum began, Council pulled item CN4 off the consent agenda and referred it to the Public Safety Committee. CBS 17 covered the meeting, and Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus spoke during public forum. Read the recap →
Item CN4 on tomorrow night's Council agenda adds a police drone program and an interview room camera system to the town's Axon contract, and extends that contract to June 30, 2030. It sits on the consent agenda, which passes in one motion with no discussion unless a Council member asks for it to be pulled. Apex has no drone ordinance, no published use policy, and no retention rule. We have not seen the contract, so the dollar amount, drone count, and program scope are unknown the night before the vote. That is the problem. Read the full breakdown →
Correction, August 12: CN4 added Axon Air DroneSense software and an interview room system for a drone capability APD already has. It was not a purchase of aircraft. The four-year term, the missing dollar figure, and the absence of any drone ordinance stand. Corrected page.
DeFlock Raleigh is live, and the pattern we documented in Apex turns out to be the pattern in the state capital. Raleigh PD has operated at least 32 Flock cameras since 2022, paid for by a federal grant that never required a Council vote. On November 1, 2022 the Chief told Council about the program under an agenda item titled “Comments Made.” No motion. No vote. Not one question asked. A single RPD search reached more than 76,000 devices across 6,200 networks. “ICE” is logged as the stated reason for at least two searches, even though RPD’s governing directive never mentions immigration at all. Their annual audit goes to the Chief of Police and nobody else. Two towns, one vendor, the same playbook: install first, tell Council later, call the vendor’s settings a policy. Apex is not an isolated case, and neither is Raleigh. See the coalition →
We pulled the FBI’s numbers for Apex back to 2011. As the town nearly doubled in size, the crime rate fell about 40 percent. Apex bought its first Flock cameras in 2023, at the lowest crime levels the town has ever recorded. Whatever made Apex safe, it was not the cameras. The next council meeting is Tuesday, August 11, and no ALPR vote is scheduled, which is exactly why the record matters now. See the chart →
DeFlock Apex is now allied with DeFlockILM, the resident campaign fighting Flock in Wilmington and New Hanover County, and with the national DeFlock network. Separate local fights are becoming one statewide push to remove Flock and ban ALPR mass surveillance. Chatham County and Pittsboro have already ended their contracts; campaigns from the Triangle to the coast are now comparing public records and coordinating. See who we stand with →
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that geofence warrants are a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. Justice Kagan, writing for the majority: individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone location records, even when held by a third party, even for a limited time. The ruling extends Carpenter's erosion of the third-party doctrine to location data disclosed voluntarily. Combined with the January 2026 Norfolk ruling, the legal trajectory for warrantless, consent-free ALPR network participation is increasingly difficult to defend. The Court remanded for a "reasonableness" analysis, so the search may still be upheld on those facts, but the constitutional principle is now settled: location data from a third-party tech company is protected. SCOTUSblog →
Apex Police posted a single ALPR arrest on Facebook to justify the entire surveillance program. Three people with property crime warrants were picked up near NC 55. That is one anecdote, not evidence. Every peer-reviewed study that has tested the claim that ALPR reduces crime found no significant reduction. The comment section reversed: opposition now outnumbers support on APD's own page. APD's pinned disclaimer about "bots and inauthentic accounts" was widely mocked. Multiple commenters independently called the post AI-written or propaganda. APD compared ALPR to your smartphone to deflect from the fact that a government agency with arrest power is tracking residents without a warrant. Facebook post · Read the peer-reviewed evidence →
DeFlock Apex meets with the Police Chief and Town Manager to discuss surveillance policy, guardrails, and the path forward.
Chief Johansen defended ALPR technology at length but did not defend Flock, telling Council he has no attachment to the vendor and would research alternatives. Several Council members separated the technology from the vendor and voiced specific concerns about Flock. Council voted unanimously to refer ALPR policy and program updates to the Public Safety Committee, the first step in a formal review tied to the contract decision ahead. The Town also confirmed it has not signed the pending contract for 10 additional cameras. Watch the full meeting →
APD presents to Town Council. Key disclosures: the two March federal agencies were the US Postal Inspector's Office and the USAFB Police Department, called "errant" shares "caught/cleared in audit." Federal agencies are now automatically excluded by Flock's default settings. APD claims 0 federal agencies currently, 0 searches for immigration or abortion enforcement, and 0 policy violations. What was not disclosed: when federal access began, who approved it, what those agencies queried. The presentation also claims ALPR is "already reducing crime" with no trend data, before/after comparison, or independent evidence. Read our full analysis →
Mayor Jacques K. Gilbert called DeFlock Apex and acknowledged resident concerns. In a written statement, he said he supports ALPR as a law enforcement tool (citing 29 years as a police officer), wants multi-layered safeguards and accountability through policy, and plans to meet with Chief Johansen to gather more information. He has not publicly stated a position on Flock, but is aware of the problems with the system. See the Mayor's statement →
The FBI has published an RFP seeking $36 million for nationwide access to license plate reader data, with Flock named as one of the few vendors that could fulfill the contract. The system would cover all 50 states with near real-time alerts. The RFP is for the FBI's Directorate of Intelligence. Ars Technica · 404 Media
DeFlock Apex will meet with the Town Manager and the Police Chief to discuss policy and transparency portals.
A California class action lawsuit alleges Home Depot uses Flock Safety cameras in its parking lots to capture every vehicle’s license plate, make, model, and location, feeding the data into a searchable database accessible to law enforcement nationwide. The complaint names Flock directly and details incidents where Flock secretly re-enabled “nationwide” sharing settings without authorization. Apex PD already has a signed access agreement for Lowe’s Flock cameras (July 2024), the identical retail-to-law-enforcement pipeline now facing litigation. ClassAction.org · Read complaint →
Public records dump reveals 994 Flock sharing relationships in March (2 federal), growing to 1,070 in April (federal removed). Records also show private-camera sharing and outside hot-list sharing. Full findings below.
DeFlock Apex launches.
Pittsboro Commissioners vote to end Flock. July 1 removal deadline.
Chatham County ends Flock contract. First Triangle municipality to terminate.
Apex Police Chief presents Flock to Council. System live ~90 days, 10 cameras.