Title: Interim Chief of Police, Asheville Police Department (Jacquelyn “Jackie” Stepp) In this role since: November 21, 2025 (named by the outgoing city manager on Chief Lamb’s last day; APD’s first female interim chief; Deputy Chief from October 2023, and an APD-only career since joining as a patrol officer in October 2005: sergeant 2012, lieutenant 2016, captain 2019) Current term ends: whenever the city manager names a permanent chief, expected “by the end of September” 2026; whether Stepp applied is unreported. The next chief will be Asheville’s fifth in eleven years. Next voter decision: never; the chief is hired by the unelected city manager, who answers to the council on the ballot Nov 3, 2026 · Election 2026
She made the case for the RTIC at five meetings
Stepp is the RTIC’s chief salesperson and its chief operator at once. She made the case at the March 2025 briefing, the July 2025 committee, the April 2026 vendor session, the May 7 briefing, and finally the May 12 vote, where she presented solo for roughly forty minutes. She has never been confirmed by any elected body for the role in which she did it. This page reconstructs that argument, because she made the case more fully than anyone else, and each claim can be checked against the record.
Her numbers contradict each other across meetings
Before the claim-by-claim, one pattern to hold. March 7, 2025, to council: APD has access to “over 177,000 cameras across the Eastern US… and we’ve had that access.” July 31, 2025, to the Public Safety Committee: the network is “connected to over 19,000 cameras across a 500 mile radius.” An order of magnitude apart, both hers, never reconciled. Same pattern on money: the April 28 breakdown was ~$400K video wall / $467,602 Fusus / ~$250K buildout; by May 12 the wall was “approximately $500,000” and the buildout “the remainder.” The city’s own staff report documented bundling savings of $46,948.25 over the full 7.5-year contract; her May 12 presentation claimed “projected savings of over 4 million.” When numbers this precise-sounding change by an order of magnitude between meetings, they aren’t measurements. They were never checked. (Their Claims vs The Record)
The May 12 argument, claim by claim
Everything below is from the city’s own recording (video, presentation 4:31:38–5:10:28), with the counter beside each claim.
1. The problem frame: fragmentation and staffing. “Critical information is often fragmented, delayed, or spread across multiple systems… We also face staffing constraints” (4:32:06). The record: the staffing argument is answered in full at “We’re short-staffed, this is a force multiplier”: the RTIC consumes the people budget (its own four-position staffing plan, $740K+/year vendor payments), generates unverified-alert work rather than doing patrol work, and the “force multiplier” has no measured product anywhere in the country.
2. The up-front denials. “There’s no facial recognition, no general monitoring, no unrestricted access to private cameras. There’s defined retention schedules and full audit logs” (4:33:18), governed, she added, under CALEA (4:33:32). The record: every item on that list is a policy choice or a vendor setting, not a capability limit: Policy 505 is revisable without a council vote, Axon owns the feature roadmap (it’s already testing face recognition on the same bodycams), and CALEA is a paid accreditation program, not an oversight body. The “full audit logs”? When a resident formally requested them, the city refused.
3. The alignment passage. “I assure you we are aligned… with the concerns around privacy, oversight, and preventing overreach… Public safety should not come at the expense of community values.” (4:34:01–4:34:33) The record: the night’s final public speaker quoted the sentence back at her (The People Who Showed Up); it cuts the other way. What alignment would look like in practice (released audits, an enforceable ordinance, an independent review) is precisely what has been declined at every opportunity.
4. The 2018 child. The presentation’s emotional anchor: a 12-year-old killed in a housing complex, dozens of witnesses, no leads, unsolved, and the claim that today’s cameras “would have had critical evidence that could have significantly advanced the case” (4:37:22–4:39:56). The record: this is a counterfactual no one can test, offered in place of evidence. The measured record on plate-reader networks: 2.5 billion scans, 99.5% of them of people suspected of nothing; no independent evaluation showing RTICs solve otherwise-unsolvable homicides; Atlanta’s clearance rate fell after its rollout. And the neighborhood in her story is a HACA housing complex, the most-watched ground in the county already, where the documented product of police-integrated cameras nationally is eviction enforcement, not closure for grieving families. Nine single-city case anecdotes followed (4:48:56–4:51:58): none independently checkable, none accompanied by the denominator (how many thousands of searches produced them).
5. The statistics from nowhere. “You see 5% violent crime solving rate, 12% improved solving property crime, and 11% improved overall clearance rate” (5:02:59): no source, no study named, and no such consensus literature exists. Then the Sheriff Miller citation: “Buncombe County sees 15% crime rate decrease in 2022… he said, [a reason] is a real-time intelligence center” (5:03:22): a 2022 crime drop credited to a center the cited article says launched around 2023, and a statistic the SBI’s own tables dismantle (countywide violent crime rose 12.7% that year). Then three out-of-state police chiefs’ testimonials (Dallas, Bakersfield, Montgomery; 5:04:03): vendors’ customers praising the vendor’s product, the exact evidence class the leaked Flock playbook tells chiefs to deploy.
6. The letters as borrowed authority. She read the DA’s letter (“I have been assured that this system cannot be used for that purpose”) and US Attorney Ferguson’s letter (dated the day of the vote) in full (4:53:19–5:02:43), capping it: “the people prosecuting the crimes, that’s the one sending the letters.” The Mayor then read AG Jeff Jackson’s letter, hedged in his own words: “Based on what APD has described.” The record: all three endorsements evaluate descriptions (assurances, briefings, characterizations) because the contract they’d need to evaluate did not exist. All three endorsements vouch for a contract that had not been written. None of them could have evaluated it.
7. The money case. Rising costs without consolidation, “a potential 20 to 30% cost increase due to inflation,” savings “of over 4 million over the term,” locked-in pricing (5:05:29–5:07:31). The record: the resident who spoke ninety minutes later submitted Axon’s own investor deck showing 124–126% net revenue retention (the same customers paying ~25% more every year, by corporate design), and Asheville’s own last renewal jumped 86% (Dahlstrom, 5:21:28). The staff report’s documented savings figure is $46,948. The “locked-in” contract includes, in her own phrasing, “futures”: unexplained, undefined, unpriced. (Follow the Money · What Axon Contracts Do)
8. The data-ownership claim. “Axon neither has access to the Fusus or to the system, or retains data. Actually, police department owns the information” (4:47:05). The record: Axon’s own Master Services Agreement names Axon an independent data controller of metadata and enrolls every customer by default in ACEIP, the program that uses customer content to build future Axon products; Flock’s contract, read into the record on April 28, grants an “irrevocable, worldwide license.” Security consultant Sarah Kent laid the MSPA’s actual terms out at the podium that same night (5:27:53), directly contradicting the claim. No staff member responded; see item 10.
9. The oversight promises. Community town halls, listening sessions “prior to any policies being finalized,” standing tours, and the closer: “trust will not be assumed. It will be demonstrated” (5:09:08–5:10:28). The record: this page will track every one. Current score: the promised transparency dashboards 404; the audit records were refused; the Public Safety Committee has never received a report; the “listening sessions” have no announced dates. She set the standard herself. This page tracks whether she meets it.
10. The silence. After her presentation, twenty-three residents spoke, including a contract attorney and a security consultant who contradicted, with documents, her data-ownership claim and the city’s negotiation claims. From 5:17:48 until the 6–1 votes and adjournment, no APD or staff voice ever spoke again. No correction, no engagement, no answer.
What changed between April 28 and May 12
The revisions between the two presentations tell their own story. “Reactive, not predictive” (the April framing) appears zero times on May 12, quietly replaced by “targeted incident-driven information” (4:45:11); it had become a liability after Chief Lamb’s on-record “predictive policing” surfaced. “Real and valid,” April’s concession to surveillance fears, survives only as “the valid fear that has kept people from speaking out”, redirected from the critics to the witnesses. And immigration vanished entirely from APD’s on-record presentation: on May 12 no APD official says the word; the exclusion claim lives only in the AG’s secondhand letter, while Deputy Chief Aardema’s much-quoted “we will not be sharing information with federal immigration” comes from WLOS’s coverage, not the recording. A month earlier she had told the same committee process “I’m not here to sway a vote” (April 28, 1:54:10), then delivered, on May 12, a forty-minute closing argument with a dead child at its center.
Her arguments track Flock’s leaked sales playbook
Lay her arguments beside Flock’s leaked council-coaching playbook and the correspondence is uncomfortable: the “who controls the system?” pivot, delivered verbatim; customer-chief testimonials as evidence; opposition reframed as misunderstanding (“some won’t believe it,” she told the Watchdog; the guide’s opposition-as-ignorance move, word for word). None of this requires bad faith: vendor sales scripts are written to be delivered sincerely. The response is the same either way: check each claim against the record.
What to watch, what to ask
- The chief decision (~September 2026): one unelected official’s call. If Stepp is the pick, every promise above transfers from audition to administration, and this page becomes the permanent chief’s baseline.
- Her own announced venues: the town halls and listening sessions she promised are the place to ask, on the record: Where are the audit reports state law requires (G.S. 20-183.31(a)(7))? Why do the dashboards 404? Has the city revoked ACEIP Tier 1?
- Her own standard: “Trust will not be assumed. It will be demonstrated.” Agreed. The Promise Tracker is the scoreboard.
Related: D.K. Wesley · Jimmy Wingo · Their Claims vs The Record · 2026-05-12 City Council · The Flockbook · Promise Tracker · The Committee