When Asheville officials answer surveillance concerns with “there’s oversight,” they mean the Public Safety Committee: three councilmembers (chair Bo Hess, Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley, Sheneika Smith) meeting remotely, roughly every other month. I reviewed every recorded meeting from the committee’s May 2025 relaunch through July 2026. This page is what the recordings show. (All timestamps are from the city’s own meeting streams; captions are unlabeled, so attributions follow the meeting context.)
The one meeting that mattered has no recording
On March 26, 2026, this committee advanced the RTIC grant to full council, 2–0. Every other 2025–26 committee meeting was streamed and archived. That one has no published recording. Its only trace in the public record is a pro-forma minutes approval at the next meeting, passed 3–0 in seconds, with zero discussion. The single moment this committee formally touched the RTIC is the single gap in its archive. (The minutes are a standing Records Center target.)
What oversight looked like when the public forced the question
November 20, 2025 is the committee’s one real test in the record. Eight callers (including a Buncombe deputy register of deeds) demanded the Flock and Fusus contracts be canceled over ICE fears, one asking the committee to “disable any city-owned Flock or Fusus camera and pause any data sharing agreement so that proper oversight and further review can be put in place.”
The committee’s response, in full: Mosley asked whether the city has agreements with ICE. Chief Lamb answered “No… we do not share any of our data with any federal agencies,” adding that Flock and Axon “don’t have the right to share our data either.” The city attorney added that LPR use is “limited to only active criminal investigations, which is specifically exempt from public records.” Smith asked one follow-up. No one asked for the data-sharing agreement list (a caller had cited over a thousand outside agencies, a figure that was nationally documented, not hypothetical). No one asked for an audit. No motion was made. The chair’s entire contribution was to thank everyone by name and move to the next item. That “criminal investigations” reassurance is the same exemption the city later used to refuse the public’s audit request: the exemption that shields the data also shields the department from audit.
Every claim staff made that day has since collided with the documented record: Flock had shared data with federal agencies through pilots its own customers didn’t know about, and Roney would later read the contract’s “irrevocable, worldwide license” clause into the record against the “they don’t have the right” assurance.
The rest of the record, meeting by meeting
- May 29, 2025: orientation. Staff pre-announce the RTIC pipeline (the city manager couldn’t recall its name: “the real time um something something center”). A caller flags that the Citizens Police Advisory Committee has been dormant since 2020 and asks the committee to restart it. It is never discussed again. The chair nearly adjourns without taking public comment at all.
- July 31, 2025: APD presents its own technology plans (new tech division, future RTIC, “actively seeking grant opportunities” for Fusus). A caller asks, verbatim: “what is the audit process? what is the transparency process? Why does the community have to come ask these questions?” Never answered, never taken up. The only skeptical questioning comes from Smith: “if the technology can scan, capture, and read a license plate, it can probably scan, capture, and read my face… What’s the difference?”
- September 25, 2025: no public comment (“Do we have anyone in the queue?” “No, we do not”). No surveillance content.
- January 29, 2026: the last recorded meeting before the RTIC grant vote. Zero RTIC preview. Smith presses APD with the record’s best question: “It’s a fine line between proactivity and profiling. How do you all keep it clean?”
- March 26, 2026: the RTIC vote. No recording (above).
- May 28, 2026: two months post-approval, 38 minutes, zero surveillance mention. The comment system was down; the chair said emails could be read by meeting’s end; none were. Adjournment: “I don’t need a motion, right? I can just say bye.”
- July 29, 2026: four months post-approval, the natural home for the promised quarterly reporting. The words Flock, Fusus, intelligence center, and audit do not occur. The chair, before confirming an empty comment queue: “let’s go ahead and get to the thousands of people waiting for public comment.”
The scorecard across every recorded meeting: RTIC audits requested: zero. Audit reports received: zero. Data-sharing agreements reviewed: zero. State law (G.S. 20-183.31(a)(7)) requires ALPR audit-and-effectiveness reports to exist. Not one has ever been presented to the committee where oversight supposedly lives.
What the committee does instead
The committee is not idle; its energy just flows in one direction. In July 2025 it heard eleven callers, overwhelmingly opposed to expanding the panhandling ordinance: a woman made homeless by Helene, a reverend (“standing on the street corner and you made me a criminal”), a caller pointing out that the headline statistic (“3 in 4 pedestrian crashes within 500 feet of reported panhandling”) spans fifteen car lengths of downtown. The committee voted 3–0 to advance the expansion the same morning, with the chair (a behavioral-health provider) explaining that opponents misunderstand “the way that science and data collection works,” and that “in no way are we criminalizing homelessness or poverty.”
By November, APD reported the results to the same committee: eight special operations, 93 people charged: “from median solicitation, panhandling and trespassing to the possession of fentanyl.” The complaint pipeline feeding this enforcement explicitly serves “businesses and neighborhood associations,” and by January 2026 staff described BID ambassadors phoning APD daily about people “sleeping in front” of businesses. The city’s own framing at the July hearing, “It is not our intent to use this as a hammer”, met the same fate as its surveillance promises: measured against output, four months later, in the charging numbers it reported itself.
93 people charged under an ordinance it advanced; zero audit reports requested for the surveillance apparatus it exists to oversee.
The numbers presented there, unchallenged
The committee accepts APD’s statistics without challenge. Documented to it, on the record: Chief Lamb describing “predictive policing” and “predictive analytics” (July 2025), the words the city’s later “reactive, not predictive” messaging had to erase (Their Claims vs The Record); a claimed “multi-year 100% clearance rate for homicides” minutes before a deputy chief’s own figures showed two 2024 homicides still open; and a violent-crime reduction that was “37%” in July’s telling, “over 36%” in the chair’s November tribute to the retiring chief, and 24% in the final annual figure reported that January. No member flagged any of it.
Why this page exists
The RTIC’s defenders point to this committee as the safeguard. Its chair is the RTIC’s most vocal advocate. Its meetings are remote-only, bimonthly, with public comment that has been forgotten, stranded by failed phone bridges, or met with a sardonic “thousands of people waiting” before an empty queue. Its record on the technology it exists to watch is a flat zero, while its one energetic output put 93 of the city’s poorest residents through the courts. The committee doesn’t need reform to do oversight; it needs to be asked, in public, on the record, why it never has. Its next meeting is September 24, 2026, 11:00 AM. That’s the venue, and Speak at Council has the how. Bring one question: where are the audit reports state law requires?
Related: Oversight Theater · Bo Hess · Their Claims vs The Record · Records Center · Promise Tracker