In August 2026, 404 Media published a leaked internal Flock Safety guide (dubbed the “Flockbook”) coaching law enforcement on how to sell and defend ALPR systems to city councils, paired with a May 2026 Flock webinar titled “How to Speak to City Councils: Meeting the Moment with Confidence.” The full text is public: the document · 404 Media’s reporting.
Read it next to Asheville’s record. This page does exactly that.
The script, verbatim, and the local performance
“Own the narrative before someone else does.” / “Opponents have a very carefully scripted narrative. They come prepared. You should also have a carefully scripted presentation.” → Asheville: APD’s April 28 presentation came with speaker notes coaching the presenter to “get ahead of the question about 2 RTICs in our county” (2026-04-28 Work Session), a scripted pre-emption.
Pre-brief officials privately: “The agencies that navigate these conversations successfully rarely wait until a council meeting to educate stakeholders.” → Asheville: the three-by-three private check-ins (unminuted small-group sessions with council before every public meeting) are this advice at scale: the persuasion happens before the public meeting, off the record.
The governance pivot: don’t deny capability; redirect. “Who controls the system? Who can access it? How is information used?” Stress data is “agency-controlled” and sharing is “opt-in.” → Asheville: Chief Stepp on the May 12 recording: “police department owns the information”, and to WLOS: “APD owns the data that we collect, and we have to agree to share that information out.” Deputy Chief Aardema, same coverage: “We control Axon Fusus.” Capt. Moore: “We do not and will not share that information short of a court order.” The vendor’s recommended sentence structure, delivered from the dais, while the 500-mile sharing radius and the informal-favor pathway (The Abuse Record) went unmentioned, and the executed contract stayed unreleased.
Don’t fight the label: “Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance… you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not.” Pivot to governance instead. → Asheville: “A real-time intelligence center is not a technology project. It’s a public safety function” (Stepp), the same reframe the guide teaches.
The cost reframe: steer away from camera cost toward “the cost of unresolved crime”; “a single recovered vehicle can often exceed the annual cost of a camera.” → Asheville: “This is not about software — this is about victims” (Stepp, May 12); the Foster-case anecdote as the recurring justification; Manheimer’s savings framing (which doesn’t survive arithmetic).
Opposition as ignorance: people object because they “do not understand how it works or how it is governed.” → Asheville: Stepp, to the Watchdog: “No matter how much factual, accurate information — even if I could get those people here to see and touch it and feel it — (some) are not going to believe it.” And the RTIC “education campaign” and public tours, engagement designed to inform the public, never to ask it.
The marketing phrases, traced to source
- “One pane of glass”: Axon/Fusus’s core product tagline (their marketing), used verbatim by APD’s technology manager on camera (2026-04-28 Work Session).
- “Force multiplier”: standard vendor framing; APD’s local variant: “We don’t have officers that can stand on every corner” (Wingo). The Jackson County sheriff used “force multiplier” itself, one county west.
- “Reactive, not predictive” / “no facial recognition” / “we track cars, not people”: Flock and Axon’s standard national rebuttal set, delivered by APD in nearly every appearance.
This doesn’t prove any official was insincere. It proves the arguments Asheville heard were not Asheville’s: they came from a vendor’s national script, taught to police departments in webinars and playbooks. When you hear these phrases at the podium or in the next campaign, you now know their provenance, and so does everyone you show this page to.
The rest of the paper trail
- The “Nova” leak: 404 Media obtained internal materials on Flock’s people-lookup product: “You’re going to be able to… jump from LPR to person… link to other people that are related… marriage or through gang affiliation.” The car-tracking company describes its future as person-tracking. (404 Media)
- Flock’s sales deck for police (33 pages, FOIA’d) and user guides are public on DocumentCloud; EFF’s FOIA’d 12-million-search national log dataset shows how one search fans across thousands of networks (EFF).
- Asheville’s Flock procurement, for the record: the contract runs through reseller Insight Public Sector; extended two years on Feb 1, 2025 (to ~Feb 2027, the “February” in the wind-down debate); and the original 11-camera deployment (April 2024) appears to have been grant-funded and administrative; no standalone council vote has been found for it. The public debate only began when the RTIC money surfaced, two years into the scanning. Result to date: 3.1 million plates scanned, ~5,000 hot-list matches.
Related: Their Claims vs The Record · 2026-04-28 Work Session · The Check-In Meetings · What Axon Contracts Do