Asheville signed a 7.5-year surveillance contract in the same year much of the country started tearing theirs up. Depending on how you count, between 50 and 102 communities across 27+ states have canceled, rejected, paused, or removed Flock Safety systems; roughly two dozen in 2026 alone. (DeFlock The USA cancellation tracker · State of Surveillance count · AP, Aug 16, 2026)
Every category of failure below was preceded, in those cities, by the same assurances Asheville residents are hearing now.
Cities that walked away, and why
Los Angeles (July 2026): it doesn’t even work. The LAPD Inspector General audited Flock’s stolen-vehicle alerts and found a 32.3% false-positive rate: in the sampled period, 161 innocent vehicles were flagged, and officers stopped or investigated a non-stolen vehicle every time. The LAPD let the contract die, citing “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights.” (Knock LA · Tech Times)
Austin (June 2025): police won’t follow their own rules. The city’s audit of a one-year trial found 117 million scans produced 228 arrests, and that 10–20% of police searches had no documented reason or case number, violating the council’s own resolution. The program ended June 30, 2025. (KUT) Epilogue worth knowing: the state of Texas then installed its own plate readers in Austin, over the city’s objection, a reminder that ending a contract isn’t the end of the fight. (KUT, Feb 2026)
Evanston, IL (Aug–Sep 2025): the vendor itself can’t be trusted. A state audit caught Flock giving Customs and Border Protection access to Illinois data in violation of Illinois law. Evanston terminated and deactivated its 19 cameras, and then Flock reinstalled them without authorization. The city issued a cease-and-desist and physically covered the cameras, calling the breach “material, intentional, and cannot be cured.” (Evanston RoundTable · ABC7 Chicago) Oak Park, River Forest, and Salem, IL followed over the same state investigation.
Santa Cruz, CA (Jan 2026): the ICE promise fails silently. The city discovered ICE had accessed its Flock data roughly 4,000 times. Canceled. Nearby, Oxnard deactivated after a vendor error allowed 364,000+ out-of-state queries; Richmond’s data was “unintentionally shared nationwide”; the state Attorney General sued El Cajon for illegally sharing plate data out of state. (Yahoo News roundup · CA AG press release)
Sedona, AZ (Sep 2025): “misled and lied to.” That’s how city officials described Flock’s representations about data-sharing features. Oshkosh, WI found Flock had misrepresented its heat-map collection; Menominee, MI found cameras activated without authorization: “we don’t know where the information is going.” (DeFlock tracker)
Denver (2025–2026): the bait-and-switch that followed. Council unanimously rejected renewal over federal data-sharing concerns; all ~110 cameras came down by March 2026. Then Denver advanced a 50-camera contract with Axon (the same company Asheville just signed with for 7.5 years) under stricter data-control terms. Nationally, this is the pattern: cities dump Flock and hire Axon for the same function. Asheville skipped the middle step and went straight to the fully integrated Axon stack. (Yahoo News)
Washington State (2025–2026): the law caught up. After courts ruled Flock data was subject to public records requests and the legislature passed the Driver Privacy Act (21-day retention cap, bans on immigration and reproductive-health uses), more than a dozen Washington agencies paused or dropped their systems rather than face liability. (Washington State Standard · KUOW)
The abuse record
These are not hypotheticals. Each happened through the same technology Asheville is installing, under the same kinds of written policies.
- The abortion search. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office ran a nationwide search across ~83,000 cameras (including in states where abortion is legal) with the logged reason “had an abortion, search for female.” The sheriff claimed it was a welfare check; court records obtained by EFF show deputies had discussed criminal charges with prosecutors. No warrant. (EFF · The Record)
- The ICE side door. ICE has no Flock contract. It doesn’t need one: 404 Media’s analysis of leaked search logs found 4,000+ lookups by local and state police for federal immigration purposes: officers running searches for ICE as informal favors, sometimes typing “ICE” or “illegal immigration” as the reason. This is the mechanism APD’s “court order required” promise does not address: another agency can run the search. (404 Media)
- The stalkers with badges. The Washington Post’s August 2026 investigation found at least 50 officers charged with or accused of misusing plate readers against partners, exes, and women they wanted to meet, 46 of 50 involving Flock (Poynter on the investigation, AP follow-on); the Institute for Justice separately documented dozens of innocent motorists stopped at gunpoint or jailed on camera errors. Two of the newest charges are in North Carolina; the full pattern, including how abuse actually gets discovered, is in The Abuse Record.
- The security disaster. Benn Jordan and security researcher Jon Gaines rooted a Flock camera in under 30 seconds on video (the video); Jordan later found ~70 Flock cameras streaming unauthenticated on the open internet (404 Media). Senator Wyden and Rep. Krishnamoorthi have asked the FTC to investigate Flock’s security: no mandatory two-factor authentication, at least 35 documented cases of stolen customer passwords. (Krishnamoorthi press release) The House Oversight Committee opened its own investigation after the ICE and abortion revelations. (404 Media)
Does any of it reduce crime?
The independent evidence says: barely, if at all.
- The most rigorous studies of plate readers find an investigative effect but no deterrent effect: they help solve some cases after the fact; they don’t prevent crime. (CrimRxiv review)
- A 2025 evaluation of Atlantic City’s fixed-camera expansion found no reduction in violent crime. (Justice Evaluation Journal)
- Flock’s marquee claim, that its cameras help solve “10% of reported U.S. crime”, was company-funded, and six criminologists publicly rejected it; one called it borderline “ludicrous,” another doubted it “would survive peer review.” The researcher who oversaw it told 404 Media he had concerns about it. (404 Media · Forbes)
- Real-time crime centers show improved case clearance in some studies (Miami’s RTCC-assisted cases cleared at meaningfully higher rates), a real but modest benefit, concentrated after crimes occur, and nothing like the transformation the sales decks promise. (Justice Evaluation Journal)
Austin’s arithmetic is the summary: 117 million scans, 228 arrests.
Axon and Fusus specifically
Fusus (the platform at the center of Asheville’s RTIC) was bought by Axon in January 2024 for $240 million. (Axon investor release) Its signature feature is integrating privately owned cameras: businesses, churches, schools, and homes “register” cameras or install a device giving police live streaming access. EFF has documented how these registries pull private cameras into police networks (EFF); The 74 documented ICE reaching school security cameras through exactly these networks. (The 74)
Nashville’s Metro Council voted Fusus down in December 2024: 20–18, with the NAACP and community oversight groups opposed. (WKRN) Asheville’s council was told about none of this on May 12.
On cost: Axon bundles Fusus into multi-year “ecosystem” contracts: exactly Asheville’s 7.5-year deal. At the May 12 hearing, a resident who negotiates contracts professionally told council that Axon publishes its terms and customers “sign what is on the page”; another documented the ~25%-per-year price escalation Axon itself markets to investors as its “Flywheel of Growth.”
The legal ground is shifting
- Schmidt v. Norfolk: the Institute for Justice’s Fourth Amendment challenge to Norfolk, VA’s 175-camera Flock dragnet is now before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (No. 26-1227), with ACLU, EFF, Cato, and EPIC filing in support. The 4th Circuit’s rulings bind North Carolina. (IJ · case tracker)
- The Supreme Court’s June 2026 location-data ruling held that acquiring mass location history is a Fourth Amendment search, rejecting the “we only took a small slice” defense that Norfolk won on below. Whether it extends to plate-reader archives is the open question everyone in this fight is watching. (Ohio Capital Journal analysis)
- A separate Virginia suit alleges police used Flock to track one driver 526 times in four months. (NBC News)
Flock’s damage control
Under pressure, Flock has kept revising its guardrails: California lookups disabled (2025), required offense codes (Dec 2025), a federal-sharing off switch (Jan 2026), and (announced August 13, 2026) a 7-day default retention, offense filtering, and mandatory audit tools. The ACLU’s response: the previous safeguards were circumvented with vague search entries, and a company with this record has lost the credibility to self-regulate. (AP · ACLU response)
Flock’s own recommended retention is now 7 days. Asheville holds your data for 30.
What this means for Asheville
Every promise in Asheville’s Promise Tracker has already failed somewhere else under identical wording. The cities that protected their residents didn’t do it with policies; they did it with enforceable law: council-approval requirements, retention caps, sharing bans, and termination clauses. That’s the ask. See Speak at Council.