Between January 2025 and May 2026, across nine public meetings, 36 Asheville residents stood at the podium or called in to speak on the record about the city’s surveillance buildout, and five more signed up just to cede their time so a neighbor could finish an argument. All but one spoke in opposition. On May 12, 2026, the night council voted on the Real-Time Intelligence Center, 23 residents spoke after waiting through a six-hour agenda; 22 of them said no. Council passed both items 6–1 anyway.
The vote doesn’t erase the record. The record shows lawyers, security engineers, ministers, veterans, moms, public-housing staff, and people attending their first-ever council meeting making the case against mass surveillance, carefully, specifically, and repeatedly. This page collects their strongest arguments so future speakers can build on them, and so everyone who spoke knows: it was heard, it was preserved, and you are not alone.
Every quote below is transcribed from the city’s meeting videos and linked to its timestamp. Names appear as given at the podium; the city’s captions are auto-generated, so spellings follow the meeting record as best it renders them. Auto-caption punctuation has been added and obvious caption misspellings of product names (e.g., “Fusus”) normalized; wording is otherwise verbatim.
”If you pass this, ICE will come”
The earliest and most persistent argument: surveillance infrastructure built for one purpose will be used against Asheville’s most vulnerable neighbors, and no local policy can stop it once the data leaves town.
“I am the son of two Mexican-American immigrants. I am a veteran, and frankly, I am terrified. … I came here to ask a very scary question: what are you going to do? … I said then that the same people who put cameras on the wall in Gaza put cameras on the walls in the southern border. … What are you going to do?” — Anthony Mahia, January 14, 2025 (3:13:08)
“So many of the things they’ve done are not only unfair, but they’re unconstitutional. And who gets hurt? … at the end of this, they had the mayor saying, ‘If we build it, they will come. If you pass this, ICE will come.‘” — Curry First, a retired civil-rights lawyer, relaying another city’s cautionary tale to council, March 25, 2025 (22:18)
“Speaking of oversight, I believe that an immediate actionable step that can be taken to reassure us, the people, is for the city of Asheville and APD to review and consider not renewing contracts with Flock. The automated license plate readers in our community are AI-driven and owned by private contractors. While these cameras are operating in our city, your constituents remain vulnerable to targeted attacks by federal agents.” — Michaela Barry, January 13, 2026 (1:44:23)
“APD has said they don’t share data with ICE. But APD Flock data is shared with more than 1,400 outside agencies, including Florida’s Fish and Wildlife. And recent 404 Media reporting shows Florida Fish and Wildlife shares that data directly with ICE. The ‘we don’t share with ICE’ promise is meaningless the moment the data leaves our network.” — Patrick Conant, April 14, 2026 (2:29:04)
“A significant threat to our constitutional and civil rights”
Residents didn’t just invoke the Constitution: they explained, precisely, why it won’t protect anyone here.
“The item before you has an enormous number of constitutional challenges … it’s the Fourth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, and it talks about unreasonable searches and seizures. … I want this council to be a little brave.” — Curry First, March 25, 2025 (20:26)
“I want to be direct about something I’ve heard from this body. The Fourth Amendment does not protect us here. The Fourth Amendment binds local government, not Axon. The records we hand over to a private company — our phone records, our bank records, the metadata on a cloud service — receive substantially less constitutional protection than records we keep ourselves.” — Sarah Kent, May 12, 2026 (5:31:11)
“The collection of data by police without an individual’s consent or a judicial warrant, using technology that can track everyone, monitor all our public movements, and do so both in real time and retroactively, is a significant threat to our constitutional and civil rights.” — Claire Hanrahan, May 12, 2026 (5:40:15)
“I just don’t believe that it won’t be accessible to federal organizations. … It could be used to locate undocumented people or indeed people who hold residential status, green card status, and are in danger of having that revoked. I’m worried that it would be used to track people seeking feminine healthcare, because we just don’t know what’s going to happen.” — Molly Rickert, March 25, 2025 (23:37)
Molly Rickert said this in March 2025, more than a year before the RTIC vote, and months before most of the city had heard the words “real-time intelligence center.” Who Gets Watched documents everything she predicted coming true.
”We, the people of Asheville, were the product”
Technologists and researchers came with the receipts: the business model, the metadata, the price escalators, and what the vendors’ own documents say.
“The business model for Flock, Fusus, Axon, and the rest of these vendors is not public safety, it’s data. The city lets them install cameras and license plate readers on our streets, and in exchange, all those vendors get a 24/7 data set of resident behavior that they license, analyze, and use to train AI models. That’s the trade. We, the people of Asheville, were the product here.” — Patrick Conant, April 14, 2026 (2:28:28)
“If we cancel the contract, the video has a 90-day retrieval window, but the metadata does not. They keep it. They keep what their AI learned from it. We cannot claw back that data.” — Sarah Kent, application security consultant, May 12, 2026 (5:28:50)
“What I really want to draw your attention to is this 125% net revenue retention. … That means the average customer pays 25% more every single year, regardless of their contract. … In 2020 the city renewed a 5-year contract for Axon body cams, and the cost for years 2 to 5 of that contract jumped 86%, with the city finance manager noting that Axon prices change every year in January.” — Aaron Dahlstrom, May 12, 2026 (5:21:28)
“This is not just license plate readers. This is an advanced network of AI-powered facial and object recognition cameras in public spaces, businesses, daycare centers, pools, gyms. … Flock even quietly changed their terms of service, removing a line assuring customers that the company does not own and will not sell customer data.” — Vaughn, April 14, 2026 (2:22:48)
“You can’t negotiate against Skynet”
Council voted to authorize a seven-and-a-half-year vendor commitment before any contract existed in reviewable form. The people who negotiate contracts for a living explained what that means.
“You have 30 to 60 days to negotiate a master services agreement. They’re not going to let you negotiate the master services agreement. That’s not how it works. You might get a few things like venue or choice of law. You might get North Carolina law. Congratulations. You’re not going to be able to promise that the federal agencies are not going to have access to this.” — Jessica Myers, contract attorney, May 12, 2026 (6:02:17)
“[Reading the Flock contract, section 5.3:] ‘Flock may disclose the footage to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties … if Flock has a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise address security, privacy, fraud, technical issues, emergency situations’ — you can drive a truck through this.” — Jessica Myers, May 12, 2026 (6:04:46)
She also offered the record’s most counterintuitive insight, that inefficiency is a civil-liberties feature: “There is a reason that IRS didn’t talk to housing … That’s so inefficient on purpose. Law enforcement doesn’t need to run at the speed of light. That’s how mistakes are made.” (6:10:11)
“I am upset that there is no contract with Axon at this moment, and I think that the city council should not be voting on this item if there is not a contract present. … I know your names. I vote in every election.” — Lyndon Blazes, May 12, 2026 (5:38:14)
“In the abortion access space, we are used to thinking of the government as a threat actor that could harm people with the data we collect. Council should also be thinking of the federal government as a threat actor. … Policy alone is not a sufficient safeguard to ensure that local surveillance data does not fall into malicious hands. The enforcement mechanism must have teeth and must be made transparent.” — Nicole Lopez, technologist, May 12, 2026 (5:55:21)
Lopez, who spoke at four meetings across two years, had already told council on April 14 that “the City of Asheville has refused to release a network audit of our Flock camera fleet that could have proven whether our network has been searched by unintended actors like rogue prosecutors tracking abortion clients.” (2:48:34)
“It doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me scared.”
Some of the strongest testimony wasn’t technical at all. It was people describing what it is like to live under the cameras that already exist.
“I can’t leave my neighborhood without being surveilled. ‘Cause I live near Pisgah View. Because Pisgah View is a minority community, and so we surveil it. It doesn’t make me feel safe to be tracked all the time. It makes me scared. I implore you, please vote no on this.” — Wendell Wilson, May 12, 2026 (5:57:20)
“Poverty is violence. … We have 15% of children in Asheville living in poverty. And the majority of folks living in poverty in Asheville are people of color. … I’m just now realizing, after all this discussion has happened, that working in housing has probably put my car, my license plate on plenty of cameras that are accessed by folks all over this nation.” — Jessica McLean, who works at Pisgah View Apartments, April 14, 2026 (2:40:13)
“These Flock safety cameras — I know that there are at least two that I know of that watch me when I go to work. At least two on the way, at least two on the way home.” — Ethan Steel, April 14, 2026 (2:33:34)
“This is my first ever city council meeting. … I haven’t seen anything that can guarantee that my data will not be used against me and the people that I love and care about in this community. That deeply, deeply scares me.” — Cecil Utterback, May 12, 2026 (6:19:41)
What the cameras over Pisgah View actually mean, nationally and here: Watching the Poor.
”What do they teach our children?”
Ministers and neighbors asked the question underneath the procurement question: what kind of city does constant watching make?
“I have a 4-year-old. I also have an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old. And I wonder, what do we want to teach our children? What will all these cameras — what do they teach our children? What do they teach us? If we see them every day, what do we start believing about ourselves? Do we think that we’re trustworthy people? No, we think that we’re to be feared. And then over time, we start acting out on that belief.” — Cassandra Howe, mom and minister, May 12, 2026 (5:54:05)
“When you stand in this room and you vote on rules, you choose to sharpen the teeth of authority or to dull them.” — William Emerson, April 14, 2026 (2:11:40)
What actually keeps us safe
Speaker after speaker made the same affirmative case: safety is built from the bottom up, and the evidence for that is stronger than the evidence for surveillance.
“I don’t believe that surveillance cuts down on crime. I don’t believe it necessarily solves crime. I think the things that prevent crime are social programming, making sure people have affordable food, affordable health care, and affordable places to live.” — Molly Rickert, March 25, 2025 (24:39)
“Let’s be clear. The need for public safety is real. Families shouldn’t have to sleep on the floor of their homes for fear of stray bullets. But Big Brother is not the answer. Big Brother is never the answer. Lasting safety is systemic. … Today’s helpful technology under an accountable, responsible government is tomorrow’s tool of oppression under leadership that doesn’t care in the slightest about due process or civil rights.” — Nina Tovish, May 12, 2026 (5:46:13)
“Science tells us again and again that what reduces crime is not policing or surveillance, but affordability and social programming.” — Mo Knight, May 12, 2026 (5:51:29)
“In Chicago, major studies found that CVI [community violence intervention] programs reduce violent crime arrests by nearly 50% while also increasing high school graduation rates. In Richmond, California, which is a city very similar in size to ours, a CVI-based strategy contributed to an 85% reduction in homicides over several years. Meanwhile, research on expanding surveillance and police staffing shows mixed or inconsistent results. … If we discovered a cheaper and more effective source of clean energy, why would we double down on fossil fuels?” — David Greenson, May 26, 2026 (53:00)
“Who are you listening to?”
The process itself became evidence. A $1.1 million surveillance expansion first appeared on a consent agenda. On decision night, the public got one hour, two minutes each, after a six-hour wait, while the interim chief and two vendor representatives flown in for the occasion got the afternoon. Ann Craig put the obvious question on the record: “Since there is no deadline to accept this grant … I ask you, what is the urgency here?” (5:43:38)
“It seems like y’all buried this $1.1 million expansion of police surveillance in jargon, calling it a real-time intelligence center. But let’s call it what it actually is. … Burying this in the consent agenda was a deliberate choice.” — Jen Hampton, April 14, 2026 (2:25:52)
“The reason people are so concerned is because we are removing citizen oversight and expanding surveillance. That is a dangerous combination. … I just don’t see how our city can approve a 7-and-1/2-year, multi-million-dollar vendor commitment whose binding operational terms do not yet exist in reviewable form.” — Patrick Conant, director of Sunshine Labs, May 12, 2026 (5:58:29)
“The police chief was given from 9:47 to 10:26 to talk, but we get an hour. And also, there wasn’t an expert that presented on our side.” — Canyon De Luca, May 12, 2026 (6:15:18)
“I have a simple question. Who are you listening to? Asheville and its people this affects daily, or the big company selling the Panopticon like a regular Tuesday?” — Andreas Elder, May 12, 2026 (6:18:21)
Two weeks after the vote, Nina Tovish came back to ask council to open its private briefings to the public, because “sometimes angels dwell among the minutia,” and a citizen might spot what council misses. (May 26, 2026, 2:15:43)
Coda
Ben Spencer attended the afternoon committee meeting on April 28, then came to the evening session to report what he’d heard: “45 minutes of interim police chief and two paid representatives for private surveillance companies flown out here does not seem like a really balanced way to gauge the facts.” (1:49:06) On May 12, he kept his final turn at the podium to thirty seconds:
“Have you all seen Star Wars? Don’t take federal grant money for the Death Star, please. … As brevity is the soul of wit, I will summarize the best single thing that was said there [by the interim police chief, in her own presentation that night]: public safety cannot come at the expense of community values.” — Ben Spencer, May 12, 2026 (6:18:50)
He was quoting Chief Jackie Stepp back to the council: her exact words at 4:34:29 that same night were “public safety should not come at the expense of community values”; Spencer’s rendering sharpened should to cannot. Either way: hold the city to it.
Add your voice
The vote on May 12 was not the end. Contracts get renewed, budgets get amended, and every argument on this page is still true. The people above showed that two minutes at a podium becomes a permanent public record, one that other cities’ residents, journalists, and future councils can build on.
You can be next: Speak at Council.
The meetings
| Date | Meeting | Video |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 14, 2025 | Regular City Council | youtube.com/watch?v=rW6a8D3jXKU |
| Mar 25, 2025 | Regular City Council (RTIC grant on consent agenda) | youtube.com/watch?v=Bc-VVlvBx0U |
| Sep 9, 2025 | Regular City Council | youtube.com/watch?v=HVuW4HrBQzU |
| Jan 13, 2026 | Regular City Council | youtube.com/watch?v=ziQVwdBcwqE |
| Feb 24, 2026 | Regular City Council | youtube.com/watch?v=xz7FrFLV1U8 |
| Apr 14, 2026 | Regular City Council ($1.1M RTIC item pulled from consent) | youtube.com/watch?v=QHT2NetBNmI |
| Apr 28, 2026 | Regular City Council (committee met that afternoon) | youtube.com/watch?v=BtV1NRZCV0k |
| May 12, 2026 | Regular City Council: [[2026-05-12 City Council|the RTIC vote]] (both items passed 6–1) | youtube.com/watch?v=AfdrH-a92As |
| May 26, 2026 | Regular City Council / budget hearing | youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1dEYMm6o0 |
Spot an error in a name or quote? Every entry links to the video; tell me and I’ll fix it. That’s the standard this page holds council to, so it’s the standard I hold myself to.
Related: Speak at Council · 2026-05-12 City Council · Who Gets Watched · Get Involved