Flock contract canceled by Asheville council in heated meeting

After a long and tense meeting with more than an hour of heated public comment, the Asheville City Council voted 5-2 Tuesday night to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety. It’s a move that comes during a statewide reckoning with the technology company, which has come under fire for perceived potential Fourth Amendment violations. 

The resolution came after Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer called on the City Council to end the area’s Flock contract in a video statement posted on social media last week. Prior to Tuesday’s vote, the city of Asheville was operating 11 Flock cameras. Eighty-six cameras are operated by other entities across Buncombe County, including homeowners associations and the public school system, inside the city limits. Those other cameras were not affected by the council vote.

The votes against the resolution came from council members S. Anntanette Mosley and Sheneika Smith, however some other members expressed reservations before ultimately backing the measure.

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The city manager will now review the Flock contract. Flock Safety manufactures ALPRS, or automatic license plate readers, which capture images of license plates at a singular point in time and enter them into a database where artificial intelligence catalogs vehicle characteristics, like a vehicle’s make, model and color. APD has had a contract with Flock since 2025, which was originally set to run through 2027.

Atlanta-based Flock has a network of data on every car it has detected, which allows law enforcement agencies across the country to search for a specific vehicle’s location history across thousands of camera feeds. The council’s resolution made it a point to specify that Asheville has not been using facial recognition technology, nor has it shared its Flock data with any facial recognition database. 

Other communities in North Carolina, like the towns of Hillsborough and Pittsboro and Davidson County have each ended their contract with Flock. Others are reviewing their policies as the company has become increasingly controversial. In Western North Carolina, Macon County also recently ended its contract with the technology company. 

Not the only license plate readers

Flock’s ALPRs are the only such technology in Asheville right now, but other companies also provide the service — the city just doesn’t have it from them so far. 

Asheville does have a contract with one such company, Axon, but only for police department body cameras and ALPRs mounted on police vehicles, not the standstill ALPRs similar to the widely recognizable Flock devices. 

APD currently operates 137 Axon plate readers mounted to police vehicles, according to the transparency portal. 

City Council members approved the Axon contract in May, along with a Real-Time Intelligence Center, which will synchronize license plate readers, public and private surveillance cameras in the city, and police dash cameras. Council member Kim Roney was the only dissenting vote at that time.  

“The question that we have to address is whether or not we want to allow Axon to do that, and whether or not it just feels like we’re replacing the Flock system with something similar,” Manheimer told CPP earlier Tuesday.

Council member Kim Roney, who is running for mayor against Manheimer, said in a social media post that the council’s resolution on the Flock contract adopted Tuesday night reads more like a pause than taking a stance on Flock. During the meeting, Roney introduced a motion to see a new moratorium on ALPRs, which failed.

APD will now engage with a policy reviewer from the American Civil Liberties Union while continuing discussions about ALPRs and surveillance technology. 

Data from the Axon ALPRs is not shared with third-party networks, according to the company’s transparency portal for Asheville. These cameras retain data for 90 days. Flock cameras now retain data for seven days unless they are involved in an active criminal investigation. 

The resolution that the council passed Tuesday said information relating to immigration enforcement, reproductive healthcare and the First Amendment-protected activity will be protected in regards to the contracts. In other states, law enforcement agencies have used Flock to track those who seek reproductive healthcare outside of state lines. Local law enforcement agencies across the country have also used ALPR data when cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Now that the Flock contract has been cancelled, the council is at a fragmented pause, as members disagree about the need for license-plate reader technology. Meanwhile, there will still be Flock ALPRs in Asheville, they just won’t be operated by the city. 

It is also unclear whether Flock license plate readers will be covered before they are removed. Roney asked the city manager whether covering the cameras has been considered and was told that it had not yet been considered. 

Reaction to Flock contract debate

Many Asheville community members spoke at the meeting against both Flock and Axon contracts.

Some also brought up frustration with the lack of public comment at the earlier meeting where the council voted on the 24-hour Real-Time Intelligence Center and Axon Some also expressed frustration that Manheimer brought up such an issue that she previously had a different opinion on before a contentious mayoral race. 

“This is something that the majority of Asheville from across the political spectrum wants,” Sean Snyder, an Asheville resident who spoke during the meeting’s public comment period, said. He, like tens of others like him, urged the council to consider ending its contract with Axon, not just the Flock contract.

Towards the end of the meeting, council members went back and forth about the city’s future with Axon, and whether they would pursue fixed ALPR infrastructure from Axon to replace the Flock cameras. 

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