Security1 publisher2 min readPublished
404 Media requests Axon's ALPR activity logs from cities and police departments as Flock's rivals rise
Cities are swapping Flock license plate cameras for Axon's after reporting on searches run for ICE and a nationwide abortion-related lookup. Axon keeps the same search-by-search record under four report names. Six agencies have handed theirs over.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- Cities are dropping Flock license plate readers and installing Axon's equivalent cameras. 404 Media attributes the switch largely to its reporting on Flock lookups run for ICE and a Texas officer's nationwide search for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
- Axon's activity reports log when an officer searched its ALPRs, the officer's name and badge number, the plate they searched, and the reason the officer stated for the search.
- 404 Media has obtained Axon activity reports from six agencies: Benton County Sheriff's Office and Ocean Shores police in Washington, plus departments in Falmouth, Maine; Johns Creek, Georgia; Pleasanton, Texas; and Red Wing, Minnesota.
- Three further Axon reports cover network search activity, the history of which outside agencies were invited to or removed from data sharing, and changes made to the hotlist alerts an agency receives.
Compiled by The WatchSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- capability Scrutiny of a department's plate searches no longer depends on one newsroom's request queue. The report names, the menu that holds them and the date range to ask for are all published. A resident can file the same request the reporters did.
- constraint Each vendor switch resets the examined record to zero, and it splits what Flock held in one network audit across four differently named Axon reports. Anyone following a department across vendors has to re-ask the same question in an unfamiliar format.
- exposure A department that left Flock partly over out-of-jurisdiction searching still generates a running list of every outside agency invited into its plate data, and that list is reachable under state records law.
Flock's network audits have been the basis of much of 404 Media's Flock reporting, and of local and national coverage elsewhere [5]. Axon documents an equivalent log. Per Axon's help pages, the four audit reports sit in one menu in the product, at LPR > ALPR Search > LPR Audit [10]. An agency that answers a records request by saying it keeps no such log is contradicted by its own vendor's documentation.
The migration leaves both of the questions that produced the Flock coverage intact, the reason an officer typed into a search and the identity of outside agencies let into the data [4][8].
404 Media has activity reports back from six agencies [6]. They sit in five states, and Washington is the only state with two of them, the Benton County Sheriff's Office and the Ocean Shores Police Department [14]. The post publishes no findings from any of the six and no count of how many cities have dropped Flock [15].
The template 404 Media published asks for everything logged from January 1, 2025 to the date the agency processes the request [11]. Requests go to an agency's public records email or through MuckRock, and returned records to [email protected] [12]. 404 Media wrote that local residents "can do a lot to reveal how surveillance technology is being used in their own communities" [13].
What to watch
- Whether any of the six returned Axon activity reports carries a stated search reason tied to immigration enforcement.
- Whether agencies start refusing the Axon reports as vendor-held records or claim they cannot be exported.
- Whether Axon alters the audit menu or the report contents now that the exact menu path is circulating in records requests.