APACHE JUNCTION, AZ — The Apache Junction Flock camera ordinance won final approval Oct. 6. The City Council voted 7-0 to adopt Ordinance 1579, which makes misuse of any police surveillance technology a Class 1 misdemeanor. That includes license plate readers from Flock or any other company, drones and the department’s real-time crime center. City employees who violate the rules also lose their jobs.
The new Chapter 17 of the city code also limits plate data to 30 days, bans selling it and requires monthly audits with a check from outside the police department. During a public hearing that drew 13 speakers, residents asked the council to add a warrant requirement and public audit results, which the code does not include. Two speakers supported keeping the cameras. Most of the others opposed the cameras or called for stronger safeguards.
What the Apache Junction Flock camera ordinance requires
Only police employees designated by the chief may use the system. Before each search, they must log in with assigned credentials, enter a case or incident number and get authorization from a named supervisor. The code allows only three uses:
- “Hot-list” alerts, which flag a plate that matches a list of stolen, wanted or high-risk vehicles connected with a crime
- Investigations of misdemeanor and felony crimes
- Searches for missing, endangered or vulnerable people
The code also bans any non-law enforcement use, including personal searches, political or religious activity and unrelated surveillance.
The chapter limits stored data to a plate number, vehicle type, color, location, date and time. The department must purge it after 30 days, and it cannot be sold. Other cities, towns and counties may receive it with supervisor pre-approval, but anyone using it must follow the same access rules.
The chief or a designee must audit user logs every month. The city manager must then appoint an employee outside the police department to check that audit’s accuracy. Every authorized user must also complete mandatory training on privacy, legal compliance and ethics and sign an acknowledgment of the rules annually.
Under state law, a Class 1 misdemeanor can carry up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500, plus surcharges.
The rules follow an April incident in which an officer used the system for a personal search. He resigned before the department could fire him. After a Sept. 1 hearing drew 26 speakers, the council voted 7-0 on Sept. 15 to have City Attorney Joel Stern draft the ordinance.
Chief answers council questions on misreads, probable cause and cost
Before opening the hearing on the Apache Junction license plate reader ordinance, council members put several questions to Police Chief Michael Pooley. Councilmember Bambi Johnson asked whether the cameras, in use for about three years, have misread plates. Pooley said they have. However, he said a person always checks the photo before anything goes out, and officers put “human eyes on the plate” before acting.
Councilmember Bryan Soller asked whether a Flock alert by itself amounts to probable cause. Pooley said it does not. Soller added that departments elsewhere made mistakes by treating it that way. Instead, he said, officers must investigate and build probable cause on their own, because the system is “just a tool.”
Mayor Chip Wilson said several people have asked him how many officers the city could hire by dropping the camera contract. Pooley said the department spends about $80,000 on license plate readers, while one officer costs about $120,000 with benefits. “It would not pay for one police officer,” he said. The city could not afford enough officers to replace what the cameras do, he added.
Pooley also described a case from two weeks earlier. According to him, an 18-year-old came home from a late shift at a fast-food restaurant and found a stranger waiting at her house. The man took her at gunpoint, hooded her and took her to his home about five houses away, Pooley said. She was beaten so badly she needs facial reconstruction, he added. After the man released her, she was taken to a hospital and described a few details, and police used Flock to find the vehicle and arrest the suspect within 30 to 45 minutes. Because the suspect lived so close, police did not know whether she was still in danger, Pooley said. Without the system, the arrest probably would have taken several days or longer, “and who knows what would’ve happened,” he said.
Finally, Soller said Pooley had invited everyone at an earlier hearing to visit the police department, see the system and read the contract. Pooley said no one came except an incoming council member.
Work session leaves police policy to the chief, calls for body camera rules
On Oct. 5, the council reviewed Stern’s draft of the license plate reader code at a work session and asked for two changes. The first turned on the difference between city code and police policy. The code is law, and only the council can change it. Police policy is the department’s internal rulebook, which the chief writes and the city attorney usually reviews, Stern said. The draft would have also required the chief to get the city manager’s approval before changing the department’s license plate reader policy.
Stern said the idea came from Soller, who wanted the council to know when the department brings in new surveillance technology. However, Johnson pointed out that the wording did something else. It covered changes to the department’s written rules, not the purchase of new cameras or other tools. Pooley said having the city manager approve police policies is “not normal,” and Stern agreed it “hand-ties the police chief.” Johnson also argued the requirement would work against the council’s effort to be open. The city faces “so much pushback” from people who say it is not transparent, she said. For the last few weeks, she added, the council has worked to put the camera discussion where residents can see it. Sending police policy to a city manager “who was not elected by the citizens” would be “an issue with the general public,” Johnson said.
Stern said any change to the code must come to the council anyway, and Soller said he expected the council would hear about new technology anyway, “’cause you’re gonna have to fund it.” Pooley also promised to bring new tools, such as red light or speed cameras, to the council first. With that, council members agreed to remove the city manager approval requirement.
Soller and Johnson raised the second change. Soller said body-worn camera video should be used or shared only for government purposes. The draft’s misuse section already named drones and the real-time crime center, so the council directed Stern to add body cameras to that list. Councilmember Tess Nesser then asked whether the code would also cover future technology. Stern said it would, because the code names types of technology rather than vendors such as Axon or Flock.
Residents ask for warrants, sharing limits and public audits
Kimberly Carroll said she opposes mass surveillance but offered three amendments if the council moved ahead. Penalties come after the harm, she said, and the best protection is preventing the search in the first place.
First, she noted that under the draft, any misdemeanor investigation can open a search of anyone’s driving history in the city. A supervisor approves it, and no judge oversees it, she said. She asked that searches require a judge’s warrant, with narrow exceptions for hot-list alerts, Amber Alerts and missing or endangered persons.
Second, she said the draft bans selling residents’ data but not sharing it, and it says nothing about state or federal agencies or what Flock itself does with the data. She asked for a ban on sharing with those agencies, data brokers or any third party without a warrant, written into the Flock contract.
Third, she noted that a city employee reviews the audits and nothing requires the results to be made public. She asked for monthly audit results posted publicly and reviewed by a board independent of city staff. “These aren’t anti-police amendments. They’re pro-Constitution,” she said. Without her changes, she called the ordinance “compliance theater.”
Nola Perkins said she supports the police department and credited the cameras with recovering vehicles and finding missing people. Still, she said the issue is “bigger than whether the technology can be useful.” Instead, it is about “the limits we place on government power,” she said. She asked what will protect residents 10 or 20 years from now under different leaders, and she urged the council to make the rules “strong enough to protect the innocent as well as help find the guilty.” She called a Class 1 misdemeanor “a slap on the wrist” and said safeguards belong in enforceable law rather than department policy.
Ken Taylor asked whether a warrant could be required. He questioned whether a doorbell camera could have produced the same lead in the kidnapping case. He also said it isn’t clear what the technology will be able to do as it develops. “That is something to be concerned about,” he said.
Speakers describe tracking, lost privacy and distrust
Donna Carr, who submitted 95 signatures seeking removal last month, said the system reads more than plates. According to her, Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple told a meeting that the cameras capture make, model, year, bumper stickers, dents and missing chrome. Teeple had a Flock representative run his plate, she said, and he could identify himself in the blurred image of the driver’s seat. Carr said residents lose privacy “a little bit every time” a new reader appears, and she compared the cameras to surveillance in China. She said she keeps her phone in a Faraday bag so no one can track her.
Tim Picciott tied the cameras to his experience on social media. In 2016, he said, he ran what he called the largest pro-Trump libertarian page in the country, reaching millions of people a day until the term “fake news” went viral. He has been shadow banned ever since, he said. Later, he said, two media channels he co-hosted lost their funding, and one was removed from YouTube. “I already know what it looks like when your speech gets turned off for saying the wrong thing,” he said. “No warning, nobody votes on it, and one day the switch is flipped.” He warned that a government able to track where people drive could more easily find and target its critics. He cited an estimate by University of Hawaii political scientist R.J. Rummel that governments killed 262 million of their own people in the 20th century, six times as many as died in combat in all of that century’s wars. He asked the council to imagine if the British had had this technology during the Revolutionary War. “Any step towards more surveillance needs to be stopped,” he said. Picciott also predicted that private contractors, federal agencies and other countries would have backdoors into the technology. He acknowledged “a few feel-good stories,” such as the case the chief described or a lost grandparent with dementia found through Flock. However, he said a federal government that “spent decades protecting Jeffrey Epstein” should not be trusted when it says the technology will stop human trafficking. He urged the council to remove every plate reader, including Flock and Axon products.
Adam Richard Merritt Jr., a veteran, said he moved from Oregon nine years ago and feels safe enough here to leave his car unlocked. He said he committed multiple felonies in Oregon, and police there never needed a plate reader to find him. He called the cameras “an information gathering system.” Veterans who risked their lives in combat did not do so “to come back here and be surveyed everywhere they go,” he said.
Another speaker said residents had “overwhelmingly said they did not want these Flock cameras,” and the new rules only put “a little bit of lipstick” on them. He warned that constituents “will vote you out.” Karl Williams said police corruption exists, and he called Mesa’s police department “one of the worst.” As an example, he pointed to Daniel Shaver, who was fatally shot by a Mesa police officer in 2016, and said Shaver “was murdered.” The officer was acquitted in 2017. He also pointed to what he saw as a double standard. Stern had argued in September that drivers have no expectation of privacy in public, Williams said, yet Apache Junction police arrested a man for filming in public at the post office.
Hacking risk, vendor control and the $80,000
Maggie Berizzi said she understands the trade-off when a child’s safety is at stake, but Flock’s security worries her. She said hackers at DEF CON, an annual hacker conference, were able to hack Flock “very easily.” She said residents would have no recourse against the private company if their information were used against them. She also worried about what could happen if a different kind of government took power and used the cameras to watch residents “at all times.” As an example of where such technology can lead, she cited Lavender, which she said helps decide “who lives and who dies.” An investigation by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli army used Lavender, an AI program, to mark tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza as possible air strike targets with little human oversight. The Israeli military rejected that account, saying its information systems are only tools for analysts, who must independently verify each target.
Ed Kahle noted the department said in September that it shares data with about 60 other agencies. If each has 10 users, he said, 600 people could access it. He asked who watches Flock, the private company that runs the system.
Erlyn Huck said the $80,000 should not go to the technology because doorbell and building cameras already exist. She asked how often police solve crimes without the cameras, using help from the public, which she said is “always willing to step up.” Residents of a small community “don’t need to be treated like criminals upfront,” she said.
Supporters point to kidnappings and police tools
Dave McGrane, who lived with Flock cameras in Minnesota and Wisconsin, said he “couldn’t agree more” with concerns about individual freedoms. However, he asked residents to think about what the system could do if their own child were taken. Cameras are everywhere now, he said, and $80,000 is worth it if one person is saved. Afterward, he told the crowd he was sorry to go against them and that they were “all still good people.”
Austin Lanter, who described himself as career law enforcement, said being tracked and recorded in public is part of life in 2026. “You’re being watched all day long,” he said, pointing to phones and personal dash cams. Police already have tools that capture more information than Flock does, he said, and misuse is rare. He supported the criminal penalties because bad actors “make us look bad.” Lanter said no one has called for removing body cameras, which he said record everyone on every call. Finding the wrong person can cost officers their careers, he said, so Flock helps them find the right one. He suggested the speakers may be a vocal minority.
Council answers speakers before the vote
After closing the hearing, Soller said a misdemeanor is a legitimate crime that leads to booking into jail. The city can only create misdemeanors, he said, so it chose the most serious class. Under the new code, he said, resigning would no longer let an employee avoid the misdemeanor charge.
Councilmember Peter Heck called the issue “very controversial” and said both sides have a point. However, if the city keeps limiting the tools officers use to prevent and solve crimes, he said, “we’re letting evil get the upper hand.” He cited a girl abducted in Apache Junction who, he said, was found shortly afterward in Globe with help from the plate readers. Had he been her father, Heck said, he “would have been on my knees that night thanking God for our police officers and the Flock technology.”
The council then adopted the surveillance ordinance and its companion resolution, each by a 7-0 vote.
Case numbers: 26-497 (Ordinance No. 1579), 26-498 (Resolution No. 26-43) and 26-514 (Oct. 5 work session discussion).
