ASHEVILLE, N.C.—On May 12, in a chamber overflowing with community members late into the evening, the Asheville City Council voted six to one to approve increased police surveillance funding and activity, with Councilperson Kim Rhoney the only vote of dissent. The decision was met with cries from residents citing violations of civil liberties and the institution of what some activists have called “Orwellian” justifications for heavier surveillance in this city of 95,000.
Resolution 2697 commits the Asheville City Council “to declare and reaffirm the protection of civil liberties of all residents and visitors in the collection and use of data obtained through the utilization of public facing cameras, license plate readers, and the operation of a real-time intelligence center….”
The resolution authorizes the usage of over $1.141 million secured via Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards to for the new surveillance center and related activities. The Asheville Police Department requested the funds through Edwards to procure equipment, software, and hardware to establish its new intelligence hub. The authorization was submitted on May 22, 2024, and secured in Feb. 2026 for the FY26 Appropriations Bill, with the funding managed by the Department of Justice.
Community members spoke against the resolution at great length, despite Mayor Esther E. Manheimer’s attempt to limit the normal three-minute speaking limit to two. Many residents in the council room shouted disapproval during the meeting, shouting, “This isn’t democracy! The people do not want this!”
Interim Police Chief Jackie Shemp was allowed to speak first, stating, “We’re working in an environment of increasing demand and limited capacity. At the same time, we’re operating without fully integrated, real-time capability.”
APD went on to make its case as to why the resolution is necessary, citing staffing allocation issues amidst the increase in federal, state, and local law enforcement activity in conjunction with anti-immigrant policy and ICE enforcement. The department’s argument was essentially that its officers are too busy and too few, thus necessitating the stepped-up public surveillance operation.
Community members, however, spoke out in majority against the resolution. Of the 36 commenters who signed up, 35 expressed their disapproval, with many citing worries about civil rights violations.
Aaron Dolstorm, an Asheville community member, focused like many others on the company that would be providing management services for the surveillance systems, a firm called Axon.
“Axon has a history of ratcheting up the price on its customers throughout the life of a contract. They’re quite proud of it, actually, and brag about it in this investor presentation which highlights Axon’s financial incentives to bring military industrial complex and ever-present surveillance to a town near you,” Dolstorm said. “It provides insights into the company’s strategy of extracting more resources from every customer every year. They have a name for that strategy, they call it the ‘Flywheel of Growth.’”
According to Axon’s 2025 fourth quarter report, the “Flywheel of Growth” begins with the building of an integrated bundle of subscription plans followed by repeated upsells to higher cost bundles every year. Axon said the strategy has a 125% net revenue retention rate, yearly. That means customers’ costs go up 25% on average annually, regardless of the contract they’re under.
Axon also has an “Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity” contract with federal law enforcement, including ICE, for body cameras as well as software. An IDIQ is a contract with the federal government that “provides for an indefinite quantity, within stated limits, of supplies or services during a fixed period. The Government places orders for individual requirements,” according to Title 48 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It’s like an open-ended blank check, of sorts.
Sarah E. Kent, a West Asheville resident and an application security consultant, presented a threat model analysis about the resolution, stating: “We the public have yet to see Axon’s contract with the city of Asheville. But reviewing online versions of Axon’s master services and purchasing agreements show that these agreements are boilerplate and not negotiated per customer. I also referred to the cloud services privacy notices, which is referenced in these agreements.”
Kent called attention to the additive nature of Axon’s contracting practices, “This matters because the council may be told that staff can negotiate safeguards into the contract. Axon does not negotiate these agreements. They publish a version, they update it, and customers sign what is on the page.”
She then went on to discuss the type of data Axon collects on residents.
“Axon aggregates live and recorded video from across police body cameras, in-car cameras, automated license plate readers, drones, and any private business camera that gets registered into the network. It already includes gunshot detection. In December 2025, Axon launched its first live pilot of facial recognition on body cameras, ending a six-year self-imposed pause.”
However, Kent continued further and brought the council’s attention to Axon’s collection of metadata. Metadata is information that pertains to other forms of data, such as dates and times of the creation of files, search engine queries, changes to webpages, as well as other forms of administrative information.
“Axon’s privacy notice calls this ‘non-content data’ and defines it broadly to include application logs, device logs, service event logs, and transaction logs. Axon’s AI technology appendix,” Kent read out from the standard customer agreement with Axon, “spells out the behavioral telemetry,” meaning the AI is able to build and understand a behavioral profile of a user based on their clicks, video recordings, and more.
The city council has asserted it will protect community members’ information. “You can’t promise that,” responded Jessica Myers. “Most of my career was spent negotiating complex contracts under complex master contracts—the same sort of form that Axon Enterprises use. I’m curious about how the city attorney is going to be expected to wield Asheville’s power against a contract from a company this size, backed by the federal government, who is using it as a Trojan horse to investigate, to bring ICE into our city, to track people who are trying to find reproductive health.”
Myers demanded to see the contract, which council had said it would make available during the meeting; it was never produced.
People’s World spoke with community member Andreas Elder, who also commented during the meeting. “This resolution was a combination of three funding resolutions. The reason for this, at least according to the police chief, was that it would be cheaper in the long run. One of the resolutions in this combination was to outline the costs of and acceptance of a program called FUSUS, a software owned by a company Axon.”
FUSUS is the program that collates public cameras within a police department’s jurisdiction with public cameras that opt into the system. Elder continued, “I opposed this resolution because I oppose any measure to create a mass surveillance state at either the city, state, or federal level. It is a method for the government to control its population.”
Expressions of anger and distrust could be heard throughout the council hall after the vote was taken, with residents demanding the ability to speak, as the public comment period was cut short at midnight. Despite almost complete, vehement pleas for denial of the project, the Asheville City Council defied the voters demands and adopted the Axon contract.
As communities of color are increasingly targeted by federal and local law enforcement in accordance with anti-immigrant policy, fears of racist policing continue to grow. And with a local history of violent law enforcement and red-lining against Black communities in Asheville as early as the 1930s, the introduction of FUSUS, Axon’s surveillance technology, and an active surveillance center where facial recognition software would be actively used by APD, residents fear the worst is yet to come.
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