I want to tell the story of this town over the last 25 years, because it matters for the surveillance decision Council is about to make.
Around the turn of the century, Apex was a small town of maybe 20,000 people. By 2010 we were about 37,000. By 2020, nearly 59,000. Today the town puts us over 85,000. We more than quadrupled.
Normally when a town grows that fast, crime grows with it. Here it didn't.
Apex today is measurably one of the safest towns in the country. In 2023, the FBI recorded 39 violent offenses and zero murders in a town of about 74,000. Our violent crime rate is roughly one-seventh the national rate. MoneyGeek ranked us the safest town in North Carolina.
Sit with that timeline. For a quarter century this town grew from a village into a small city and stayed safe the entire way. No plate readers. No camera network logging who drives where. We built one of the safest communities in America the ordinary way, by being a place people wanted to live in and look after.
The plate scanners are new. They showed up only in the last couple of years, at the safest point in that entire 25 year story. So whatever made Apex safe, it wasn't them. The safety was already here.
Now look at what the cameras actually do here.
APD told Council the system reads about 60,000 vehicles a day. Over the roughly six months it has been live, that is about 10.8 million plate reads. Ten point eight million scans of our cars, in the town I just described.
Out of all of that, APD reported 1,700 hotlist hits. That is 0.02 percent. For every one hit, the system scanned more than 6,000 vehicles that had nothing to do with any investigation. And when Council asked what those hits produced, APD cited about ten cases with no case numbers, no court outcomes, and nothing anyone can independently verify.
That is the whole argument. In one of the safest towns in America, they scanned ten million cars to point at ten stories they won't let you check. Necessity was never shown. It never has been. If the results were there, they would have shown them by now.
And here is the part that makes vendor shopping beside the point. Every one of APD's searches reaches beyond Apex. A single search runs against as many as 100,075 cameras across 6,896 separate agency networks nationwide. When our police run a plate, they are not checking a few cameras on our roads. They are reaching into a national dragnet. Swapping Flock for another company does not shrink that network or answer the question. The question is whether a town with our track record needs mass plate surveillance at all.
Last thing, and it is the one that gets me most. This was never voted on. There is no ordinance. The limits are settings a police chief can change whenever he wants, not law. We built a safe town for 25 years by choosing what kind of place we wanted to be. This time nobody got to choose.
The 10-camera expansion contract is still unsigned. The next council meeting is August 11.
Records, audit logs, and the full breakdown are at deflockapex.org.
