"A camera cannot teach a child, cure an illness, or feed a family; it can only document the consequences of a government failing to do so."
This Tuesday, Cherokee Votes on Mass Surveillance
On October 20th, the Board of Commissioners votes on one ten-year, $37 million contract that would put the police's tasers, body cameras, car cameras, plate readers, drones, records, and AI in the hands of a single surveillance company: Axon.
The contract
| Tech | Today | New contract |
|---|---|---|
| Body cameras | 320 | 350, with livestreaming |
| TASERs | 308 TASER 7 | 350 TASER 10 |
| Evidence licenses | 215 Pro, 150 Basic | 400 Pro |
| Cloud storage | 1.95 TB | Unlimited |
| Drones | 2 | 16 |
| Patrol-car cameras | 201 | 201, with livestreaming |
| Fusus streams | 1,500 | 1,500 |
| Records system | Sheriff's current one | Axon's, with 543 licenses. All old records converted. |
| AI | None | “AI Era” package |
| Counter-drone | None | A trailer with radio sensors and a long-range radar |
| Training and facilities | None | Virtual reality training and two interview rooms |
Item 12.1, the "Technology Agreement for the Sheriff's Office" of the October 20th agenda asks the Board to approve "a consolidated agreement with Axon Enterprise Inc. for existing and future public safety technology, equipment, software, licensing, support, and related services, for an initial annual cost of $3,441,563.00 beginning in FY2027, with a total 10-year contractual value of $37,287,493.75," intended to replace all of the Sheriff's Office's existing Axon contracts, and significantly expand the scope of surveillance technology in our county.
Axon's quote describes each item included in the contract and its cost. Most of it is one bundle, the "Officer Safety Plan 10 Premium": the body cameras officers wear (newly equipped with livestreaming capabilities, and with which Axon is experimenting with facial recognition), the TASER 10 stun weapon (which seem to rapidly deteriorate and require replacement), the Evidence licenses and cloud storage that hold and share their video (now completely unlimited), Fusus (a searchable network that pools footage and data from body cameras, car cameras, and cameras from private businesses), virtual reality training (video games for cops), and the counter-drone trailer (sensors that detect other people's drones). The bundle costs $16.85 million in all. "AI Era", which bundles Draft One (auto-generated police reports which tend to be quite racist), Axon Assistant (a voice assistant on the body camera, equipped with a translator that seems to constantly hallucinate slurs), Form One (fills out forms from transcripts, so you don't need to know what you're signing) and Brief One (summarizes evidence transcripts, so AI can decide which evidence isn't important), Smart Detection (automatically finds and tracks every person in body camera video), Policy Chat (a chatbot that answers questions about department policy, in case you skipped orientation), and "future AI Era releases," is $8.22 million. Fleet 3, the patrol-car cameras (equipped with license plate readers; Axon already reports 8.1 billion plate reads logged), is $5.17 million, including new antennas and routers. Drones (which Axon's ethics board resigned over, due to plans to equip them with tasers) are $4.06 million. Axon's records system, which would replace the Sheriff's current one, is $2.37 million.
Ten Years of Burning Money
The Sheriff's Office says the county pays Axon "close to $1.358M/yr" across all its contracts today. The new contract is $3,441,563 in year one, and rises to $3,959,935.75 per year in five years: nearly triple the cost of the current contracts.
They claim the contract saves the county more than $15 million. This is incredibly misleading: the county would pay $23.7 million more over ten years than it pays now. The "savings" come from comparing the contract to what it would cost to buy "all deliverables purchased separately at standard Sourcewell Cooperative MSRP," a hypothetical "max" price that the county was never going to pay. Much of what is being priced, like the new records system, the AI package, and most of the drones, is equipment the county doesn't have today.
In theory, the Board could cancel this contract at the end of any fiscal year. In practice, they never will: deputies would already carry the tasers and cameras, the evidence, records, and AI would sit in Axon's cloud, and the county's agenda request admits that switching vendors "would require substantial replacement or duplication of existing equipment, software,… and evidence-management infrastructure." Axon's terms and conditions contain a predatory early-exit fee for the difference between the equipment's standalone price (MSRP) and what the county pays. A ten-year contract like this is, by design, unthinkably difficult for a county to exit when they inevitably regret it.
Axon Is Flock's Evil Twin
Two months ago, Axon's CEO Rick Smith told investors, when asked about customer resistance: "I'm sure you all have seen the DeFlock movement, which is, you know, has some broader anti-surveillance sort of momentum." He went on to say "the critics aren't all wrong," and acknowledged cases of people "abusing their access to license plate reader data." And then the pitch: "we're seeing a significant number of agencies want to come over to Axon and convert from existing license plate readers to us."
Axon clearly sees itself as the alternative to Flock for agencies that want out, yet it's the same kind of mass surveillance company, with all the same problems. And Cherokee is set to sign with it for ten years while a Senate investigation into how Axon collects, keeps, and shares the data from its cameras is still open.
Cities and counties that left Flock for Axon tend to regret it. Axon is as reckless with their ALPRs (automated license plate readers) as Flock: Syracuse, New York, dropped Flock after its police were found to have exposed drivers' data to thousands of outside agencies, including federal immigration authorities, and then signed a five-year Axon contract. Months later, the NYCLU's Daniel Schwarz reported that "virtually all ALPR laws are continuously being violated, both by government entities and by the vendors." Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Council voted 10 to 4 to block the LAPD's switch to Axon ALPRs after local backlash ousted Flock. Locals there had quickly realized that Axon had all the same problems.
Axon's AI software has a similarly terrible track record. It doesn't seem to save any police time: a trial in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that "AI assistance did not significantly affect the duration of writing police reports." They also make them significantly worse: a 2026 study in which 92 senior officers reviewed 80 reports, 20 written with Draft One, found that the AI reports were rated "substantively and significantly worse on ACCURACY." And they introduce quite a bit of bias: Axon's chief product officer admitted to Fortune this month that Draft One models use more heated language and ascribe more guilt to Black suspects than white ones.
And like Flock, Axon is riddled with security vulnerabilities. Among many other incidents, Axon was forced to admit that three flaws in its camera software "can be chained together and result in attackers gaining full access and control over all aspects of the IP cameras." In May, a hacker showed ABC an app that tracks police by the Bluetooth signals from Axon cameras and tasers, and said it can work from up to 400 meters away. (Axon later admitted that its "Stealth Mode" doesn't stop its devices from emitting radio signals.) In a rapidly approaching future where free, open-source LLMs are developing serious hacking abilities, these vulnerabilities are just warning shots for the consequences of such sensitive data (every video, evidence file, record, plate read, and drone feed) being concentrated in one company's cloud.
What You Can Do
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Harry Johnston (Chairman) | hjohnston@cherokeecountyga.gov |
| Will Cagle (District 1) | wcagle@cherokeecountyga.gov |
| Richard Weatherby (District 2) | rbweatherby@cherokeecountyga.gov |
| Benny Carter (District 3) | bcarter@cherokeecountyga.gov |
| Corey Ragsdale (District 4) | caragsdale@cherokeecountyga.gov |
| Frank Reynolds (Sheriff) | fareynolds@cherokeecountyga.gov |
Axon doesn't belong in Cherokee County. We should be finding a way to oust Axon entirely, not locking ourselves into ten more years of it.
We won't accomplish that on Tuesday: Axon is already woven into the county through the Sheriff's body and car cameras (an agreement which runs through September 2027) and the drone program (which runs into 2030). That doesn't unwind overnight, but we can stop the Board from cementing ten more years of it.
Here's what you can do:
- Email the commissioners and the Sheriff, today if you can. Implore them to vote no on item 12.1, or at least table it until the public has more time to learn about Axon.
- Attend the Board meeting, October 20th, at 6:00 PM, at the Cherokee County Admin Complex, 1130 Bluffs Parkway, Canton 30114. The first five speakers to sign up in person each get three minutes: that's about 350 words, so come prepared.
- Spread the word. Most of our neighbors don't even know this vote exists. Send this article to three of your friends, post it in your neighborhood group, and be loud!
Join us
We're a local group of concerned residents fighting mass surveillance, in all its forms, in Cherokee County. Interested in joining or getting in touch? Email us.
Special thanks to our friend and neighbor Steve Butler, who does great independent research and uploads incredible infographics. Steve went through every Board agenda and set of minutes the county has online, all the way back to 2017, asked the Sheriff's Office the hard questions in writing, and shared all of it with us. Much of this post exists because of his work.