Asheville Cut Flock. The County Built a 4,500-Camera Hub.

On August 25, 2026, the Asheville City Council voted to end the city’s Flock camera contract. It was a real step back from mass surveillance, and residents earned it. (The record is here.)

But Asheville sits inside Buncombe County — and the county’s Sheriff runs something far larger than the city’s plate readers. Its name is “Connect Buncombe.” It is built on Axon and its Fusus real-time platform, and the contracts we obtained show a system designed to pull public and private cameras across the county into one screen. We asked the Sheriff’s Office for the full record. It released two contracts and hid the rest.

4,500 cameras. One county.

Here is the number that should stop you. The Sheriff’s Office’s own Fusus service agreement provisions the platform for “up to 4,500 data points and 4,500 public/private video feeds” — and up to 30 terabytes of stored video and still images. That is the capacity to wire up four thousand five hundred camera feeds into a single county command platform, public and private, and keep the footage.

The platform is not a passive archive. The same agreement includes fususOVERWATCH, which the vendor markets to “track vehicles and people from one camera to another,” and it integrates license-plate readers, drones, and computer-aided dispatch into one feed. A camera registered by a business or a homeowner becomes a node the Sheriff can watch in real time.

The price: $13 million.

Two contracts came out. The Fusus service agreement runs five years at roughly $1.17 million and states that the “software and associated hardware will be delivered and installed.” The larger one is an Axon master agreement (CSID 4747), signed October 21, 2025, on a 132-month term, with a total cost of $13,048,484.86 — $13,528,986.07 with tax. The county bought it off a City of Charlotte cooperative purchasing contract, which let it skip a competitive bid. That is thirteen million public dollars committed to a decade of camera surveillance, approved without the scrutiny a stand-alone procurement would draw.

A licensing question the county won’t answer.

North Carolina regulates who may install, service, or monitor camera and analytic systems used to detect illegal activity. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 74D-2(a)(2), that work requires a Security Systems Licensing Board license. On August 28, 2026, the Board’s director confirmed in writing that Axon was “not licensed, no records on file” — Axon has since become licensed (Oct. 2026). Axon’s own Buncombe contract says it will “deliver and install” the equipment and provide “Installation and Technical Phone Support,” the licensable activity at issue.

A vendor in that spot can still comply — by hiring a licensed North Carolina contractor to do the physical installation. That is a routine arrangement, and it is how Flock ultimately came into compliance after a Wake County court halted it in 2023. So the real question is not whether the cameras exist; it is who installs and services them, and under whose license. That is exactly what we asked — Category D of our request sought the identity and Chapter 74D license numbers of everyone who installs, services, or monitors the system — and the county withheld it. We report the facts and leave the law to the Board, where we have put the question: our Chapter 74D complaint against Axon (which already includes the Asheville Police Department’s Axon Fleet ALPR, run since December 2023) and, on September 15, a Fourth Supplement adding the Sheriff’s “Connect Buncombe” contract. (Read the Fourth Supplement.)

They released two contracts — and hid the program.

We asked for the whole program: who is enrolled, who installs and services the cameras, what other systems it plugs into, and where the data flows. The Sheriff’s Office released the two contracts and withheld every other category — the participant registry, the device and fee records, the installer identities and license numbers, the integration inventory, the external data-sharing agreements, and the governing policies — behind a single block quotation of the criminal-investigations exemption, § 132-1.4, with no record-by-record basis and no attempt to segregate the public parts.

That is not how the exemption works. North Carolina courts read it narrowly, place the burden on the agency, and require it to release the public portions of a record rather than withhold whole categories. On September 15, 2026 we sent the Sheriff’s Office, through the county’s own records portal, a deficiency and litigation-hold demand for a cured production and preservation of the records. (Read the full request thread and our response.)

Who is behind the 4,500 cameras.

You don’t have to take our word for how this works. The county runs a public sign-up site — connectbcso.org, powered by Axon — that invites “businesses and residents” to enroll their own security cameras in two levels. Level 1, Register: you tell the Sheriff’s Office your camera exists, so investigators can ask you for footage. Level 2, Integrate: you plug in a “small fususCORE device” that gives the Sheriff’s Office “direct access to your camera feed.” Those are the county’s own words.

And it is already well underway. As of September 15, 2026, that same public site reports 2,586 cameras already integrated in Buncombe County — 2,586 private cameras wired to give the Sheriff’s Office direct, live access — plus 563 more registered. That is already more than half of the 4,500 feeds the contract is built to carry. Each one is a camera a business or resident aimed at their own property, now a live window the Sheriff’s Office can open.

This is not unique to the mountains. A hundred and eighty miles east, in the Cape Fear, the Sheriff’s own Connect New Hanover site reports 716 cameras integrated and 2,159 registered — the same Axon program, the same live-feed model. That office, like Buncombe, has not answered our records request for the list of who is enrolled.

So we asked the obvious question about Buncombe’s program: who is enrolled? A resident ought to be able to learn which storefronts along their daily route can hand the Sheriff a live view. The county’s answer was to withhold the entire list of participants as a criminal-investigation record under § 132-1.4 — the same categorical exemption New Hanover County has invoked in our other disputes with its Sheriff’s Office. The government’s position is that the list of private cameras feeding it video is itself a secret.

Built to plug into the federal network.

A county real-time crime center is not an island. The Fusus platform is designed to plug into the National Network of Fusion Centers that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stands up under federal law — 6 U.S.C. § 124h, the DHS State, Local, and Regional Fusion Center Initiative — which Congress directed to operate “in consultation with the program manager of the information sharing environment” created under 6 U.S.C. § 485. In North Carolina, that hub is the N.C. Information Sharing and Analysis Center (NCISAAC) — the state fusion center — which channels state and local information to DHS and its federal partners. The architecture points one way: a camera a business aims at its own doorway can end up feeding a query in Washington.

Does Buncombe’s program actually push data into that network? That is exactly what we asked. Category F of our request sought every agreement and connection by which program data is shared with NCISAAC, DHS, ICE, CBP, or the FBI. The county withheld it. So we know the pipe is built — we do not yet know what runs through it, because the government won’t say.

This is not just Buncombe.

On September 11, 2026 we filed the same records request with every North Carolina agency we could confirm runs an Axon “Connect” / Fusus program — eleven in all. Buncombe was simply the first to answer. The other ten:

• New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office — Connect New Hanover
• Guilford County Sheriff’s Office — Connect Guilford County
• Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office — Connect Forsyth County
• Raleigh Police Department — Connect Raleigh
• Greensboro Police Department — Connect Greensboro
• Winston-Salem Police Department — Connect Winston-Salem
• Fayetteville Police Department — Connect Fayetteville
• High Point Police Department — Connect High Point
• Mooresville Police Department — Connect Mooresville
• Rocky Mount Police Department — Fusus camera registry

Same platform, same vendor, same questions. As those answers arrive, we will publish them here.

The whole record is public.

Everything the county did release — both contracts, the request, and our response — is preserved permanently and free to read at the Internet Archive. A city can vote to walk back one camera network. A county can quietly stand up a bigger one next door. The difference between the two is whether anyone is reading the contracts — so we read them, and we published what we found.