Citizens of Charleston, WV Against Mass Surveillance
They call them license plate readers. They're much more.
Charleston already owns almost all of the building blocks needed for a citywide AI-enabled surveillance network: fixed and in-car license plate readers (ALPR), body-worn cameras, access control systems, and AI-capable cameras installed in public spaces. Modern public safety platforms such as Motorola's Avigilon Control Center are designed to integrate many of these systems into a single interface, with additional capabilities often enabled through software licensing add-ons rather than new hardware purchases. Without greater transparency and independent oversight, residents have no reliable way to determine which capabilities have been activated, what data is being collected, how long it is retained, or how it is being used.
This website documents the surveillance technologies deployed throughout Charleston, where the City has already spent almost $2 million on this equipment, examines the companies and government agencies behind them, and publishes the public records, technical research, and analysis needed to inform the public and hold decision-makers accountable.
We are calling on the City of Charleston to prohibit the purchase, activation, or use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, including facial recognition, gait analysis, behavioral and crowd anomaly detection, AI-assisted drone or robotic surveillance, automated audio detection such as gunshot detection, and any comparable technologies, from Motorola, Flock, Axon, or any current or future vendor. Such a policy should ensure that existing cameras and sensors cannot be transformed into a unified AI-powered tracking network without public debate, legislative approval, and meaningful democratic oversight.
The future of surveillance in Charleston should not be decided behind closed doors. Contact your City Council representatives, attend Council meetings, ask questions, demand transparency, and make your voice heard before these technologies become entrenched.
Each exhibit below documents a distinct, verifiable problem with the AI surveillance already present in Charleston — license-plate readers, facial recognition, and audio detection — whether operated by the police department or by private companies on land bordering public streets.
Charleston Police Department currently operates a stationary Motorola license plate reader on Pennsylvania Avenue. Classified as "passive" and described as used only for active investigations, the technology must still scan and log every single vehicle that passes in order to find a match.
38.3593, -81.6413 — CPD ALPR, Pennsylvania AveFlock AI cameras are currently deployed at the Lowe's in Kanawha City, at Target and Lowe's in Southridge Mall, and at the Walmart and Lowe's in Cross Lanes. These are private AI camera deployments operating in the public sphere, pointed at our roads and sidewalks, collecting data on Charleston residents regardless of suspicion.
Charleston does not need to adopt Flock, Motorola, SignalTrace, or a similar ALPR/AI camera system to keep residents safe. The City already deploys standard, high-resolution IP and CCTV cameras at city buildings, parking garages, event venues, parks, and intersections.
Charleston should weigh the experience of other cities and jurisdictions where AI surveillance technology — including license-plate readers, facial recognition, and audio detection — has led to documented misuse, public backlash, and, in some cases, the end of the contract entirely. See the case log below, drawn from recent, publicly reported coverage cited in full at the end of this record.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested and charged five former Albany Police Department officers with misuse of license plate data and violation of their oath of office, after an internal audit found they had accessed the department's Flock system repeatedly for non-law-enforcement purposes, including stalking the movements of former romantic partners and other private citizens with no connection to any investigation. A Greene County sheriff's deputy was separately arrested days later on similar allegations. [Source 1, Source 2]
The Los Angeles Police Department announced it would not renew its Flock contract, with LAPD's chief information officer citing unresolved concerns around civil liberties, civil rights, and how collected data is handled. [Source 3]
Huntington City Council voted 6 to 4, in a meeting that ran roughly eight hours past 4 a.m., to approve a five-year, more than $2.1 million contract with Flock for license plate readers, live cameras, audio detection, and drone services. More than 50 residents spoke against the contract, and protestors rallied outside City Hall throughout the meeting. Charleston should hold public meetings requesting resident input before moving forward, and learn from, not repeat, this outcome. [Source 4, Source 5, Source 6]
In Houston, at least half a dozen Flock cameras were cut down and spray painted over the course of a single week in July 2026, prompting an ongoing police investigation. In northeast Wisconsin, the cities of Kaukauna, Appleton, Grand Chute, Oshkosh, and Sturgeon Bay have all ended or declined to renew their Flock contracts, citing privacy concerns and an inability to audit data sharing. In Suffolk, Virginia, a 41-year-old U.S. Air Force engineer, Jeffrey Sovern, faces 13 felony counts of destruction of property for allegedly dismantling 13 Flock cameras over six months, and has pleaded not guilty while telling investigators he believes the cameras are unconstitutional. [Source 7, Source 8, Source 9, Source 10]
Charleston has spent almost $2 million on Motorola Solutions equipment over the past few years: body cameras, in-car systems, fixed cameras, license-plate readers, and door access control. Motorola appears to be the City's only vendor for this gear.
Here's the part that matters: nearly all of the video already being recorded, from body cameras, park cameras, and in-car systems, can be converted into AI-searchable data through the same Motorola software stack. A single software license upgrade, likely costing a few thousand dollars per camera rather than a major new contract, could make every one of those video feeds, plus license-plate scans and door-entry logs, cross-referenceable by time, location, and identity. That would turn a set of separate, disconnected cameras into one unified tracking network.
In practice, that network could be used to log which house of worship someone attends, or misused by anyone with access to watch children at splash pads and playgrounds across the city's parks. No council vote, audit, or public hearing currently stops the City from making that upgrade and switching on full AI surveillance.
| Category | Hardware | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Park Cameras, Citywide Source |
Motorola HXX Series fixed cameras. AI built in — YES | $245,907.49 |
| Body-Worn Cameras Source |
Motorola V700 body-worn cameras. AI built in — NO; with software, yes | $1,035,555 |
| ALPR: In-Car Cameras Source |
Motorola M500 in-car ALPR cameras. AI built in — YES | $147,227.76 |
| Fixed-Mount ALPR, West Side N/A |
Motorola L6Q Quick-Deploy License Plate Reader camera system. AI built in — YES | No Records |
| Card Access Readers Source |
Avigilon card readers — City Hall & Charleston Police Department. AI built in — NO; with software, yes | $64,351.60 |
| Charleston Civic Center AI Cameras Source |
Avigilon AI security cameras. AI built in — YES | $214,936.53 |
Motorola Solutions has built its ecosystem by acquiring specialized companies, Avigilon for cameras and facial-recognition AI, Vigilant Solutions for ALPR, WatchGuard for mobile video, and partnering with Skydio on drones, then stitching them together into one system. The goal is a single, unified intelligence grid where every camera, sensor, and drone feeds centralized command software. Below is how the hardware and software layers already deployed in Charleston integrate to form that network.
1 Edge Sensors — Motorola hardware
Classify and extract biometrics on-device: facial metrics, clothing color, gender, whether someone is carrying a backpack.
Microphones in camera housings use AI audio analytics to detect gunshots, breaking glass, car alarms, or raised voices.
Fixed and in-car units scan passing traffic, extracting plate, make, model, and color, checked instantly against hotlists.
LTE-connected, they can auto-trigger and stream live to the command center the moment an officer draws a weapon.
Card readers log exactly when a specific badge-holder passes a door, pairing identity with AI weapons screening.
Motorola CAPE software can pair with autonomous drones for live aerial video; unknown if CPD is evaluating this today.
2 Software Hubs — Motorola software
Runs Appearance Search and Identity Search: an operator can upload one face and scan the entire city's camera network for everywhere it has been seen.
The evidentiary backend for the mobile fleet, storing and indexing footage from V700 body cams and M500 in-car systems.
The apex of the ecosystem: a cloud-based, single-pane-of-glass dashboard for Real-Time Crime Centers. It ingests facial-recognition hits, ALPR hits, gunshot alerts, and drone telemetry, mapping all of it geographically on one screen.
3 Real World Nightmare — Wrongful Arrest By Police
This is not hypothetical. On Interstate 94 in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, a Flock Safety ALPR network, the same class of AI camera system Motorola/Vigilant Solutions sells, wrongly flagged a passing car as tied to a Milwaukee homicide, and officers acted on the alert alone. It shows exactly what happens when officers treat an algorithm's hit as ground truth.
Brookfield police officers received a severe alert from their Flock ALPR camera network claiming a passing SUV was directly connected to an active homicide investigation out of Milwaukee. Acting on the digital alert alone, officers initiated a high-risk felony stop, surrounding the vehicle with multiple squad cars and bringing interstate traffic to a halt. The driver was ordered out at gunpoint, hands raised, while a passenger held their hands out the window. The vehicle and its occupants had no connection to the crime; the algorithm was simply wrong.
Only after the stop did Brookfield officers contact the Milwaukee Police Department, and learned that MPD no longer needed the car or anyone inside it. It remains unclear why the vehicle was still flagged in the system, or why officers didn't confirm the alert with Milwaukee police before sending multiple armed units to intercept a car on a live interstate. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 26 cases since 2018 of innocent motorists detained at gunpoint or jailed because of ALPR errors like this one, most of them since 2022. An unverified automated alert was treated as probable cause for a felony stop.
The driver and passenger were eventually let go once Brookfield officers confirmed the alert was stale, but nothing about the stop itself — the drawn weapons, the halted highway, the felony-stop procedure — can be undone after the fact. Independent testing of Flock-style ALPR systems has found significant misread rates, and researchers point to the same root causes here: OCR errors that misread characters, and hotlists that departments fail to clear once a case closes. This is the exact failure mode Charleston is being asked to write blank checks against: an AI camera hit, officers certain enough to draw weapons, and residents left to hope the algorithm was right.
Cities that have successfully paused, cancelled, or placed real guardrails on AI surveillance and similar ALPR contracts, including Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, and even Putnam County here in WV, have generally asked their councils for the same core set of protections. I ask Charleston City Council to adopt the same approach.
Do not authorize any new or renewed contract with Flock Safety, Motorola/Vigilant Solutions, SignalTrace, or any comparable vendor unless presented as its own agenda item, with a public hearing and a recorded vote.
Before any further investment, commission an independent audit of all surveillance technology used by the City of Charleston and CPD, including fixed ALPR, in-car ALPR, and AI cameras. This audit must reveal who accessed the data, how often, for what specific investigative purpose, and whether any searches were run for personal or unauthorized reasons.
Any future contract must cap data retention at the shortest window that supports real investigations, days, not weeks or months, with automatic deletion after that.
Prohibit sharing Charleston's surveillance data with any other agency, including federal agencies such as ICE or CBP, without a warrant tied to a specific felony investigation recognized under West Virginia law.
Limit use to defined categories, such as felony investigations, missing person cases, and stolen vehicle recovery, and publish that policy so residents know exactly what the cameras can and cannot be used for.
Require CPD to publish yearly numbers on searches run, by whom, and for what purpose, and limit how surveillance data can be pulled through open records requests so it cannot be used to track or stalk a specific person.
Extend regulation to privately owned AI-surveillance and ALPR systems operating on Charleston's public rights of way, including the Lowe's location in Kanawha City, since these currently function as an unregulated extension of the same surveillance network.
Work with neighboring municipalities, including South Charleston and St. Albans, so residents are not left exposed simply by crossing a city line. Protections are only as strong as the weakest jurisdiction sharing the network.
Legislation to limit warrantless, real-time surveillance statewide, including House Bill 4682, has been introduced in 2025 and 2026. I ask Council to commit now to complying with any such law if enacted, and to hold off on new local contracts in the meantime.
The City's August 20 response to my FOIA request remains severely incomplete. The City must immediately provide all withheld policies governing its AI surveillance, including ALPR, cameras, Avigilon, and CommandCentral, specifically detailing who has data access, retention timelines, and whether these systems have ever been audited for constitutional violations.
Everything below is a public record. A Freedom of Information Act request was submitted to the City of Charleston on July 27, 2026, asking for the contracts, policies, and camera locations behind the City's AI surveillance spending. The City responded on August 20, 2026 — more than three weeks past the five-day statutory window, and without the policy documents that were requested. Read the request, the response, and every document the City did release.
The original request as filed, and the City's complete production as received. Download the full set as a single archive.
The Motorola Solutions agreements, extensions, and pricing schedules that commit Charleston to this vendor through 2031.
Site-by-site records for the AI-capable cameras installed in Charleston's parks and public facilities.
City officials need to hear from residents who refuse to surrender their civil liberties in the name of false security. You have the right to attend City Council meetings and speak during the public comment period.
Public comment at City Council meetings is possible on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of every month; check the Council Meeting Portal to confirm session dates.
Arrive early to sign up for public comment. The City allows a maximum of five speakers to make public comments each session; SPEAK OUT!
Ask the City to ban AI surveillance and audit what we have. Demand financial transparency and accountability from City officials using this tech today.