Big Brother Is Expanding, and He's Bringing Friends

Sept. 15: Chief John Chambers told City Council Chattanooga wasn't "going down that road" with Flock-style tracking. Sept. 21: Times Free Press reporters asked his department, point blank, whether the $13 million system on Tuesday's agenda does exactly that. CPD didn't answer. Tuesday: council votes anyway.

Here's the exact quote, on the record, from the Sept. 15 council meeting: "We're not interested in that granular technology," Chambers said, explaining why CPD's Motorola readers are different from Flock's. "Obviously, with the amount of privacy concerns that are very, very legitimate, we're not going to go down that road with Flock." He added that Motorola uses AI too, "but it's a more limited kind." Six days later, the Times Free Press put the obvious follow-up to his department directly: which AI functions does the new Axon system actually include, how does it differ from the Flock capability Chambers just described, and can officers search for a car or a person by description alone. CPD did not respond by publication.

That's not us characterizing CPD's position. That's the paper of record asking the department to clarify its own chief's public statement, on a $13 million purchase headed for a vote three days later, and getting silence. Axon's own sales materials say the new LPR system, integrated with Fusus, "allows users to search by vehicle make, body, color or features like bumper stickers or roof racks." No plate required. That's not our inference. That's the vendor's pitch.

Here's what didn't come up at either council meeting. The software that would do the stitching, pulling license plates, drone footage and body-cam video into one interface at CPD's Real Time Intelligence Center, is called Fusus. We listed it in our last piece without knowing the full story: "Fusus software: integrates LPR, drone, and body-cam feeds into RTIC. 2024. Grant-funded; figure undisclosed."

In February 2024, Axon Enterprise, the Taser company now asking for $13 million, bought Fusus outright. The following month, CPD announced its own Fusus expansion at RTIC on grant money, with RTIC supervisor Sgt. Billy Atwell telling a local news crew the platform let him "click on the call" and pull every nearby camera instead of scrolling through thousands. Chattanooga didn't wait for a public vote to start building an AI-linked camera network on Axon's platform. It's been running one, quietly, on grant funding that required no purchasing vote we've been able to locate, for two and a half years. Tuesday's package doesn't start that relationship. It's the city agreeing to pay full freight for it and expanding it from a slice of RTIC's camera list to all 300 streams the city has.

The Institute for Justice's national tracker lists more than 140 documented cases of license-plate-reader misuse, mostly Flock, but including "similar systems." Zoom in specifically on Axon's own platform, the one already running quietly in Chattanooga, and the record looks like this:

San Francisco: turned on protesters. Williams v. San Francisco, a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California, alleges SFPD used live access to a business improvement district's privately owned camera network, the identical model Fusus is built to run, to monitor protesters in real time, no warrant involved.

Lawrence, Kansas: the one place a community actually won a guardrail. When Lawrence PD proposed its own Fusus-powered real-time crime center, residents specifically objected to facial recognition touching live surveillance footage. The department's response, under that pressure, was to write a formal policy barring facial recognition from ever touching the RTCC. "So what we did is we crafted a policy procedure where facial recognition does not touch a real time crime center," a department spokesman said. Chattanooga's council has never been asked, on the record, to demand the same commitment from CPD.

El Cajon, California: the data didn't stay local. California's attorney general sued the city in October 2025, alleging it shared Fusus-collected plate data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies. A separate class-action suit filed this year claims Axon's Fusus-powered plate database operates without the usage and privacy policy state law requires.

Seattle: the ICE question, asked directly about this platform. When Seattle rolled out its own Fusus-based crime center this year, the ACLU named the specific risk: shared plate data could let "ICE and out-of-state agencies... arrest immigrants and prosecute people coming to Seattle for reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare while bypassing state protections." SPD's answer was that the department "controls where all of our data goes," the same assurance CPD would be making Tuesday, untested until the first outside records request actually arrives.

The scale underneath all of this. EFF counts nearly 150 jurisdictions running Fusus nationally (Minneapolis, Atlanta, Miami, Cleveland, New York among them) and has documented departments in multiple cities going door to door asking small-business owners and homeowners to volunteer their private security footage into the network.

None of this is an accusation against CPD. It's the track record of the specific vendor and platform CPD is asking council to expand fivefold. Two of these cities are in active litigation right now; a third, Seattle, faces a formal ACLU objection that hasn't yet reached a courtroom. Lawrence is the one example where a city got a real concession: a written policy, before rollout, forced by public pressure at a council meeting. Chattanooga hasn't had that meeting yet. Tuesday is it.

Nine days after our last piece, Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett paused all 70 of his office's license plate readers pending state and federal regulation. Collegedale's commission voted to stop using the cameras entirely. This summer, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs (yes, the former WWE wrestler) told Flock Safety the county sheriff's contract for more than 140 cameras was no longer valid. Nationally, NPR reported last month that at least 100 cities have deactivated ALPR cameras or canceled vendor contracts outright, in what the ACLU's Jay Stanley called a genuinely nonpartisan backlash: "opposition from the left... from MAGA Republicans, from mainstream Republicans, from centrists."

Chattanooga isn't following a national trend toward caution. It's moving against one, at the exact moment Tennessee's own political winds, per state reporting this month, are shifting the other way.

DeFlock Chattanooga, an unpaid, volunteer-run offshoot of the national open-source DeFlock project, has spent months mapping known ALPR camera locations around the city. A Change.org petition launched in late July, addressed by name to Mayor Tim Kelly, the City Council, and Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp, calls for removing Flock-style cameras and giving residents "a real say in surveillance decisions" before installation, not after. Its core complaint tracks exactly what CPD's own vote does Tuesday: technology "approved through police department budgets or vendor contracts with little to no public notice, hearing, or debate before installation." Neither group has commented publicly on this specific Axon vote as of this writing.

The $13 million ask isn't a standalone AI-surveillance vote council can debate on its own terms. It's packaged with 466 Tasers, 390 body cameras, and equipment for seven interview rooms: officer-safety hardware nobody on council wants to be on record voting against. A member who wants to question the 300-camera AI piece has to vote no on Tasers and body cams to do it.

Axon reports 125% net revenue retention on its public-safety contracts, meaning existing customers reliably spend more every year than the last. Its own investor materials describe the sequence: sell Tasers, then body cameras, then evidence storage, then Fusus, then whatever's next. CPD's five-year ask isn't the start of that sequence. Fusus already did that in 2024. This is the next rung.

City Council meets Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., 1000 Lindsay Street. Public comment is allowed once per person per council day. This is the first public vote the Axon/Fusus relationship has gotten since it started running two and a half years ago on grant money.

Nine years ago, sixteen cameras went up in Alton Park with no vote at all. Tuesday, 259 more streams get wired into the same room, bundled with equipment nobody's inclined to oppose, from a company whose own platform is under active legal challenge in at least two other cities. "Not Flock" was never really the question. The question Tuesday is whether anyone on that council asks CPD, on the record, the same thing the Times Free Press already asked and got silence on.

We asked how you felt about the cameras. Some of what came back:

On August 21, 1863, the first artillery shells landed inside the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, utterly surprising and scattering Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. The officer who ordered those shots to be fired was Captain Eli Lilly, commanding the 18th Indiana Light Artillery. Before the Civil War, Lilly worked as a druggist and had a deep fascination with chemistry. During the Chickamauga Campaign, he commanded the artillery of Colonel John T. Wilder's "Lightning Brigade," a role which eventually placed him squarely in the thick of the fighting along West Chickamauga Creek several weeks later on September 18, 19, and 20, 1863.

Lilly survived the battle and the war, eventually returning home and re-entering the pharmaceutical field. Under his family's leadership, Lilly Pharmaceuticals became one of the first companies in the United States to mass-produce penicillin, saving the lives of thousands of soldiers during World War II. It was also among the earliest producers of insulin, transforming the treatment of diabetes and improving the lives of millions.

Eli Lilly's legacy lives on today, continuing to save lives through the medications his company develops, all of which can be traced back to a young captain who survived the carnage of the second deadliest battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Chickamauga.

However, Lilly's success should bring us pause and cause us to ask ourselves how many cures, discoveries, or breakthroughs never came to be because their potential creators were lost to war?

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I keep thinking about how quietly things change.

Not the big things. Nobody storms a wall. Nobody burns down a building. It's smaller than that. It's a habit you stop keeping, a question you stop asking, a thing that used to bother you and doesn't anymore, not because it got better, but because you got used to it.

Vigilance isn't watching for one specific danger. It's staying awake to your own baseline, noticing when "normal" has quietly moved without your permission.

Most people don't lose what matters to them in a single moment. They lose it gradually, the way a room goes dark, not with the flip of a switch, but with the sun going down while you're busy doing something else, until you look up and can't remember when it happened.

Staying alert isn't the same as staying afraid. It's just refusing to let the ordinary stop being examined.

— Marie

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