Anchorage Assembly memo says Axon contract leaves vendor in control of police metadata

Anchorage cannot fully control what Axon does with the metadata its police cameras, license plate readers and evidence systems generate, Assembly Vice Chair Daniel Volland writes in a memorandum filed for the Anchorage Assembly's October 6 meeting.

It is one of three memos Volland dated September 25 inside a 177-page information memorandum, the background packet filed with an ordinance, on the surveillance ordinance AO 2026-108(S-1). Bound with them are the Axon quote, the master services agreement and the privacy policy. The packet is not yet public.

"A review of the Axon contract documents reveals no explicit authorization for Axon to sell or commercially exploit Anchorage's identifiable law-enforcement evidence," he wrote. His objection is structural: "multiple provisions collectively allow Axon to retain, analyze, aggregate, transform, and indefinitely store derivatives and metadata generated from Anchorage data."

The hinge is a distinction between Customer Content, the evidence Anchorage owns, and Non-Content Data: metadata, access logs, usage analytics and performance metrics. "Anchorage does not control downstream use of Non-Content Data," the memorandum says.

The vendor's own policy says as much. "Axon is a Data Controller for Non-Content Data," the cloud services privacy policy states, the term for who decides how data is used, adding that Axon may analyze and report anonymized and aggregated Non-Content Data to external and internal stakeholders. The same document says Axon will not use Customer Content for advertising or other commercial purposes.

The claim the memorandum leans on hardest is the one its attachments support least: that partner sharing severs municipal control over retention, deletion and accountability. Those words appear verbatim in the packet, but inside a clause governing My90, Axon's community survey product, rather than evidence sharing generally. The 177 pages do not resolve whether an equivalent clause applies to evidence.

The Assembly approved the 60-month Axon package on September 23, 2025, at a cost not to exceed $11,795,175.04, as a cooperative purchase through Sourcewell contract 101223-AXN, nearly a year before the oversight ordinance was drafted.

The sponsors told the September 25 work session that the Real-Time Crime Center keeps no data beyond 14 days unless it becomes evidence, and that scanned plate data is deleted automatically after 14 days. Those are policy, not code, which they give as their reason to legislate.

The drafts also split on warrants for outside agencies: the S-1 requires one, the version it replaces does not. Action on the ordinance is set for October 20, when the Assembly takes public testimony.