Anchorage Assembly sponsors say Axon police contract lets vendor keep metadata

Anchorage Assembly members Daniel Volland, Keith McCormick and Sydney Scout say the city's $11.8 million police technology contract lets Axon keep, combine and analyze metadata from police data with no end date, according to a draft memo posted with Sept. 25 work session documents.

The three sponsor a version of the city's surveillance ordinance that would define surveillance data to include metadata and require Assembly approval before any contract materially expands a covered technology. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance and Assembly members Jared Goecker and Yarrow Silvers sponsor a competing version. The Assembly holds a second work session on the ordinance Wednesday, and debate and amendments open Oct. 20, according to the sponsors' slides.

Volland, the Assembly vice chair, wrote that he found no explicit permission for Axon to sell or commercially exploit the city's identifiable evidence. The main risks, he wrote, come from permissions on aggregation, derivatives, metadata and retention that together let Axon "retain, analyze, aggregate, transform, and indefinitely store derivatives and metadata generated from Anchorage data."

The city owns its evidence, which the contract calls "Customer Content." But the city agrees to let Axon use "Non-Content Data," such as metadata, access logs and usage analytics, to improve its current and future products. The contract bars Axon from selling city content, using it in advertising or sharing identifiable content unless legally compelled.

Under the TASER Data Science Program, Axon gets a perpetual license to de-identified data from TASER reports, body camera footage and incident reports, and owns the "Transformed Data" built from it. The appendix for My90, a community survey tool, lets Axon monetize survey responses and keep shared data indefinitely, outside the city's retention policy.

The quote also enrolls Anchorage by default in Tier 1 of Axon's Customer Experience Improvement Program, which lets Axon use de-identified segments of customer content to build products. The city can revoke that consent at any time.

The Assembly approved the contract 11-1 in September 2025, according to the sponsors' slides.

The slides say the sponsors used the name Flock as shorthand for technology the public knows, and call Axon its direct competitor. Plate reading in Anchorage runs through Axon dash camera software, purged after 14 days under policy, the slides say.

"Alaska is the last state without a Flock network. Keeping it that way should be a decision of this body, written in code, not a vendor setting," the sponsors wrote.