Anchorage weighs surveillance rules 11 months after buying the system

Anchorage bought a surveillance system before it wrote any rules for one.

In September 2025 the Assembly approved a five-year contract worth about $11.8 million with Axon Enterprise, giving the police department a Real Time Crime Center built to take up to 750 camera feeds, along with automated license plate readers, drones capable of remote deployment, and equipment for detecting other people's drones. The vote was on the purchase. The city's surveillance chapter went untouched.

That chapter, Anchorage Municipal Code 3.102, had been assembled over six years from three separate measures. A 2018 ordinance set limits on how the city's own drones may be flown, barring routine patrol, warrantless evidence searches, and traffic enforcement (among other things). A 2023 ordinance banned municipal use of facial recognition. A 2024 measure moved body-camera standards into code.

It is a real body of law and it works. It simply has nothing to say about license plate readers, crime centers, or watching a live camera feed, because none of those existed in Anchorage when it was written.

So for eleven months the largest expansion of municipal surveillance in the city's history has operated under rules the police department wrote for itself.

Those rules exist. The chief of police adopted three of them effective February 2026, covering the crime center, the Drone as First Responder program, and license plate readers. They are not trivial documents. They cap plate data retention at fourteen days, limit historical searches to roughly ten employees, and require a case number for access. Chief Sean Case has described them to the Assembly in detail, and by his account the department has released plate data to a federal agency once this year, in a violent felony case, with a commander's approval.

But each of those policies states, in its own text, that it does not apply in any criminal or civil proceeding. A violation is an internal personnel matter and nothing else. Case acknowledged at an August work session that he can change a policy, and that so can whoever holds the job after him. Assistant Municipal Attorney Dean Gates told the same session that code supersedes policy: if the Assembly adopts conflicting rules, the department has to rewrite its own.

That is the choice in front of the Assembly on Tuesday. Not whether the limits are good ones, but whether they are law.

The ordinance up for hearing, sponsored by Assembly Members Keith McCormick and Sydney Scout and Vice Chair Daniel Volland, would repeal Chapter 3.102 and replace it with a version that reaches everything the department is now running.

Plate readers could compare against a hot list in real time and nothing else: vehicles reported stolen, vehicles tied to an Amber or Silver Alert, vehicles registered to someone with an outstanding felony warrant, and vehicles specifically named in an active felony or missing-person investigation. They could not be used for misdemeanors, minor offenses or civil violations at all. Searching plate data more than fourteen days old would require a warrant, and the entire authorization would expire on Jan. 1, 2031 unless the Assembly renews it.

Live camera monitoring would require a specific reason recorded before it starts: an incident in progress, an imminent threat of death or serious injury, a missing person, a felony investigation with a supervisor's written approval, or a warrant. The system would cut access off automatically after sixty minutes unless a supervisor writes a specific justification for renewal, and renewals would run thirty minutes each. Following a person or vehicle from camera to camera would be barred outside narrow emergencies. Feeds could not be left open on a wallboard between sessions.

Surveillance data would be deleted in fourteen days unless someone individually designates it as evidence, and the ordinance says bulk or automatic designation does not count. Deletion would have to be automated rather than manual, with the chief certifying each year that it works and disclosing any period when it did not.

The ordinance also does something the current chapter does not attempt. It requires Assembly approval before any agency acquires surveillance technology or materially expands what it already runs, regardless of cost, including free trials and demonstrations. A first approval runs ninety days. To keep the technology, the department comes back.

Case has argued that code cannot keep pace with changing technology, and the concern is not frivolous. Surveillance tools change faster than ordinances get drafted, and a department facing a violent crime in progress does not want to wait for a committee.

The ordinance's answer is that pace is the point. Its findings say limits on surveillance should sit in code "rather than in administrative policy subject to unilateral revision." The ninety-day approval is designed to let the Assembly say yes quickly and provisionally rather than never. And the department retains every emergency tool it has always had: a warrant, and the judicially recognized exceptions to needing one.

What the ordinance would end is the arrangement where a department decides on its own what it can do and writes the rules afterward.

Anchorage would not be unusual in deciding this. Alaska has no statute governing license plate readers at all, which is why the question lands on a municipal assembly. Across the country, cities have spent the past two years discovering what their own police departments bought, and in the Mat-Su Borough an assembly member has proposed banning plate readers outright.

The public hearing begins at 6 pm Tuesday in the Assembly Chambers at the Z.J. Loussac Library. Written and phone testimony is due by 5 pm Monday.