# Vendor-Controlled ALPR Trial Data When an ALPR trial runs on a vendor-hosted cloud platform, the operational record it generates — plate reads, hotlists, hit alerts, search logs, audit trails — lives in the vendor's system, not the agency's. When the trial ends, the agency's access ends with it. The agency is then unable to produce, or even inspect, the record of its own surveillance activity. The public record of a government surveillance program becomes the private property of the vendor, by the design of the trial. ## How it appears in the corpus Fayetteville PD ran the [[Axon Fleet 3 ALPR Trial]] for roughly ten weeks. It generated substantial operational data: "over 33,000 reads in approximately 32 hours," managed hotlists including a detective-driven list, automated hit alerts, and at least one NCIC-confirmed hit. When the FOIA request asked for usage and audit data (Item 3), FPD's interim message (2026-05-21, Gmail thread `19e4b04db749769f`) stated: > when our Axon ALPR trial ended, we lost access to all administration, data, hotlists, and logs related to ALPR. The production contains **no audit-log export, no search history, and no hotlist record** — only officers' email descriptions of the trial. The read counts and hit details that survive in the wiki survive only because officers happened to quote them in email. FOIA Item 3 is, as a result, effectively unanswerable: the documentary record of the program no longer exists within the agency's reach. ## Stakeholders - **The agency** — no longer holds the audit trail of its own surveillance operation; cannot self-audit or respond fully to records requests. - **The vendor** — sole custodian of the operational data, retained or discarded under its own terms. - **The public and records requesters** — cannot obtain the usage and audit records that would show how the surveillance capability was actually used. ## Timeline - 2026-02-12 to 2026-04-23 — the trial generates plate reads, hotlists, hits, and audit logs on Axon's platform. - 2026-04-23 — the trial ends; agency access to the data ends. - 2026-05-21 — FPD reports it has "lost access" to all of it. ## Notes This is the end-state of the [[ALPR Trial-to-Procurement Pipeline]]: the free trial leaves no agency-held record behind. It is related to, but more severe than, the Conway pattern in [[Flock Audit Logs and Retention]], where audit logs existed but were vendor-controlled and narrowed; here the agency-side record is gone entirely. A standing question for any ALPR trial is who holds the data when the trial ends, and whether the agency can satisfy a public-records request for its own surveillance history afterward.