# D002 — Thesis: The Successor Directive Conway PD's Chief Has Not Issued Is the Agency's Act ## Claim The absence of any successor internal directive adequate to platform-era license-plate-reader configuration is **Conway PD's act under unilateral chief authority**, not a structural impossibility imposed from outside the agency. The chief of police possesses, and has demonstrably exercised, unilateral authority to promulgate written LPR governance — that authority produced [[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]] in 2013 and its R3 revision in 2023 under [[William Tapley]]'s signature alone. Across the entire sixteen-month platform-era deployment from January 2025 onward, [[Chris Harris]] has held that same unilateral authority and has not exercised it to produce any directive — supplement, revision, memorandum, or new framework — addressing the 1,384-organization sharing topology the platform deployment generates. That non-exercise, under demonstrated capacity, is the agency's culpable omission. ## Argument **The chief's unilateral authority over CPD's LPR governance is established within the corpus by the policy that already exists, and it bears one signature.** [[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]] is the department's governing internal policy on license-plate-reader operations — four pages, effective August 30, 2013, with the most recently surfaced revision (R3) dated 1/18/2023. The approval page on the R3 revision carries a single signature: "**William Tapley, Chief of Police**" ([[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]], CPD Policy 800-32 approval page). There is no countersignature from the Mayor, the City Council, the City Attorney, the Office of Professional Responsibility, or any other body. The institutional fact the policy itself establishes is dispositive: in Conway, the chief of police can — and routinely does — promulgate written LPR governance under unilateral authority. The 2013 original was issued under the same authority. The 2023 revision was issued under the same authority. No further procedural hurdle stands between the office of the chief and a written internal directive on LPR practice. **Chief Harris has held that same unilateral authority for the entirety of the platform-era deployment this investigation documents.** [[Chris Harris]] succeeded Tapley as Chief of Police of the [[Conway Police Department]] in November 2024 (Conway PD home page, primary public record). Two months later, on 2025-01-23, the Flock onboarding email chain ran ([[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]]): Brittney Hall (Flock Territory Sales) introduced the implementation team to Chief Harris and [[Lt. Andrew Burningham]]; Skylar Lindner (Flock Senior Project Manager) walked through the 20-camera deployment plan; Melissa Lee (Flock Customer Success Manager) requested the agency's LPR policy; Burningham replied by attaching the Tapley-signed 800-32 R3 PDF. Harris was in the room — the primary recipient of the welcome email. The policy he handed over to Flock was the policy he had inherited from the prior administration. From that day forward, the platform-era deployment ran with Harris as the unilateral promulgating authority for any successor directive. **The "evidence of an offense is indicated" sharing standard Harris inherited is, by its plain text, a per-event evidentiary trigger — and the deployment that began under his tenure runs on standing toggles, not per-event acts.** Section D.4 of 800-32 confines data sharing with other law-enforcement agencies to circumstances where "evidence of an offense is indicated" ([[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]] §D.4). On its face the clause envisions a sharing decision triggered by, and proportionate to, a specific offense — a discrete agency act keyed to evidentiary predicate. The 1,384-organization sharing topology the platform produced ([[SharedNetworks 2025-12-17 Snapshot]]) is not a sequence of per-offense decisions; it is a configured state of standing relationships that persist until affirmatively un-toggled. The doctrinal mismatch was operationally visible from the first weeks of Conway's Flock deployment — and the office that had drafted 800-32's elaborate evidentiary regime in the first place had every demonstrated tool to draft a successor regime for the standing-relationship moment instead. Harris did not. **The window for that exercise of authority is now approximately sixteen months — and the corpus, across four FOIA productions and roughly 620 records, contains no such directive.** The platform-era deployment runs from the January 2025 onboarding through the present (May 2026). Across that window the investigation has assembled four document productions covering the policy-and-personnel side of the agency on multiple cuts: PD-2026-354 (472 files including the complete department LPR-policy archive served via the onboarding-email policy-attachment route) ([[_overview]] for PD-2026-354), PD-2026-477 (six files in the supplemental / withholdings response from CPD), FOIA-2026-125 (eight files from the City Clerk covering Council, budget, and asset-forfeiture records), and FOIA-2026-127 (99 files from the Mayor's Office covering Mayor-side correspondence, procurement coordination, ARDOT permitting, and the spring-2026 citizen oversight wave). The total is approximately 620 records distributed across the agency's own files, the City Clerk's files, and the Mayor's Office files. **In all of it, no successor internal directive amending, supplementing, or replacing 800-32 surfaces.** The absence is not the absence of a single document a single production might have missed; it is a corpus-wide absence across the document classes — internal CPD policy archive, Mayor-Office-routed administrative correspondence, City Clerk procurement and ordinance records — in which such a directive would have appeared. **The 1,384-organization topology is the operational scope a successor directive would have governed, and that scope was visible to the agency ten months before the snapshot date.** [[SharedNetworks 2025-12-17 Snapshot]] enumerates Conway PD's configured Flock data-sharing relationships as of the platform cutover date: 1,384 organizations total — 486 bidirectional, 471 inbound-only, 427 outbound-only — across 38+ states plus DC, federal entities including `[Federal] Wright Patterson OH Air Force Base`, tribal law enforcement (`Quapaw Nation OK Marshals Service`), a national NGO (NCMEC), and private parties (six Arkansas Home Depot stores). Ninety-four percent of the relationships are out-of-state. The asymmetric configuration pattern — 471 inbound-only relationships in which Conway data does not flow back, 427 outbound-only in which counterparties do not share with Conway — is, the snapshot page notes, "unexplained in the corpus" and "reflects either deliberate Conway-side configuration or default-on settings the configuring administrator did not actively curate." These are configuration outcomes a chief-level directive — issued at any point in the preceding ten months, or in the five months since — could have constrained. The remedy available to the chief was never to *retroactively apply* Section D.4's per-event evidentiary test to a configuration moment; the remedy was to *promulgate a different rule, in writing*, addressing the configuration moment on its own terms. That is precisely the kind of rule the office of the chief is institutionally constituted to write, and the policy that already exists is the proof. **The institutional-incapacity defense fails because every component of it is empirically refuted by the policy that already exists.** The chief did not need Council approval to issue an internal directive: the existing 800-32 carries no Council signature, no Mayor signature, no City Attorney signature. The chief did not need vendor cooperation: an internal directive governs Conway personnel's configuration practice in the Flock administrative interface — what relationships [[Lt. Andrew Burningham]] (the Flock administrator, 330 message touches across PD-2026-354 per the bounce-scope diagnostic) and any successor administrator turn on, turn off, or escalate to the chief for approval — not what Flock's interface itself permits in the abstract. The chief did not need legislative reform: an internal directive is an internal rule of practice within a single municipal law-enforcement agency, not a state law, and it operates under the same administrative-policy authority every Arkansas police chief routinely exercises over internal department conduct. None of the institutional resources required to issue 800-32 in 2013 or to revise it in 2023 were unusual; none of them are now unavailable. The chief had, has, and continues to have the same unilateral authority that produced both the original and the R3 revision. Across sixteen months of platform-era operation, that authority has not been exercised on the platform-era configuration question. **The Conway PD organizational chart confirms that the office in question is structurally positioned to do precisely this work.** The [[Conway Police Department]] org chart shows the **Office of the Chief** at the top, with direct staff units — including the Office of Professional Responsibility (O.P.R.), the FOIA function (where Drake Vickers sits), the Public Information Officer, and Health & Wellness / Crisis Response — reporting directly to the chief, alongside an Assistant Chief who supervises the Patrol, Investigative, and Support Divisions. [[Lt. Andrew Burningham]], the Flock administrator, sits within the Investigative Division's Special Investigations (Narcotics) unit and reports up that chain. The chief's office is the apex of a chain of command that already contains, on its own staff side, the institutional functions a configuration-governance directive would naturally consult: O.P.R. for review, the F.O.I.A. function for disclosure-posture analysis, and the operational Flock administrator three steps down the line. None of these institutional pieces were added in 2024 or 2025; they were the configuration of the department when Tapley issued 800-32 R3 in January 2023. The capacity to draft, review, and issue a successor directive is built into the agency's organizational structure as a standing fact. It has simply not been used for the platform-era configuration moment. **The omission is therefore the agency's act under the same unilateral authority pattern the existing policy demonstrates — and it is sustained, current, and ongoing.** The relevant attribution question is not "did Conway PD know the platform-era deployment generated configuration outcomes that 800-32's per-event sharing standard did not address?" — the doctrinal mismatch was visible in the policy text and the deployment topology from January 2025. The question is whether, with that knowledge and with the unilateral institutional authority to write a successor rule, the chief's office chose to leave the policy field empty. The corpus answer is yes: across sixteen months, four productions, ~620 records, and two successive chiefs (Tapley's policy still governing under Harris's command), no successor directive has issued. That sustained non-exercise of established and demonstrated authority is, on the empirical record this investigation has assembled, the culpable governance omission Statement A identifies. ## Evidence - **Tapley's R3 signature establishes unilateral chief authority over CPD's LPR governance:** the approval page of CPD Policy 800-32, Revision R3, dated 1/18/2023, is signed by "**William Tapley, Chief of Police**" alone — no countersignature from any other body ([[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]], CPD Policy 800-32 approval page attached to the 2025-01-23 onboarding email). - **Section D.4's per-event evidentiary grammar is verbatim:** "**Data sharing** with other LE agencies '**if evidence of an offense is indicated**'" ([[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]] §D.4). - **Harris's tenure begins November 2024, two months before Flock onboarding:** Chris Harris is identified as Chief of Police of the Conway Police Department, with his Conway-Arkansas email anchored to both the City of Conway police-department page and CPD's own home page (Conway PD home, primary public record, cited on [[Chris Harris]]). - **Harris is the primary recipient of the 2025-01-23 Flock onboarding email:** the welcome chain introduces "Chief Chris Harris and Lt. Burningham" to the Flock implementation team; Burningham replies attaching the Tapley-signed 800-32 R3 PDF as the agency's LPR policy ([[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]]). - **The configuration scope a successor directive would have governed is 1,384 organizations across 38+ states plus DC, federal, tribal, and private parties:** the SharedNetworks export of 2025-12-17 lists 1,384 total organizations — 486 bidirectional, 471 inbound-only, 427 outbound-only ([[SharedNetworks 2025-12-17 Snapshot]]); 94% of relationships are out-of-state and the asymmetric configuration pattern is "unexplained in the corpus." - **The federal counterparties in the configured topology include an Air Force base:** `[Federal] Wright Patterson OH Air Force Base` appears in the snapshot as a configured sharing relationship with no recorded activity in the March–April 2026 window ([[SharedNetworks 2025-12-17 Snapshot]]). - **The Flock administrator, Lt. Andrew Burningham, sits in the Investigative Division under the chief's chain of command:** Burningham is the Flock administrator with 330 of 389 message touches across PD-2026-354 — the single most-frequent CPD address in the production ([[Lt. Andrew Burningham]]). - **The chief's office sits at the apex of an organizational structure that already contains, on its own staff side, the institutional functions a configuration-governance directive would consult:** Office of Professional Responsibility, the FOIA function, the Public Information Officer, and an Assistant Chief who supervises the three operational divisions — all reporting to the Office of the Chief ([[Conway Police Department]] organizational structure, per the Conway PD org chart cited there). - **The corpus-wide absence claim is anchored in four productions totaling ~620 records:** - PD-2026-354 — 472 files, including the complete department LPR-policy archive served via the onboarding-email policy-attachment route and all internal CPD email correspondence on Flock-platform administration ([[_overview]] for PD-2026-354). - PD-2026-477 — six files in the supplemental / withholdings response from CPD; the response withholds operational categories (SharedNetworks snapshots, federal-search exports, pre-April-2025 audit logs) but contains no successor LPR directive document and references none. - FOIA-2026-125 — eight files from the Conway City Clerk including Ordinance O-25-09, the 2025 city budget, January 14, 2025 Council meeting records, and Flock payment records; no successor LPR directive document appears. - FOIA-2026-127 — 99 files from the Conway Mayor's Office covering Mayor-side procurement coordination, ARDOT permitting, citizen oversight, and CPD strategic reporting to the Mayor's Office; no successor LPR directive document appears. ## Anticipated counterarguments Statement B will press the position that no internal directive Conway PD could have promulgated would have coherently governed the platform-configuration moment — that the structural remedy operates at the platform-product level (vendor design) or the statutory level (state legislation modeled on Virginia's or Illinois's product-enforced restrictions), and that demanding the chief draft a successor directive is therefore demanding what cannot meaningfully be done. The antithesis will likely invoke the structural-grammar finding from the prior dialectic — that an internal rule governing agency conduct cannot reach a configuration outcome the platform produces in the absence of agency action — and will likely argue that the absence of a successor directive reflects institutional recognition of where the remedy actually lives, not abdication of an available one. That engagement is the antithesis subagent's task in a separate fresh-context invocation; the thesis records the position for completeness without addressing it here.