# T002 — Successor-Policy Omission This tension asks whether Conway PD had a written directive governing platform-era standing relationships and, if not, what that absence means. The existing CPD policy proves the chief can approve LPR policy; the productions reviewed do not establish that they are an exhaustive search of every current directive or policy repository. *Erratum, 2026-07-30: D002's split verdict depended on D001's unsupported product-default finding, treated incoming/outgoing CSV fields as proof of who authored each relationship, and described four productions as a comprehensive policy search they were not. [[D002 Synthesis]] remains a historical isolated-phase artifact, but its verdict is no longer operative and this tension is reopened.* ## Statement A **Conway PD's failure to promulgate any successor internal directive adequate to platform-era configuration is a culpable agency omission. The chief's authority on internal directives is unilateral and documented; the absence of such a directive across a 16-month platform deployment is the agency's act, not its inaction.** The chief's authority on department policy is established within the corpus by the policy that already exists. [[William Tapley]] approved CPD Policy 800-32 R3 as "Chief of Police" on 2023-01-18, signing the approval page alone ([[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]], anchored to [[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]] where the policy PDF is attached to the 2025-01-23 Flock onboarding email). The signature establishes the institutional fact: Conway PD's Chief of Police can, and does, promulgate written department policy on license-plate-reader use under unilateral authority. No countersignature from a Council, Mayor, City Attorney, or other body appears on the policy. [[Chris Harris]] succeeded Tapley as Chief in November 2024 (primary public record, [Conway PD home](../../web%20archive/2026-05-18/conwaypd.org/home.md)) — two months before Conway PD's January 2025 Flock onboarding ([[AR - Conway PD - Welcome to Flock!]]). Harris has therefore held unilateral chief authority for the entirety of the platform-era deployment this investigation documents. The "evidence of an offense is indicated" sharing standard he inherited from his predecessor is doctrinally a per-event standard ([[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]] §D.4: "Data sharing with other LE agencies 'if evidence of an offense is indicated.'"). The platform deployment that immediately followed his appointment uses sharing as a standing-toggle relationship rather than a per-event act. The doctrinal mismatch was operationally visible from the first month of deployment; it was institutionally curable by the same unilateral authority that produced the original policy. No internal directive amending 800-32 or expressly governing Flock relationship configuration appears in PD-2026-354, PD-2026-477, FOIA-2026-125, or FOIA-2026-127. Those productions cover onboarding email, supplemental withholding, City Clerk, and Mayor's Office records; none is identified as a complete current CPD directive archive. The finding is therefore “not surfaced in these productions,” not “no successor directive exists.” [[SharedNetworks 2025-12-17 Snapshot]] establishes the scale and direction fields a directive might address. It does not show which relationships were Conway-authored, what approvals already applied, or whether another written rule existed. Tapley's signature establishes that a chief approved Policy 800-32. The record does not establish every procedural prerequisite for a successor directive or prove that later authority was unexercised. ## Statement B **No internal directive Conway PD could have promulgated would have governed the platform-configuration moment coherently. The structural remedy operates at the platform level (vendor product design) or at the statutory level (state legislation modeled on Virginia or Illinois) — not at the internal-directive level. Demanding the chief draft a successor directive is demanding what cannot meaningfully be done; the absence is not culpable because the action would be vain.** The vendor's own description of the structural-restriction architecture makes this point against the agency-directive remedy directly. Flock SVP Chris Colwell, in the August 2025 audit-system explainer to Lt. [[Andrew Burningham]], lays out where structural restriction lives: > "**In some states, sharing is automatically restricted as required by law, and searches with search terms that indicate a purpose prohibited by law have been disabled in our product. For example, in Virginia, out-of-state sharing is disabled and in Illinois, accessing data for certain purposes is not allowed. However, you are responsible for knowing your agency's laws and policies.**" ([[Audit-System Policy Emails (Aug 2025 - Apr 2026)]]) The structural restriction is not "the agency's chief has promulgated a directive that the agency observes." It is "the product has disabled the relevant configuration option." The remedy operates at the product surface — Virginia's out-of-state-sharing prohibition runs as a product setting, not as a Virginia State Police chief's internal directive. The Illinois example is parallel. Where structural restriction governs sharing, it does so because law mandates the *product* be configured a particular way, and the *product* enforces the configuration. The chief's directive is downstream of that structure; it is not an alternative to it. The 471 incoming-only rows do not prove that Conway took no action or that a counterparty action alone created them. A Conway directive can plainly govern Conway personnel; the record does not reveal which product or counterparty actions fall outside that authority. Section D.4 supplies an evidence-of-an-offense condition for data sharing ([[CPD Policy 800-32 — License Plate Reader Vehicle Operations]], `Conway PD LPR Policy.pdf`, § D.4). Whether it reaches standing configuration is unresolved; the record does not establish that the directive instrument was exhausted or that any official reached that conclusion. The Virginia and Illinois examples discipline the legislative remedy onto the statutory level, not the agency level. Neither state achieved its restriction through a directive issued by every law-enforcement chief in the state; the restriction is in the statute, enforced through the product. The cognate intervention for Arkansas runs through the Arkansas General Assembly, not the Conway Police Department. The chief's authority is unilateral as Statement A correctly notes — but its scope is internal to the agency, and the configuration problem is by structure not internal to any single agency. Issuing an internal directive against a structural problem mistakes the level the remedy operates on. The omission is therefore a recognition of where the relevant authority lives, not an abdication of an available remedy. ## Why it matters The two readings point at different evidence, locate the remedy in different places, and attribute responsibility differently: - **If Statement A is correct (culpable omission):** The remedy and the attribution remain at the agency level. Follow-on FOIA targets Conway PD's internal directive archive (any successor or supplemental memoranda referencing 800-32, any chief-level training documents on platform configuration, any draft directives that were considered but not issued). On this reading the question is institutional: Chief Harris had unilateral authority and a documented institutional precedent (Tapley's 2023 R3 revision) and chose not to act. The remedy this reading implies is a mandate requiring agencies to promulgate configuration-level governance. - **If Statement B is correct (structurally vain):** The remedy and the attribution shift away from the agency level. Follow-on FOIA targets shift to Flock's product-design documentation (the same target T001 Statement B work would suggest) and to state-legislative records (Arkansas General Assembly committee work on ALPR governance, if any exists). On this reading the question is structural: the chief had no available remedy that would have done the work, and the Virginia/Illinois precedent locates the operative intervention at the statute-and-product level. The remedy this reading implies is an Arkansas statute analogous to Virginia's structural restriction. T001 and T002 now identify separate evidence needs: product/tenant configuration history for mechanism, and an actual current-directive search for policy scope. ## Resolution status **`open` as of 2026-07-30.** Resolution requires the operative directive inventory, a custodian-certified search of current and superseded LPR/Flock governance, configuration-approval records, and product documentation showing what each direction means and who can create it. ## Discovery Surfaced as a candidate next tension in [[D001 Synthesis]] § *Open questions for future dialectics* #3: "**Successor-policy omission as standalone tension**: the narrower culpability claim that survives the synthesis — that Conway PD failed to promulgate any internal directive translating §D.4's spirit into platform-era practice — deserves its own tension page. The chief's authority is unilateral on internal directives; the absence of one is an act, not an inaction." Filed 2026-05-24 in the same session as the deferred D001 body-sync of [[T001 - Default-On Sharing Policy or Product Design]] and the parent synthesis [[Default-On Surveillance Data Sharing as Operational Model]]'s `## Status` qualification. ## Notes - T002 is the wiki's first **attribution** tension (T001 was a **framing** tension). The distinction maps onto the dialectic's expected output: framing tensions tend to resolve toward one reading of a shared evidence base; attribution tensions tend to resolve toward locating responsibility (or its absence) at a specific institutional level. T002's verdict will be a finding about where the policy-and-attribution intervention should operate, not (primarily) about what the evidence says. - The two statements do **not** share the same evidentiary base in the way T001's did. Statement A rests primarily on the corpus's documentary record (chief signatures, deployment window, absence claim across four productions). Statement B rests primarily on the structural/architectural reasoning the D001 dialectic developed, anchored back to the same Flock SVP and §D.4 verbatim quotes. The dialectic will test which kind of argument the wiki's discipline accepts as dispositive on a culpability claim. - Neither reading is alleged to be a basis for a finding of unlawful conduct on the part of any individual or agency. Internal directive promulgation is a matter of administrative practice, not statutory obligation; the absence of a directive carries no statutory penalty under any Arkansas law in the corpus. The tension's resolution informs the wiki's analytical-attribution claims and the investigation's downstream FOIA / legislative briefing strategy, not any legal claim about the chief's or the agency's conduct. - The complete three-phase argument is collected in [[D002 Thesis]], [[D002 Antithesis]], and [[D002 Synthesis]]; its original verdict is preserved but no longer operative.