The Denver City Council dug into details of a new proposed contract with Axon Enterprise on Wednesday during an initial presentation about the company’s license plate-reading cameras.
If a majority of the council approves the not-yet-finished contract, it will replace the city’s current system with the controversial company Flock Safety. The city’s final contract with Flock expires this month, and its cameras are then set to be decommissioned.
The would be for a year and would include the installation of 50 license plate-reading cameras in public intersections in the city. They would snap photos of passing cars to capture their license plates and any identifiable features — such as a scratch or a dent — and use that data to help investigate crimes like car thefts, hit-and-runs, kidnappings and homicides. Currently, the city has 111 Flock-operated cameras doing that work.
The meeting marked a lowering of the temperature for discussions around the city’s license plate-reader system. Council members and hundreds of Denver residents have criticized Mayor Mike Johnston’s office in recent months after his administration repeatedly extended the city’s contract with Flock last year without council approval.
“It took a very long time to get this level of responsiveness, and I’m glad that we’re getting it — but I’m not feeling like any of this would have happened if we had not had a huge amount of accountability from the public,” said Councilwoman Sarah Parady, one of the most vocal critics of Flock, during the meeting.
Tim Hoffman, the director of policy for the mayor’s office, asked the council’s to delay a vote until its meeting next week so that the city could have more time to complete the contractap details.
Multiple council members said they would withhold their support for the new agreement until they had a chance to see the details in that contract. Parady said she saw some improvements between the two companies but still had some concerns.
Council members on the committee asked for more details, including about potential audits of the system’s usage, the data retention policy and the potential to share data with other agencies in the future.
Flock has been under heightened scrutiny nationwide after reports showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have used Flock’s database to aid in President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. ICE agents were in 2024 and 2025 before the city asked to be removed from Flock’s national database last April.
While some elements of the new system would be similar to Flock’s, it will have significant differences, city officials have said, particularly around some of the most-scrutinized elements of the systems.
The city plans to set the data retention period for Axon’s cameras to only 21 days, nine days shorter than it was for Flock. Axon doesn’t have a national database for other law enforcement agencies to participate in, like Flock did. Denver’s system also will be cut off from all other law enforcement agencies, and its overseers will create an invite-only sharing system with nearby law enforcement agencies that agree to abide by certain rules.
The mayor’s office decided to bring the contract through the council process, despite its value being below the $500,000 threshold that requires council approval, in an effort to be more collaborative, Johnston said in February.
The committee is now set on March 18 to consider advancing the finalized contract to the full council.
