Records, method, and corrections
Everything on this site traces back to a document you can open. This page is where they live, together with an account of what was not produced, how the site was built, and how to tell it when it is wrong.
The documents
A Colorado Open Records Act request to the City of Arvada, for all contracts, paperwork and other records between the city and Flock Safety, produced five files. They are published here in full, byte for byte as received; only the file names have been changed. They are the primary sources behind every entry tagged [CORA] on the Timeline.
| Document | Date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Flock order form, Government Agency Agreement, security and CJIS addenda (PDF, 29 pp.) | Mar 28–29, 2023 | The start: 40 Falcon cameras quoted at $2,500 each a year, Advanced Search, installation; $116,500 year one; a 60-day no-cost pilot. Flock owns the hardware and has “final discretion on location.” Retention 30 days in the agreement, up to one year in the security addendum. Signed for “CO - Arvada PD” by the chief of police. |
| Flock Master Services Agreement, Exhibits A–E (PDF, 67 pp.) | Dec 3–9, 2025 | The paid contract: 15 cameras, $47,500 a year plus $5,250 installation, sole-source, auto-renewing up to four times. Recites the 2023 pilot as “at no cost to Arvada” with 12 cameras operating, and a separate Falcon Flex agreement. Order form lists state and nationwide lookup networks and access to private cameras. Early termination in the public interest requires a City Council resolution. Immigration-subpoena restriction on Flock's own disclosures. |
| Minuteman Security Technologies agreement, RFB 25-PD-061 and bid (PDF, 24 pp.) | Jul 21, 2025 | A second system: Genetec AutoVu in-car readers for three patrol cars, 6 cameras, $75,615.26, “Genetec AutoVue is current System used.” Cites a November 2022 Genetec maintenance agreement. No plate-data terms. Not a Flock document, but produced in the same release. |
| Policy PM 460, Automated License Plate Readers (Word document) | Eff. Jun 11, 2025 | The ALPR rules: no suspicion required; 364-day retention for patrol-car data with a copy at LexisNexis; 30 days for vendor-leased fixed cameras; sharing with other agencies “at any time”; audits that “should” happen. Checked line by line on The Policies. |
| Policy PM 461, Arvada Real Time Information Center (Word document) | Eff. Jul 16, 2026 | The real-time center combining plate readers, city cameras, body cameras, drones, police databases and open-source intelligence. |
These documents resolve the origin, price, quantity, retention setting and approval path of Arvada's Flock program. They do not resolve the operational questions: the sharing settings (which agencies and networks can search Arvada's data), the search audit logs, and the camera locations. Nor do they explain how the 2023 form's 60-day pilot became what the 2025 contract calls a no-cost pilot of about 32 months.
The two policies arrived as Word documents and are published in that form rather than converted, so nothing is lost or altered in conversion. Their section numbers are automatic Word numbering, which some viewers do not display.
What the release refers to, and did not include
- The Falcon Flex agreement. The 2025 contract says “Arvada also contracts with Flock for a Falcon Flex under an agreement separate from the Pilot Agreement and this Agreement.” It is a contract between the city and Flock, the subject of the request, and was not produced.
- Pilot-period billing. The 2023 form calls for a year-one invoice once the pilot ends. No invoice, purchase order, payment record or pilot extension from March 2023 to December 2025 was produced.
- The Deployment Plan that both Flock agreements say sets camera locations.
- The LexisNexis Risk Solutions agreement PM 460 relies on for mobile ALPR data.
- RM 460.1 and the ALPR administrator's guidelines PM 460 delegates.
- The November 2022 Minuteman agreement and the IT provisions the 2025 Minuteman contract incorporates from it.
The first two fall squarely within the request as filed. The rest are records the release points to, which a follow-up request would need to name. Suggested wording is on The Policies.
Checksums
SHA-256 digests of the published files. A file that matches these digests is the file the city released. Each file name below links to the copy this site serves: download it, compute its digest with the command at the top of the table, and compare it to the digest published here. The byte count is a second check.
| File | SHA-256 |
|---|---|
| flock-order-form-and-agreement-2023-03.pdf (1,180,178 bytes) | 7158e724fc8e74fbfe0fc8b0ef7ab788e9889ee5f9b885b69710f19ab565f0fa |
| flock-master-services-agreement-2025-12.pdf (11,618,929 bytes) | ed48621f65d41227471c3a1208e734e047158c6556b9179b87cc46e78b15d75e |
| minuteman-genetec-alpr-agreement-2025-07.pdf (1,469,158 bytes) | 45c5e23cbcae2c88958978f9e45295ac86a31489090c9f52da7f61742c8b5417 |
| pm-460-alpr-policy-eff-2025-06-11.docx (49,474 bytes) | 18a9379d55decbd891e79d285ad642b317491c6eb81ea45c3a8141a89c7fc2f6 |
| pm-461-artic-policy-eff-2026-07-16.docx (52,603 bytes) | 37f470dea5974733d8103c557f5b1ecb6ed3ddbab0ef68a7739a0ebc44a76e36 |
How this site was built
Four rules govern everything here.
- Named sources only. Every factual claim is footnoted to a published source that can be opened and read. Nothing rests on an anonymous tip or an unnamed document.
- Silence is reported as silence. Where the public record does not answer a question, this site says the record does not answer it, rather than inferring an answer. The blanks are marked in amber throughout.
- Arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic. Where this site computes something the documents do not state, such as the 32-month pilot, the renewal date or a five-year total, it says so next to the number.
- Absence is never treated as proof. That a document was not produced is stated as a fact about the release, not as evidence that no such document exists.
This site is commentary and compilation. It takes a critical view of how the City of Arvada has disclosed, or has not disclosed, its surveillance program. It does not allege unlawful conduct by any person, and no reviewed record documents misuse of any plate-reader system by Arvada Police personnel.
How the documents were read: every page of every file was read in full. The text of the three PDFs was extracted, and for the 2025 Flock contract the order form and signature pages were also checked against the page images; signature details on the other two PDFs are reported from their text layer. Page citations on this site are PDF page numbers, not the printed numbers inside exhibits. Where a document contradicts itself, for example on retention or on whether two or three cameras remained to be installed, both readings are reported.
The camera count: exact query
The 31 / 37 figures and the camera map on the home page come from a single
Overpass API query against OpenStreetMap, run Sept. 28, 2026. Area
3600112912 is OSM relation 112912, the administrative boundary of the
City of Arvada, Colorado. The same query asking for ways and relations as well as
nodes returned the same 37 nodes and nothing else.
| Overpass QL |
|---|
[out:json][timeout:180]; area(3600112912)->.a; node["man_made"="surveillance"]["surveillance:type"="ALPR"](area.a); out tags center; |
Results were grouped by the manufacturer tag to produce the vendor
counts: a camera counts as Flock only if it is tagged
manufacturer=Flock Safety. Of the six that are not, one is tagged
Genetec and five carry no manufacturer tag, although three of those five name
Flock Safety in a brand, operator or name
tag instead. They were grouped by the operator tag to identify
privately operated cameras: one is tagged operator:type=private
(Lowe's), one names the Arvada Police Department, one names Flock Safety itself,
and 34 carry no operator tag. Two Flock-tagged nodes share identical coordinates
and camera direction and may be a single camera entered twice.
Corridor distances were computed from OpenStreetMap road geometry for the named corridors, counting a camera as “on” a corridor if it lies within 250 meters of any point on that road; corridors overlap at intersections, so those counts do not sum to 31. The Wadsworth–52nd cluster is measured from the point where the two roads cross: 10 Flock-tagged reports lie within 600 meters of it, and the next-nearest camera of any kind is 1.2 kilometers away.
The query asks for tags and coordinates only. OpenStreetMap's edit metadata, the names of the volunteers who mapped each camera and the dates they did it, was deliberately not retrieved, and the published result is stripped to each node's type, id, coordinates and tags: overpass-alpr-2026-09-28.json.
The map graphic was generated from that result, the city boundary and the major
roads by .github/scripts/make-alpr-map.py in this site's repository,
whose header lists the exact queries for all three inputs and which prints every
count and distance quoted on this site. Each dot on the map links to that camera's
location on DeFlock's live map. The links are added by
.github/scripts/link-alpr-map.py, which matches every node in the
query result to its plotted dot and refuses to link a result that no longer
corresponds to the map.
These are volunteer reports, not an inventory. They
undercount: a camera nobody has mapped does not appear. They can
overcount: a decommissioned camera may remain in the data, and one location
here may be entered twice. They do not establish who operates
any camera; only three of the 37 carry an operator tag at all. A
manufacturer=Flock Safety tag reflects a mapper's identification of
the hardware, not a verified contract. And no map of this kind can show
Arvada's Genetec in-car readers: they ride on patrol cars, so
no fixed point describes them. Use this number as a floor and a shape, not a
total.
Sources for the home page
- City of Arvada / Flock Group Inc., Services Agreement Order Form, Government Agency Agreement and addenda, DocuSign-dated March 28–29, 2023, obtained under CORA. PDF
- City of Arvada / Flock Group Inc., Master Services Agreement with Exhibits A–E, signed December 3 and 9, 2025, obtained under CORA. PDF
- City of Arvada / Minuteman Security Technologies, Inc., ALPR agreement, DocuSign-dated July 21, 2025, obtained under CORA. PDF
- Arvada Police Department, Policy Manual PM 460, “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR),” effective June 11, 2025, obtained under CORA. DOCX
- Arvada Police Department, Policy Manual PM 461, “Arvada Real Time Information Center (ARTIC),” effective July 16, 2026, obtained under CORA. DOCX
- OpenStreetMap surveillance data: Overpass API query for nodes tagged
man_made=surveillanceandsurveillance:type=ALPRinside the City of Arvada boundary (OSM relation 112912), retrieved Sept. 28, 2026. JSON · Exact query and method - Shaun Boyd, “Crime fighter or mass surveillance? In Colorado, license plate readers are high-tech and widespread,” CBS News Colorado, September 22, 2025. cbsnews.com
- City of Arvada, City Council workshop packet, February 10, 2026 (agenda item 2.B), containing the chief's memo of December 22, 2025. PDF
Corrections policy
If anything on this site is wrong, it will be corrected, and the correction will be logged here with its date. That applies with particular force to the City of Arvada and Flock Safety: if a record exists that answers a question this site marks as open, such as the sharing settings, the pilot-period billing or the Falcon Flex agreement, publish it or send it, and it will be published here in full alongside the correction.
Corrections are made by changing the page and adding an entry below. Nothing is silently rewritten.
No corrections yet. Site compiled September 28, 2026.