What Do the Cape Fear Sheriffs Have in Common?
Flock says every search is logged in a Network Audit for accountability. Four Cape Fear sheriffs run Flock — and not one will show you who has been searching their cameras.
Flock says every search is saved. The company markets its Network Audit as a tool for oversight — by command staff, by elected officials, and by the public. The Network Audit names the outside agencies that ran searches against a county’s cameras. So there is a simple test of that promise: can residents actually see the accountability information Flock says the audit is for?
In the Cape Fear, the answer so far is no.
Two Flock reports get confused, so let us be precise. The Network Audit lists the outside agencies whose searches reached a county’s Flock network — the record we are after. (A row means a search had access to that network; the officer’s name and the plate are separate fields — NC law makes the plate data confidential, and we have agreed to set the officer’s name aside to narrow the ask.) An Organization Audit is the office’s own usage summary — how many searches ran, of what type — and it names no outside searcher. The searching agency’s identity is the whole point: it is how the public learns whether out-of-state or federal agencies are querying local plates without a local warrant.
Four Cape Fear sheriffs built Flock networks: Ed McMahon in New Hanover, Brian Chism in Brunswick, Alan Cutler in Pender, and Bill Rogers in Columbus. New Hanover’s commissioners voted the contract down on September 8 — but the cameras ran for more than a year, and the Network Audit of that year already exists. Three sheriffs still run Flock; all four control a Network Audit. They differ on a lot. They have one thing in common.
Not one of them has released the Network Audit with the searching-agency identity intact.
To be clear about the compromise we are making: the officer’s name and the plate would in fact tell you the most — USA TODAY built much of its national investigation of Flock misuse on exactly that kind of record. But North Carolina law treats captured plate data as confidential (§ 20-183.32), so we have set that aside, and we have voluntarily agreed to redact the searching officer’s name to keep this to one clean, winnable point. We are asking for one field: the Organization Name — the outside agency that ran each search. That is the field these offices have blacked out or withheld, and the whole subject of this post.
The scoreboard: how long the searching-agency identity has been outstanding
| Sheriff’s Office | Records requested | Days & counting | Searching-agency identity |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Hanover — Sheriff McMahon | Apr 28, 2026 | 157 days | Network Audit produced — agency names redacted |
| Pender — Sheriff Cutler | Jun 29, 2026 | 95 days | Network Audit produced — agency names redacted |
| Columbus — Sheriff Rogers | Jul 1, 2026 | 93 days | Network Audit not produced (Organization Audit only) |
| Brunswick — Sheriff Chism | Jun 29, 2026 | 95 days | Network Audit not produced |
| Wrightsville Beach (Town PD — not a sheriff) | Jun 30, 2026 | 94 days | Contract records produced; Network Audit & Event Log withheld |
“Records requested” is the date we filed for the search audit; “days & counting” runs to today. Not one office has released the searching-agency field. The amber row is a town police department, not a sheriff.
New Hanover — Sheriff Ed McMahon: produced the audit, redacted the searchers
McMahon produced the Network Audit — and then redacted the one field it exists for: the name of every agency that ran a search. Nearly 3 million searches reached New Hanover’s Flock network during the period the records cover, and residents are not allowed to know by whom. Five days later, the County Commissioners voted 4–0 to cancel the program — over precisely this accountability gap. As Commissioner Stephanie Walker put it before the vote: “You don’t know who’s got it, who’s using it, what they’re using it for.” The Network Audit is the record built to answer the first of those questions — and it came back with the answer blacked out. (On why public trust is the whole ballgame for a sheriff: law-enforcement legitimacy depends on it.)
Pender — Sheriff Alan Cutler: produced the audit, redacted every searcher
Pender produced its June–August Network Audit in native CSV — and it is the clearest case of all. Across three months, Pender’s cameras were searched 2,101,548 times. The Pender Sheriff’s Office itself ran just 1,149 of them. More than two million searches of this county’s cameras were run by other agencies — and the office redacted the Organization Name on every single row, citing three statutes. We have shown the office, in writing, that none of the three reaches the name of a government agency that ran a query: the plate-data statute (§ 20-183.32(e)) protects captured plate data, not the identity of the searcher; the criminal-intelligence exemption (§ 132-1.4) covers a specific investigation, not an aggregate log of who searched a shared network; and the security exemption (§ 132-1.7) protects information that reveals a system vulnerability, which an agency’s name does not. The tell is that nine North Carolina agencies released this same field intact. If the statutes truly compelled secrecy, they could not have. The redaction here is a choice, not a command.
Columbus — Sheriff Bill Rogers: everything except the Network Audit
Rogers took three notices, a mediation offer, and 65 days to respond at all. When the partial production finally came on September 4, it included the contract, the policy, the data-sharing MOU, a camera list, and an invoice — and an “Organization Audit” screenshot (the office’s own summary of what kinds of searches ran). What it did not include is the Network Audit — the record that names who ran them. Same field missing, one county over.
Brunswick — Sheriff Brian Chism: no audit at all
As of September 13, Brunswick has produced no Network Audit responsive to our June request. And the omission matters more here than anywhere, because Brunswick has just shown what the audit is for: a routine internal audit flagged alleged misuse by a Sheriff’s Office employee, who resigned, and the matter is now under N.C. SBI investigation (the misuse tracker). The audit worked, internally. The public is still waiting to see the Network Audit that would show who outside Brunswick has been searching the county’s cameras.
A word about Onslow — because being fair cuts both ways
You will not see Onslow on this list, and we want to say why. We have not yet filed a public-records request with the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office, and Onslow runs a different vendor — Plate Ranger, not Flock. When we’ve done the records work there, we’ll report what we find, good or bad. We hold ourselves to the same standard we hold them to.
The same record — released everywhere else
Here is what takes away the excuse. At least nine North Carolina law-enforcement agencies produced this same Flock Network Audit with the searching agencies named — among them Carolina Beach PD, Kure Beach PD, the Whiteville Police Department, NC A&T, UNC Charlotte, UNC Pembroke, and Winston-Salem State University. Each is the same on-demand export, from the same Insights tab, under the same North Carolina public-records law. (More on who produces and who refuses: the Network Audit test.) So the question answers itself: if Carolina Beach and a string of universities can release who searched, why can’t a county sheriff?
Wrightsville Beach proves why audits matter
Wrightsville Beach deserves credit: its own internal audit caught a discrepancy, the Town referred it to the SBI and the District Attorney, the officer left, and on September 9 a grand jury indicted former officer Tonya Baker for misusing the plate-reader system (our account). That is the audit system working. But internal accountability is only half of it — public accountability requires the records. The Town released its contract, policy, and invoices in August, but has not produced the Organization Audit and Event Log that would show searches run through its own account, or the Network Audit that would show who outside searched its network. Catching misuse is the right thing. Finishing the disclosure — to the extent the law allows while a prosecution is pending — is the rest of it.
Two audits already caught misuse. What are the blacked-out ones hiding?
Put the last two weeks together. In Brunswick, an internal Flock audit flagged alleged misuse by a Sheriff’s Office employee, who resigned; the SBI is investigating. In Wrightsville Beach, an internal audit led to the indictment of a former officer. Both times the audit worked — and both times the public got to find out. Now hold that against the rest of the map: the same kind of audit is the record New Hanover redacted, Pender redacted, and Columbus and Brunswick won’t produce. If the audits that were disclosed already surfaced misuse, the honest question is unavoidable — what is in the ones that stay blacked out? A self-policed surveillance system only ever shows you the misuse someone chose to reveal. That is exactly why it cannot rest on trust: picture this system in the hands of the worst sheriff you can imagine, and you understand why the public, not the sheriff, has to be able to check the log.
The bottom line
The Network Audit exists in every one of these counties, and North Carolina’s public-records law reaches every one of them the same way. These offices assert exemptions to keep the searching-agency field secret — but nine other North Carolina agencies read the same statutes and released it. What is not in dispute is the choice each office has made so far: to black it out, screenshot around it, or sit on it.
New Hanover has already confronted the underlying question. Explaining her vote to cancel Flock, Commissioner Stephanie Walker said: “You don’t know who’s got it, who’s using it, what they’re using it for.” The Network Audit is the record designed to answer the first of those. Across much of the Cape Fear, residents still aren’t getting that answer.
You’re not a suspect. So stop being tracked like one.
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