Three Million Searches, Zero Names: Inside New Hanover County’s Flock Data

What the Sheriff’s Office released about its automated license plate reader network — and what it left out.

In April we asked the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office for the audit records behind its contract with Flock Safety — the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras now mounted across the county. The records arrived in June. They cover roughly sixteen and a half months, from January 23, 2025 through June 5, 2026, and they log 2,980,082 searches run through the county’s Flock camera network. Here is what the data shows, and, just as importantly, what it cannot.

A local search that reaches across the country

Each search in the log records how many separate camera networks it touched. The typical search reached a median of 6,177 networks at once; the largest reached 7,216. That is not a glitch. The county’s contract pays for Flock’s State and Nationwide Network lookup — a feature Flock markets as access to “a nationwide system boasting 10 billion additional plate reads per month” that lets agencies “look up license plates on all cameras opted into the Flock Safety network.” In practice, one officer running one search is querying thousands of other agencies’ cameras across the country, not just New Hanover’s. And this is overwhelmingly human activity: 99.7% of the searches are interactive queries typed by a person, not automated background polling.

Who is doing the searching? The records don’t say.

Every organization name and every officer name in the released log is blacked out — replaced with “***” in all 2.98 million rows. License plates are redacted too. So while the data shows how many searches ran, how far they reached, and what reasons officers typed, it does not show who ran them. We also asked for the lists of agencies New Hanover shares ALPR data with and receives it from, for both license plate data and “hot list” information. Because the names are redacted and no separate lists were provided, those questions remain unanswered. The unredacted version of this log exists — the Sheriff’s Office and Flock hold it — but it was not released.

What the searches were for

For the county’s own searches, drug enforcement dominates: 37.4% were coded Drugs/Narcotics, the single largest category by a wide margin. Across the full network log, the picture is murkier. More than half of all searches carry only a generic reason — “Other,” “investigation,” or a blank — and case numbers are missing or redacted in nearly every row. That free-text field is messy, so this is best read as a documentation gap rather than proof that any individual search lacked a good reason. The log also contains 470 “freeform” searches in which officers described a vehicle in plain English — “black Porsche SUV with paper tags,” “white Silverado with a cooler in the bed” — and let Flock’s system hunt for matches by appearance alone. Across all 2.98 million searches, Flock’s content moderation flagged almost nothing: a handful of entries out of millions.

The legal questions this raises

North Carolina has a statute for this. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.32 makes captured plate data confidential and not a public record, and allows it to be disclosed only to a criminal-justice officer, for a legitimate law-enforcement purpose, and “pursuant to a written request from the requesting agency.” A companion section bars using ALPR data to enforce traffic violations. The Sheriff’s own policy, SOP 222, goes further: it restricts access to office employees and says an outside agency may obtain data only by sending the ALPR manager a written request that names the crime, the case, and the plate — a request the manager must review, approve, and record.

Set that against the data. The records show standing, network-wide access at a scale of nearly three million searches — a structure in which participating agencies can query the county’s cameras without a separate, case-by-case request. Whether a blanket, opt-in network-sharing arrangement satisfies a statute that speaks of “a written request from the requesting agency” is a real and unsettled question. No North Carolina court has yet construed this statute — the question is one of first impression in this state. (State courts here have mentioned license plate readers in passing, but none has interpreted the ALPR statute itself.)

To be clear: the released data does not prove that anyone broke the law. Because the identities are redacted, that conclusion is impossible from these records alone. What the data does is surface a genuine conflict between how the system operates and how the law and the county’s own policy say it should — and it points to exactly the records that would settle the matter.

What we’re asking for next

SOP 222 says certain records must exist. We will be asking for them: the ALPR manager’s log of written sharing requests from outside agencies; the annual audits the policy requires be sent to the Sheriff; and the access logs that, by policy, record who viewed the data by name, date, and time. Those documents would answer the question the redacted log cannot — who has been searching New Hanover’s cameras, and whether the process the law requires was followed.

See for yourself

We show our work. The full records the county produced, and our complete analysis of them, are posted alongside this article. Read them, check the numbers, and draw your own conclusions — then ask your local leaders why a camera network in Wilmington is fielding millions of searches the public has no way to trace.

Our Complete Report is here https://deflockilm.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/NewHanoverNetworkAudit-0364.pdf