August 17. Room 301. Your three minutes.

However much you can give

Claim a lane

Ten sincere people saying the same thing counts as one comment said ten times. Ten people each carrying one lane is a case — built personal → evidence → law → money → ask. Pick a lane, say your name and neighborhood, give one number and one line, and sit down. Full how-to-speak guide →

Rules (Rule 26): keep it germane to the Board’s authority; one lane per speaker; you may criticize the program and how officials have handled it, but no personal insults, threats, or profanity — the target is a contract, not people; end on your lane’s sentence. Time yourself — 3 minutes is about 390 words. Signs are allowed (just don’t block anyone’s view). Bring a printed copy of your remarks and hand it to the Clerk, so your words enter the record even if the timer runs out.

The Letter & Report We Sent the Commissioners

On August 15, 2026, DeFlockILM sent all five New Hanover County Commissioners a two-page open letter, a fully sourced Report, a one-page Commissioner Brief, and a page of proposed hearing questions — asking the Board to pause nationwide data sharing and calendar a September 17 public hearing on Flock Contract No. 25-0364. The full text is below, web-readable. The originals are also available as PDFs.

Report of DeFlockILM

In Support of a Public Hearing and Recorded Vote on Flock Safety Contract No. 25-0364 — submitted to the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners, August 15, 2026.

New Hanover’s Flock system — what the Board should know, in one page

This Report supports the accompanying letter. Every factual claim is footnoted to its source — the contract, records produced by the County and its neighbors, the General Statutes, court filings, and published reporting — and the underlying documents are published at DeFlockILM.org. Where the Report argues or contends rather than reports, it says so. It is organized so that no reader need take any claim in the letter on faith, and it ends with the specific relief requested.

The deeper wound is trust.

I hear it every day from the people who sign this petition: they feel violated. They learned from a news broadcast, not from their government, that their daily movements had been logged and made searchable for more than a year — and then watched the County produce the record of that surveillance with every searching agency’s name blacked out. These are not fringe voices. A signer who served twenty-seven years in uniform “protecting the rights of Americans as announced in the US Constitution” wrote that the county should be rid of this capability. Another Wilmington attorney wrote that the system “moves from targeted investigations of suspected wrongdoing to a ‘dragnet’ model of mass surveillance.” A third asked only that the county spend the $219,000 “in preventing crime before it happens.”

The County’s cited grounds for the redactions — N.C.G.S. §§ 132-1.4 and 132-1.7 — are, in my contention, a poor fit: a usage log recording which agency searched, and when, is administrative metadata about software use, not a criminal investigation file, and six peer agencies released the identical field in days under the same law. I state that as a contention, not a court’s holding, but it is a contention the County has yet to answer, and the discrepancy deserves a public legal explanation. And the new transparency portal’s counter, labeled “Number of Searches,” read 878 as of August 13, 2026 — the Sheriff’s Office’s own sessions only, omitting the outside-agency searches that are the public’s actual question. The same page lists 36 total cameras but identifies only 19 as plate readers, leaving 17 devices unexplained, and reports 762,187 unique vehicles detected in thirty days — in a county of fewer than 250,000 people. If the portal exists to inform the public, why does it not display both numbers?

The local press has now asked the question in so many words: on August 11, the Cape Fear Beacon’s headline asked, “How did New Hanover County buy Flock’s human-tracking camera system without informing the public about its full capabilities?” — reporting that the Sheriff’s public statements described license plate readers while the executed contract included live-video Condors and person-search capabilities the public was never told about. And beneath the numbers sits the structural problem, described best by Dr. Viet Trinh of Ohio State University during Columbus, Ohio’s audit of its own Flock system: traditional investigation identifies a suspect first and then searches; this system searches everyone first — logs every car, every day — and looks for the suspect later. That inversion is not a misuse of the product. It is the product. Trust is not rebuilt by messaging. It is rebuilt by transparency and democratic accountability — a public hearing, a public record, and a public vote.

How the system works — two different cameras, two different problems.

The Board is being asked to govern a system that has never been explained to it — or to the public. Start with the machines themselves, because the county’s twenty-eight devices are not all the same machine, and the difference matters. Twenty are Falcons: fixed, solar-powered license plate readers in a flat rectangular housing, aimed at the road. A Falcon photographs the rear of every vehicle that passes — resident and visitor alike, no suspicion required — and software converts each photograph into a searchable record: the plate number plus a “vehicle fingerprint” of make, body type, color, and details like decals and roof racks. Eight are Condors: rounded dome cameras on an articulated arm that pan, tilt, zoom, and stream live video. A Condor is not a plate reader. It is a remotely operated video camera that can follow a person in real time — and one of them overlooks the children’s soccer fields at Veterans Park. North Carolina’s ALPR statute, written for plate readers, contains no comparable rules for live video of people.

This is not a local system. It is a national one.

The second thing the Board must understand is what happens to a plate read after the Falcon takes it. The camera on College Road is not a county filing cabinet; it is a node in a nationwide search network. When the Sheriff enrolled New Hanover in Flock’s statewide and nationwide lookup, every camera here became searchable by outside agencies — and the audits show that is exactly how the network is used. In three months of audit records released by five North Carolina agencies (Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, N.C. A&T, UNC Pembroke, and UNC Charlotte), 3,904 distinct law-enforcement organizations ran searches. Roughly ninety percent of the searching came from out of state. The single largest searcher of North Carolina Flock data was the Houston Police Department — 306,799 searches in three months — followed by the Texas Department of Public Safety, a Florida sheriff’s office, the Atlanta police, and the Louisville police. The FBI ran 26,164. Texas, Georgia, and Florida alone accounted for roughly 1.7 million searches.

Figure 3 shows the mechanics, using N.C. A&T’s audit as a worked example: one officer runs one broad query, and that single query lands a log entry in every opted-in network it sweeps — 1,390,776 entries on one university’s sixteen cameras in three months, roughly 15,450 a day. Each entry means the network was included in a search, not that a local plate matched: the number measures exposure, not investigations. But the audits also show a single query appearing on an average of 2.7 of the five audited networks at the same instant — one functionally unified national search pool, not five local systems. When a Houston detective runs a search, the record is consistent with it reaching directly into the same system that Kure Beach’s cameras feed. New Hanover’s own log — 2,980,082 entries in sixteen months — is the same phenomenon at county scale. The County has simply redacted who was doing the searching.

About DeFlockILM and the petition.

DeFlockILM is a non-partisan, volunteer local privacy initiative. It takes no donations and sells nothing; its research is built on public records, the General Statutes, and published reporting, and it declined to convert its own signers’ names into a bulk public record — the full list is available to any Commissioner on request. As of August 15, 3,034 people have signed its petition at change.org/DeFlockILM, including 1,797 New Hanover County residents (58 percent of signers with a usable address) and 2,274 across the three-county Cape Fear region (74 percent); roughly ninety percent are North Carolinians, and 412 signed in the last seven days alone.

No one voted for this deployment.

In December 2021, the Sheriff’s Office brought this Board a $43,750 sole-source contract for fifteen Flock cameras. It passed on the consent agenda with minimal discussion. Within weeks, a competing vendor demonstrated that the sole-source justification did not hold, and the county’s own finance staff agreed. That deal was scrapped. The process worked — barely — because the question at least appeared on a public agenda.

The current program never did. Contract No. 25-0364 — $219,000 over two years for twenty-eight devices — was signed by the county manager at the Sheriff’s request. There was no notice to the citizens this was about to occur. There was no public hearing. There was no public discussion. There was no recorded vote of this Board. A deployment roughly five times the cost of the one this Board once considered in public was authorized administratively, in private. Residents learned about it by looking up at a pole on the morning commute and running a google search asking what is that pole with a solar panel and a camera.

And let me concede that the county manager acted within his purchasing authority, and no statute required a hearing before this contract was signed. I do not claim otherwise. That is precisely the problem. A decision that changes the relationship between a quarter-million people and their government fit through an administrative doorway built for buying tires and radios — and only this Board can decide whether a decision like this should ever fit through that doorway again.

Measure that against what this Board requires of its own citizens — not in the abstract, but on this very meeting’s agenda. Item Z26-07 is a request to rezone approximately 0.96 acres at 8086 Market Street from I-1 Light Industrial to conditional B-2 Regional Business. To move that single acre from one commercial category to another, Chapter 160D of the General Statutes required published notice in the newspaper once a week for two successive weeks, mailed notice to the owners of every abutting parcel, a sign posted prominently on the property, review by the Planning Board, a legislative hearing before this Board, and your recorded vote. Yet a countywide surveillance system was installed across a county of nearly a quarter-million residents — one whose data has been made searchable by agencies in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky, and by the federal government — with no notice, no hearing, no discussion, and no vote.

It is inconceivable that one acre gets more public process than a quarter-million people. A county that will not rezone one lot without hearing from the public should not track every driver on its roads without asking them first.

The county’s own records tell the story — and the reach is the story.

The data export the County itself produced in June shows 2,980,082 logged searches touching the New Hanover Flock network in roughly sixteen months — with the name of every searching agency and every officer redacted. Those entries measure exposure — inclusion in outside searches — not 2.98 million local investigations or “hits.” What the County has withheld is the one thing that matters: who was doing the looking. In the records reviewed by reporters for the first half of 2026, our Sheriff’s Office accounted for 3.9 percent of logged search traffic on county cameras; roughly ninety-six percent was attributed to outside users, and the County has said that records identifying them must be obtained from Flock, a private company — while six peer North Carolina agencies released the identical agency-name field, under the identical statewide law, in days. How is it that six state and local government entities in North Carolina were able to produce the record, and New Hanover says “Ask Flock”?

The mechanism matters, so let me state it exactly. No one claims the County ships its database to Texas; the network reaches in. A Georgia officer searching for a plate receives every matching read nationwide — including the New Hanover driver’s — and whatever that agency saves or exports from the result then sits in its files under its state’s law. North Carolina’s ninety-day retention cap, sale ban, traffic-enforcement ban, and criminal penalties bind North Carolina agencies only; the contract itself acknowledges, in Section 4.4, that recipients of shared data may retain it beyond Flock’s standard retention period. Once a plate read is returned out of state, our rules no longer protect it, and no policy the Sheriff adopts — and no ordinance this Board passes — can follow it. The only decision that actually governs this system is the decision whether to feed it.

And the conflict is not only interstate — it is written into the contract itself. Because it is best seen side by side, the operative words follow verbatim: the contract the County signed on the left, the General Assembly’s command on the right.

A license is not a sale, and reasonable lawyers can debate whether Section 4.1 crosses the statute’s no-sale line. But “third parties” on the vendor’s own good-faith belief sits hard against a statute that names “a criminal justice officer … for a legitimate law enforcement purpose” — and no one else. That is not a theoretical reading: it is the very clause the Town of Hillsborough cited when it cancelled its own Flock contract. I state the tension as my contention, not a court’s holding. What should be beyond debate is narrower: the contract’s language is materially broader than anything the public was told, another North Carolina town has already ended its agreement over one of these very clauses, and the County Attorney has never explained in open session how the columns fit together.

Every safeguard offered for this system fails in a documented way.

Start with the audit trail. North Carolina law bans ALPR use for traffic enforcement — and so does the Sheriff’s own written policy, which echoes the statute in its sixth numbered command: “ALPR-generated data shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations.” Yet the audit logs provided by the New Hanover County Sheriff record 17,695 searches coded “Traffic Infraction” — with the Sheriff’s own officers accounting for fewer than fifteen of them. Sheriff McMahon says those entries were mislabeled. Take him at his word and observe where it leads: if those codes accurately describe searches run to enforce traffic violations, both the statute and the Sheriff’s own SOP 222 are being violated; if they do not, the justification field — the very mechanism every defender of this system points to as its safeguard — cannot establish why any search was run. Either answer demands independent review.

The eight Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras present a dilemma of their own: if they convert plate images the way the plate readers do, they are ALPRs, and every Article 3D safeguard applies to them, unacknowledged; if they do not, they are wholly unregulated live video. The County has not said which. One of them overlooks the youth soccer fields at Veterans Park. And the system searches for more than plates: county records show 470 plain-language “FreeForm” searches over thirteen months — fourteen of them describing human beings by clothing, build, and location, and three typing the subject’s race.

Misuse, meanwhile, is no longer hypothetical in this state. Twelve days ago, a Mooresville officer was arrested for using Flock to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife — twenty-nine of her thirty-one searches falsely logged as motor vehicle infractions. A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was charged by the SBI in July for an unauthorized search of a North Carolina plate. Every North Carolina violation on record was discovered after the fact, by log review; none was prevented. Women in Fayetteville and Charlotte have already been wrongfully arrested or detained over plate-reader errors. I do not allege our deputies have done any of this. I do not need to: no community that adopted this system expected to be the next example, and every one of them had a policy. And when misuse is caught, the public rarely learns — state personnel law seals the investigative file and most discipline short of dismissal-level action.

Sheriff McMahon’s August 10 reforms — thirty-day retention, monthly audits, a transparency portal — acknowledge that the concerns residents raised are real, and he deserves credit for them. But each is a policy: revocable by memo, binding no outside agency, retrieving no copy already out of state, amending no contract clause, and reaching no camera the statute does not cover. This is not about whether we trust Sheriff McMahon. A surveillance architecture should never require a community to trust any officeholder indefinitely — that is the whole point of structural limits. The contract is the problem. Only this Board can address the contract.

The vendor’s eleventh-hour conversion concedes the premise.

On August 13 — four days before this meeting — Flock’s chief executive, Garrett Langley, announced sweeping safeguards: default retention cut to seven days, mandatory audit tools, required case codes with automatic lockouts, independent security testing, and pledges against facial recognition and data sales. Nearly every announced fix maps to a failure this Report documents. His own words went further. Of safeguards not built in from the start: “we got that one wrong. We should have required it out of the gate.” Of misuse: “that one officer can erode the trust of the entire community.” And to the public whose plates his cameras read, he offered this:

“The short message would be, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the system has failed you.”
— Garrett Langley, Chief Executive Officer, Flock Safety · August 13, 2026

On all of it, this Report agrees — including the apology, which the people of this county are owed. But announcements are not amendments. The contract his company signed with this county grants an “irrevocable, worldwide” license, machine-learning rights, and disclosure to third parties on the vendor’s own “good faith belief” — and Sections 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, and 5.3 say today exactly what they said in January. No press release binds the thousands of outside agencies already searching, and no announcement retrieves a record already sitting in another state. If the new safeguards are real, the vendor will have no objection to writing them into an enforceable agreement — and the public hearing is where that question gets asked. A promise the vendor will not put in a contract was never a promise. It was a press release.

The law is moving, and the County is exposed.

This Report asks the Board to sit as no court — only to do what boards do with public money: price risk. No court has yet held that a fixed license-plate-reader network violates the Fourth Amendment. But the Supreme Court’s location-privacy decisions — Jones, Carpenter, and this June’s Chatrie — have been moving steadily toward protecting aggregated location data, the leading ALPR case is now on appeal in our own federal circuit, and plate-reader errors have already produced wrongful-arrest settlements in Fayetteville and Charlotte. The practical point is narrow: continuing, expanding, or renewing this contract purchases litigation risk with public money at the exact moment the law is moving — a question on which the Board should hear from its own counsel, in public, before deciding anything.

What the cameras get right — and what no one can yet measure.

Let me concede what supporters of these cameras get right: an ALPR can help locate a stolen vehicle, generate a lead, and help find a missing person. I do not dispute that Flock has ever helped solve a crime. It has. The Sheriff’s Office has published narrative examples on its portal, and they deserve to be weighed: deputies located a missing 89-year-old with early signs of dementia; detectives traced a homicide victim’s missing vehicle to a neighboring state; an LPR-assisted stop produced a kilogram of cocaine; other searches helped uncover a three-state theft ring. Those are real outcomes, and this Report does not discount them. But they are anecdotes, not measures: narratives with no denominators, no case numbers, and no way to know what conventional tools would have produced in the same cases. Controlled research has not found that these systems measurably reduce overall crime, the County has published no before-and-after data of its own, and a public records request for the program’s local effectiveness data remains unanswered. That is precisely what the public hearing is for.

This ask crosses every party line — and Macon County has already shown how.

Macon County is the closest thing North Carolina has to a preview of this decision. One of the most conservative counties in the state, with a sheriff who wanted the cameras, it took up Flock on July 14 as a simple discussion item — and its commissioners voted unanimously, twice in one evening: first to defund the program, then to remove the cameras as soon as feasible. Two motions, one meeting, roughly $47,000 a year returned to priorities that community chose for itself. Hillsborough cancelled in October and had every camera down by December; Chatham County followed in April, Pittsboro in May; and this month a Charlotte television poll found a majority of respondents oppose law enforcement’s use of Flock cameras. This Board has already framed the question for itself. Vice Chair Scalise put it exactly right: “How much do we want to trade off for safety and security, versus our liberties?” — and he has already named the remedy, saying the citizens of this county “deserve a transparent review and discussion by the Commission.” Chair Pierce said she needed answers before supporting future funding. They are right, and that review has a name: a public hearing and a recorded vote.

The power to act is precisely the power you hold.

Let me close the last door an opponent might offer you. Someone will say the Board cannot tell the Sheriff how to police, and that is true: G.S. 153A-103 commits law-enforcement operations to the Sheriff, and nothing in this letter asks you to direct a single patrol or investigation. But this program does not exist because of an operational decision. It exists because of a county contract and a county appropriation — and those belong to you. The Board approves, funds, conditions, renews, and terminates the contracts through which every camera in this program operates; that decision-by-decision control over the purse and the pen is stronger than any ordinance this Board could write. No one need resolve a single question about the Sheriff’s statutory independence to act. Even the vendor agrees where decisions like this live: asked about police departments that work with federal immigration enforcement, Flock’s chief executive answered, “I think that’s a local decision.” So is this one.

One more reason not to wait. This year’s state budget made the SBI’s license-plate-reader program permanent on state rights-of-way across North Carolina — a network no county decision can reach. That is an argument for acting, not for shrugging. The one network this Board controls is the one this county pays for. If the county’s own cameras simply dissolve into an ever-growing state and national grid without a vote, then no elected body will ever have decided, on the record, whether the people of New Hanover County consent to being watched.

What this Report does not claim.

Briefly, so no one need guess at the boundaries: this Report does not claim that 2.98 million logged searches equal 2.98 million investigations or “hits” on local drivers. It does not allege that New Hanover County deputies have misused this system, and it does not claim that any court has held this network unconstitutional. It does not dispute that these cameras sometimes help solve crimes. The claim is narrower: a county should not collect location information about everyone on its roads, make it searchable far beyond this community, and ask the public to accept safeguards no one here can verify or enforce — least of all when no elected body ever approved the arrangement.

The ask.

The argument, reduced to its floor: New Hanover County made a consequential surveillance decision without elected review. Since then, the County’s own records have revealed millions of network searches, roughly ninety-six percent attributed to users outside the Sheriff’s Office; the County has withheld the identities of those outside users; documented misuse has occurred elsewhere in North Carolina; other North Carolina governments have terminated their Flock agreements; and Flock itself has now announced substantial safeguards in response to the same concerns. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this technology should ultimately remain. What is no longer reasonable is refusing to put the question before the elected Board and the public.

On behalf of 3,034 petition signers — 1,797 of them New Hanover County residents — I respectfully ask this Board to act, and to act in public. The ask is a ladder, in the order a careful board would climb it:

1. Pause, today. By interim directive, request that the County’s devices be disenrolled from any statewide or nationwide open-lookup network pending review — preserving the Sheriff’s Office’s own local access in full — and direct that the complete, unredacted searching-agency audit be produced to this Board. This step takes no tool from any deputy and decides nothing on the merits.
2. Calendar the public hearing. Place Contract No. 25-0364 on the formal agenda for a noticed public hearing and recorded vote at the next regular meeting, and publish beforehand the contract, the current sharing settings, the audit data, and the evidence scorecard — so that the County Attorney and the vendor can address Sections 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, and 5.3 against N.C.G.S. § 20-183.32 in open session.
3. At the hearing — terminate. Terminate for convenience under Addendum Paragraph 29 — or decline to appropriate further funds under the non-appropriation clause — direct the removal of all twenty-eight devices, and require written certification that every record of County data has been deleted or returned. DeFlockILM’s position is that termination is the right outcome.
4. Never again without a vote. Adopt a standing policy: no county funds spent on surveillance technology without a published surveillance-impact report, a public hearing, and a recorded vote; no use for traffic enforcement, immigration enforcement, or the monitoring of worship or protest; a warrant for retrospective pattern searches; and independent, published audits that name every searching agency.

The first two rungs are available at the August 17 meeting, under North Carolina law and the Board’s own procedures — exactly as Macon County’s commissioners did in July. And let me name the political fear honestly, because it is real: if a crime occurs after termination, someone will try to lay it at this Board’s feet. Four North Carolina boards — Macon, Chatham, Pittsboro, and Hillsborough’s — weighed exactly that risk in public session and acted anyway, and their officers still solve crimes today. No commissioner need own termination this afternoon. The first rung asks a commissioner to own only this: that a program watching a quarter-million people should face them once.

Every factual claim in this Report is documented in the footnotes and in the source materials published at DeFlockILM.org. Where the Report argues or contends, it says so. DeFlockILM welcomes scrutiny of every line — from the Board, from its counsel, from the Sheriff, and from the press.