Don’t Laser the Cameras

It started showing up in our own comment section.

We post about the county’s Flock contract, or the 2.98 million searches nobody will explain, and underneath it someone writes: just laser them. Not once. Repeatedly. People are arriving at our posts already carrying the idea.

They’re getting it from a video. A creator posting as Plonk has a series that runs on deadpan reverse psychology — he says, with a straight face, that he wants to help the camera companies, and then tells you exactly what you should avoid doing if you want the cameras to keep working. The first post went up June 20. When we checked on July 15, 2026, it had 12.5 million views, 1.7 million likes, and had been shared 134,000 times.

The video never quite says go destroy a camera. It says the opposite, with a wink. But twelve and a half million people can read a wink, and the comments arriving under our posts are not winking. They are telling our neighbors to go point a laser at something.

We’re not going to repeat the how-to. Not the wavelength, not the wattage, not where to buy it. You can find it in ten minutes if you want it; you won’t find it here, because a page that says “don’t do this” while printing the shopping list is just the eleventh site handing out the instructions.

So let us say it plainly

We are a group of Wilmington citizens who want our government to respect the United States and North Carolina Constitutions and stop the mass surveillance of people suspected of nothing. That’s it. That’s the whole project.

So we are about as far from neutral on this technology as a group can be. We oppose ALPR cameras. We think a standing government record of where everyone drives is un-American, and we have spent months saying so, in public, with our names on it.

And we do not support destroying these cameras. Not with a laser. Not with a saw. Not at all.

That isn’t squeamishness, and it isn’t concern for the equipment. It’s that we’ve now read enough of these records, and enough of these arrest reports, to know exactly who pays for this trend — and it isn’t the vendor, and it isn’t the county.

You have no way of knowing what you’re actually risking

We’re going to be careful here rather than dramatic. What follows is general information, not legal advice, and what any given person is exposed to depends on facts we can’t see from here.

Start with what nobody in that comment section can tell you: who owns the camera.

It is the same gray box on the same gray pole whether it belongs to a beach town, a county sheriff, a university, a private HOA — or a federal agency. And federal plate readers are real. The DEA has run a National License Plate Reader Program since 2008, documented through ACLU public-records litigation, sharing data with thousands of agencies. Federal cameras exist at federal facilities. If a camera is federal property, a different body of law comes into play — 18 U.S.C. § 1361 reaches damage to property of the United States, and its maximum is ten years where the damage exceeds $1,000.

You cannot tell by looking. The trend is asking people to bet on a question they have no way to answer.

We’re not telling you the camera on your road is federal. Most in this county are not. We’re telling you that the person aiming has no idea either, and the answer is the difference between a local charge and a federal one.

State law is its own set of problems. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-160, willfully injuring someone else’s personal property is a misdemeanor — a Class 1 misdemeanor where the damage exceeds $200. That is a criminal conviction, a record, and a lawyer you have to pay for. And North Carolina has a separate statute for laser devices entirely: under § 14-34.8, intentionally pointing a laser at a law enforcement officer who is performing his duties is a Class I felony. A deputy pulling up mid-attempt is not a remote scenario when the thing you’re standing next to is a camera that just alerted somebody.

Then there’s the person who was never part of your plan at all. A beam that misses a lens at night, beside a road, does not stop existing. Where it lands is not up to you — and injuring someone’s eyes is where North Carolina’s assault statutes, and their felony grades, live.

Add it up honestly and you get this: a range of criminal exposure running from a misdemeanor to something far worse, with the size of it determined by facts you don’t control and can’t check in advance. That is not a risk anyone should take for a gesture.

The camera is watching you do it

There’s an irony here that ought to be enough on its own. Public records obtained by researchers show police using Flock’s own network to hunt the people damaging Flock cameras — audit logs with search reasons typed in like “flock camera got shot,” sweeping tens of thousands of cameras looking for the vehicle that left. Reporting indicates Flock advised agencies to be “as vague as permissible” about what those searches show.

So the plan is: approach a camera that will still be recording after you’re done, in a car whose plate is being read by the next camera down the road, to attack a network that will then be searched to find you. In Havelock, the Sheriff’s Office released the surveillance video. In Suffolk, Virginia, a man now faces 25 criminal counts over 13 cameras. He argued in his own defense that ALPR systems are unconstitutional. He may even be right about that. It did not help him.

And there’s a decent chance it doesn’t even work

We’ll put this last, because it isn’t the reason. Even if it worked perfectly we’d still be against it. But it’s worth knowing.

The surveillance-testing outfit IPVM ran lasers against security cameras in a controlled test and found that “permanent damage did not occur from a distance of ~50 feet or further from the camera, regardless of the strength of the laser we tested” — and that aiming by hand past roughly ten feet is impractical, because hands shake. Now picture the real thing: a camera on a pole eight to twelve feet up, set back from a roadway. Temporary flare is easy. Permanent damage is not.

And notably, in every documented case of an ALPR camera actually being destroyed in this country — Suffolk, Eugene, La Mesa, Menard County, Lisbon, Park Ridge, Havelock — the tool was vice grips, a saw, a bullet, or spray paint. We went looking and could not find a single confirmed instance, anywhere, of someone destroying one of these cameras with a laser.

So the likeliest outcome of the whole exercise is a brief white bloom in the footage of a camera that keeps working, keeps recording, and now has a reason to be reviewed.

It’s happening here, and it isn’t helping

This isn’t a distant internet thing. In Rutherfordton, a camera was damaged and the police chief’s Facebook post defending the program drew tens of thousands of comments. In Havelock, on July 5, two people cut a pole and took the reader; Craven County released the video. (Both are on our statewide tracker, and we’ve written before about the smashing.)

We understand the anger. We have read more of these records than almost anyone, and the anger is earned. Nearly three million searches of this county’s network with every agency and officer name blacked out. A beach town that ran 276 searches coded for the one purpose state law forbids. Nobody voted for any of it.

But here is the cold part. Every destroyed camera becomes the story instead of the searches. It hands the county and the vendor the only argument they don’t otherwise have — that the people asking questions are the problem. We have spent months building something that is hard to dismiss: documents, audits, statutes, numbers with sources attached. A laser in a comment section undoes more of that than Flock’s PR team could on its best day.

And then there’s the part we can’t stop thinking about

Everything above is about you. This part is about everyone else on the road.

The FDA caps lasers sold as pointers at 5 milliwatts, and its language about the class above that is blunt: “Class IIIb hand-held lasers are too dangerous for use as pointers or amusement articles.” The device this trend nudges people toward isn’t Class IIIb. It’s the class above that — what the FDA calls the most hazardous there is.

The medical literature isn’t ambiguous either. A review in Survey of Ophthalmology treats retinal injury from handheld lasers as a growing public-health problem and notes the prognosis is generally good unless the injury hits the fovea — in which case the vision loss is permanent. One case series documents seven teenagers injured by a single handheld device, some with lasting damage.

Now put that outdoors. A beam aimed at a housing of glass and metal, mounted beside a road, usually at night, with cars going past and people inside them. You do not control where that light goes after it leaves your hand. Neither does the driver coming the other way, or the kid in the back seat.

And here’s the part that makes it worse: owning a laser like that isn’t illegal. Under federal law you can own a laser of any power — the violation belongs to the seller who markets an over-limit device as a “pointer.” So nothing stops anyone from buying one, and nothing in the buying tells them what they’re holding.

We are not willing to watch a neighbor lose an eye over a camera we intend to get removed anyway.

What actually works — and it isn’t close

We’re not asking you to be polite. We’re asking you to be effective. And the record on what’s effective is not ambiguous:

• Hillsborough. Pittsboro. Chatham County. Macon County. Four North Carolina communities that got rid of Flock — by votes, after residents read the contract and filled the room. Macon’s commissioners voted 5–0 on July 14, 2026 to defund the cameras and then unanimously to take them down — the day before this post published, and eight days after their own Sheriff publicly defended the program. Not one camera was harmed. (The tracker.)
• Kure Beach. A public records request — an email — produced 825 searches, 276 of them coded “Traffic Infraction,” the one use the statute names and prohibits. A crowbar would have produced a police report.
• Columbus, Ohio. An audit, then an order to shut off statewide sharing. An administrator did that with a setting.
• Los Angeles. The nation’s third-largest police department let its contract expire after its own inspector general found plate readers had put 161 innocent people through high-risk felony stops in two months.

Not one item on that list required destroying anything. Every one of them required somebody to file, read, show up, or speak.

The New Hanover County Board of Commissioners meets August 17. Public comment is three minutes. Three minutes, on the permanent record, in front of the five people who actually control the contract, is worth more than every laser ever pointed at a pole. (How to speak — and what to say.)

Where we stand

We want these cameras gone. We have said so on every page of this site, and we’ll keep saying it until the county cancels the contract.

We want them gone lawfully — by vote, by record, by the Constitution. Not because we’re squeamish, and not because we think the people who own these cameras have earned our good manners. Because it’s the only thing that has ever worked, and because we are not willing to watch somebody lose an eye or a decade over a video.

Keep your hands clean and your aim on the Board. That’s where the contract lives.

If you came here from a comment telling you to laser one: don’t. Sign the petition instead, email the five commissioners, and show up on August 17. It is slower. It is duller. It is the only thing on this page that has actually removed a camera.

Sources

• View count, likes, shares and post date observed directly on the creator’s TikTok on July 15, 2026; figures move as the video circulates.
• IPVM, “Lasers Impact on Surveillance Cameras Tested” (2019), as summarized by the International Laser Display Association — ilda.com.
• U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Important Information for Laser Pointer Manufacturers (5 mW pointer limit; Class IIIb “too dangerous”); laser product rules at 21 C.F.R. §§ 1040.10–1040.11.
• Survey of Ophthalmology, “Retinal injury from handheld lasers: a review”; “Retinal injuries in seven teenage boys from the same handheld laser.”
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-160 (willful injury to personal property) · § 14-34.8 (criminal use of laser device) · 18 U.S.C. §§ 1361, 1362. (Our guide to the NC ALPR statute.)
• ACLU, FOIA documents on the DEA’s National License Plate Reader Program.
• WITN, Craven County Sheriff’s Office: Vandals on video stole Flock camera (July 8, 2026) · 404 Media, the LAPD inspector general’s findings (July 13, 2026).

DeFlockILM is a citizen effort on ALPR and privacy issues in the Wilmington area. This article is general information about North Carolina and federal law, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. Criminal exposure depends on facts we cannot know from here — who owns a given camera, what damage results, and who is standing nearby. If you are facing charges, talk to a licensed North Carolina attorney. We do not condone damaging anyone’s property, and nothing here should be read as encouragement to do so. Last updated July 15, 2026.