Flock Cameras in Kure Beach, NC

Residents of Kure Beach among the signers of the petition at change.org/DeFlockILM, as of Oct. 4, 2026.

Kure Beach is one square mile at the south end of Pleasure Island, population about 2,400. Its Police Department runs four Flock automated license plate reader cameras. Because the Town produced the record most agencies withhold, we can show you exactly what those four cameras do — and who reaches into them.

The cameras, on the map

Live map of ALPR cameras in and around Kure Beach, from the crowdsourced DeFlock map. Zoom and pan to explore your street.

Kure Beach by the numbers

Source: the Town’s own Flock Network and Organization audits, produced under the Public Records Act and mirrored, unaltered, at the Internet Archive.

What the record shows

Nationwide sharing, and the crowd that came. Kure Beach set its Flock network to nationwide discoverability, and 3,712 organizations searched its four cameras 2,560,152 times over five months (March–July 2026) — 92.5% from outside North Carolina, with agencies in Texas, Florida, and Georgia the heaviest, and the FBI its second-largest searcher of all. (These are the complete figures; an earlier, incomplete export capped at Excel’s row limit undercounted them.)

Federal access, through the side door. After Flock publicly promised no federal “lookup” access, Kure Beach’s own records show it shares directly — one way — with the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Federal agencies ran 75,550 searches of the town’s cameras over five months — the FBI alone 63,213. The safeguard was a setting, and a four-camera beach town flipped it.

Traffic enforcement North Carolina law forbids. 33.7% of the Town’s own searches — 275 of them — are coded “Traffic Infraction,” a use N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) expressly bars for ALPR data.

Pattern tools on a four-camera system. The record includes 19 “convoy” searches run by the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation — asking which vehicles habitually travel together — and 21 custom hot-list entries that trip an alert on every pass.

Shared with the town next door. Kure Beach PD granted Wrightsville Beach PD search, alerts, and analytics access to its network — one beach town watching through another’s cameras.

The paper trail. The Town signed its Flock contract on November 10, 2025 and adopted the written policy the statute requires 78 days later. If the Kure Beach Town Council voted to authorize this program, we have found no record of it — show us and we will correct this page.

And credit where it is due. Unlike New Hanover County, which redacts every searching agency on 2.98 million rows, and unlike Wrightsville Beach, which produced nothing, Kure Beach released the record in full, naming the agencies that searched. We say so plainly. The problem here is not secrecy — it is what the open record reveals.

The full record

• The complete Kure Beach audit — every figure, sourced, with the searching-agency breakdown.
• Carolina Beach’s record — the same request, the same weekend, ~3 million searches on five cameras.
• The records hub — where every Cape Fear agency’s request and production stands.

What you can do

The New Hanover County Commissioners fund the county program and can end it; the beach towns answer to their own councils. The single most useful thing you can do takes one minute:

Sign the petition   Email your leaders

And the New Hanover County Commissioners decide these contracts — find the next public meeting.