Surveillance in New Hanover County, NC

Residents of New Hanover County among the signers of the petition at change.org/DeFlockILM, as of Sept. 12, 2026.

On September 8, 2026, New Hanover County canceled its $219,000 Flock contract — a real win, driven by residents. But Flock was only the most visible piece. The Sheriff’s Office and the Wilmington Police Department run a far larger apparatus the Flock vote never touched: a 2,147-camera Axon Fusus network, Clearview AI facial recognition, a signed three-state data-sharing pact, and a police drone hub. Here is what the county’s own records show — what the fight was about, and what still stands.

The cameras, on the map

Live map of ALPR cameras across New Hanover County, from the crowdsourced DeFlock map.

New Hanover County by the numbers

What the record shows

Nobody voted for it. The $219,000 contract was signed by the County Manager, and the Sheriff’s Office operates the system. There was no referendum, no public hearing, and no stand-alone vote of the Board of Commissioners authorizing the deployment.

2.98 million searches, every searcher blacked out. The county produced its audit with the name of every searching agency redacted across 2,980,082 rows. Five other North Carolina agencies on the same vendor produced that exact field; the county has withheld it for months.

Eight live-video cameras it won’t locate. Buried in the order form are eight “Condor” pan-tilt-zoom video cameras — not plate readers — whose locations the county redacts. Residents have located five of the eight from public view, one pointed at a youth soccer field.

It searches for people, not just plates. The county’s records log 470 “FreeForm” searches that describe people rather than cars — and in three cases an officer typed a race, then re-ran the search seconds later with the race removed.

The Sheriff’s defense, answered with the county’s own paper. Sheriff McMahon told commissioners the system “photographs the rear of vehicles only” and is “not intended to function as a surveillance system.” We answered that with the county’s own records.

What remains after Flock — the rest of the grid

Canceling the Flock contract removed the plate-reader network the county paid for. It did not touch the surveillance the Sheriff and the City built alongside it. Four systems, all documented in the county’s own records, are still running:

• A 2,147-camera Fusus network. Beyond the 36 Flock devices, the Sheriff’s “Connect New Hanover Sheriff” program maps 2,147 private and business cameras onto an Axon Fusus platform — 716 wired for direct live access — with AI riding on top. Never put to a public vote. (The network you weren’t shown →)
• Clearview AI facial recognition. The Sheriff’s Office has held a Clearview AI subscription since 2023 — “Clearview Search with Database,” Tier 4, 25 users, $39,485 over three years (Contract #24-0236). Asked for the usage logs and policy, the county produced only the contract and closed the request. (The facial-recognition contract →)
• A three-state data-sharing pact. On March 20, 2025, the Sheriff signed the Atlanta-Carolinas HIDTA MOU, feeding the county’s plate, records, dispatch, and intelligence data into a multi-state (GA/SC/NC), 120+-agency, federally-connected database. Canceling Flock does not unwind it. (The surveillance infrastructure →)
• Wilmington’s drone hub. The Wilmington Police Department runs a ~18-aircraft drone fleet and its own real-time camera hub, the STING Center — also Axon Fusus — separate from the county Sheriff. (What the drones do →)

And the county’s own numbers are thin. The Sheriff’s Flock system was searched 2.98 million times. The county’s own “Outcomes” log shows, over roughly nine and a half months, 66 outcomes: 43 arrests, three guns, zero drug seizures, and five recovered vehicles — overwhelmingly minor property crime. That is the return on mass surveillance, in the government’s own accounting.

Dig deeper — the full investigations

Each of these is its own documented piece of the New Hanover surveillance record:

• Who searched New Hanover’s Flock cameras — the county redacted every searching agency across 2.98 million rows; we recovered them.
• The 2,147-camera network you weren’t shown — the Sheriff’s private/business camera map on Axon Fusus, 716 wired for live access, never voted on.
• The Sheriff bought facial recognition — a Clearview AI subscription (Tier 4, 25 users, $39,485 — a three-year total of $12,995/yr plus a $500 setup fee), held since 2023.
• A protest leader’s plate, run under a case labeled “intelligence” — how the network reaches people exercising their rights.
• Flock search abuse across the Cape Fear — the misuse pattern that made national news.
• No charges, no transparency — misuse found, discipline shielded, the public left in the dark.
• The Sheriff’s answers, checked against the records — his written responses, held line by line against the county’s own paper.
• The NCDOT / Condor encroachment complaint — the video cameras placed in state rights-of-way, and the complaint we filed.
• North Carolina’s surveillance infrastructure — how local plate reads reach fusion centers and the federal government (6 U.S.C. § 124h).

The full record

• The 2.98 million searches, explained · the eight Condors · the ones we found.
• Who authorized Flock in the Cape Fear · the records hub.

What you can do now

The Flock contract is gone — but the Fusus network, the facial recognition, the data-sharing pact, and the drone hub were never on that ballot. Only the Board of Commissioners and the Sheriff can end them. Ask them to.

Sign the petition   Email the Board & Sheriff   Where to speak next