Someone Is Using Our Cameras to Search for People — by Race, Not by Plate

Sheriff McMahon told the County Commissioners this month that the cameras “photograph the rear of vehicles only,” that the system “does not identify drivers or passengers,” and that it is “not intended to monitor the daily activities of law-abiding citizens.”

The County’s own records show the network being used to do something that description leaves no room for: searching for people, by physical description, including race.

Not a plate reader. A people-search engine.

Flock’s search log sorts every query into an “object class.” Most are vehicle — a make, a color, a dented bumper. But the platform has a second class: people. It lets an officer skip the license plate entirely and instead describe a human being — and ask the camera network to find them. Flock calls this FreeForm; we documented the feature, and the 470 people-and-vehicle searches run against this county’s network, separately.

That capability is not theoretical here. It is in New Hanover County’s own audit, the one the County released to us on June 18, 2026 in response to our April 28 public-records request (No. 26-594).

What was typed

On December 11, 2025, at 2:38:27 PM, a people-class search was run against this county’s camera network. What it typed was this:

“2 young teenage black males.”

Fifteen seconds later — at 2:38:42 — the identical search ran again, with one change: the word “black” removed. And it was not the only time.

Three times within the county’s audit period, someone typed a race into a search for people against these cameras. Each time, Flock’s own moderation blocked the query. And each time, seconds later, the same search ran again with the race word stripped out — and was allowed.

We want to be precise about what that means, because it cuts two ways.

Flock’s guardrail worked — and it is one word deep

To Flock’s credit, its filter caught these. The company has told reporters that users cannot search by protected attributes like race, and that attempts alert the searching agency’s own administrators. What you see above is what that looks like from the outside: a search rejected, an officer retrying, the racial term gone.

But look at what the filter does and does not stop. Moments before the December search, a vehicle-class query for a “Black car” ran against the same network and was allowed — so the system plainly distinguishes “black” the paint color from “black” the person. The guardrail is real, and it is narrow. It blocks the word. It does not block the search. The people-search for “2 young teenage males” went through.

And note the second and third rows. Two of the three blocked searches described white males. This is not a story about one race. It is a story about a surveillance network being queried for people by racial description — and a filter that stops the word while the search proceeds.

Who ran these searches? The County won’t say.

This is the question that matters, and it is the one the County has made unanswerable. On all 2,980,082 rows of this audit, the name of the searching agency is blacked out. Every one.

So we will tell you what we know, what we don’t, and what the record most plausibly means.

What we know: These searches appear in the Network Audit — Flock’s log of searches run against the network New Hanover’s cameras belong to, a network shared with thousands of other agencies. They do not appear in the Organization Audit, which summarizes the Sheriff’s Office’s own search activity by offense type.

What we don’t know: The specific agency behind any one of these searches. The County removed it.

What the record points to: Sheriff McMahon has stated plainly that his office does not use this system to monitor people. If we take him at his word — and we have no reason here not to — then these searches came from the other agencies that share the network. And we have a window into who those are. Fifty miles down the coast, the Town of Kure Beach produced the same Flock report without redacting the searchers. On that network, 92.5% of searches came from outside North Carolina — the Texas Department of Public Safety the single largest, the FBI running more than 25,000. (Kure Beach’s records.)

So the most reasonable reading of this record is the one the County’s redaction is designed to keep you from confirming: out-of-state agencies appear to be using cameras New Hanover County pays for to search for people by description — including race.

We cannot prove which agency. That is not our failing. It is the direct result of the County blacking out the one field that would answer it — the field Kure Beach released, the field NC A&T released in eleven days, the field we have been asking New Hanover for since June 18.

Why this is the whole argument

The Sheriff’s memo asks residents to trust that the system is used “only for legitimate law enforcement purposes.” That assurance may be entirely true of his deputies. It says nothing about the hundreds of outside agencies that can reach into this network — and it cannot, because the County will not say who they are or what they searched.

A camera network that can be queried for people by race, by agencies a county refuses to name, is not a license plate reader. It is a search engine pointed at the public, and nobody voted for it.

New Hanover County Commissioners fund this program, and only the Board can put it to a public vote. They meet regularly — find the next date.

Sources & method. Every figure here is our own tally of the audit New Hanover County produced under the North Carolina Public Records Act (Request 26-594), archived in full at the Internet Archive so any reader can verify it. The Kure Beach comparison is drawn from that town’s production. Flock’s statements on attribute-search moderation were made to 404 Media. We do not allege that the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office ran any of the searches described here; the searching agency is redacted on every row, and the Sheriff has stated his office does not use the system this way. This article describes public records and is general information, not legal advice.