The Cameras Over the Ball Fields Don’t Protect Children. They Expose Them.

One county, two very different decisions

In March 2025, the New Hanover County School Board was offered a free, $3.2 million state program to put AI cameras — with facial recognition — in the public schools. Parents and staff came to the meeting and spoke up about privacy and false alarms. The board voted it down, and said no again even when offered the money with the facial recognition taken out.¹¹

The people in charge of our children looked at AI cameras watching kids — and chose the kids.

Here is what almost no one knew. Just weeks earlier, on February 12, 2025, the Sheriff had signed New Hanover up for Flock’s camera network — a decision the elected Board of Commissioners never put to a public vote.¹⁵ No hearing. No debate. Not on any ballot. And eight of those cameras weren’t plate readers on a highway. They were “Condors” — AI video cameras, the very thing the School Board had just turned down — only with more power, not less. A Condor uses artificial intelligence to pick out a person and swivel, tilt, and zoom to follow them; it is wired into a nationwide police network; and the facial recognition the School Board refused is software the Sheriff already owns.¹² Eight of them went up over Ogden, Longleaf, and Veterans Parks, pointed at the ball fields and playgrounds where children play.

Same county. Same children. One decision was public, debated, and protective. The other was quiet, never voted on, and is now watching your kids at the park. The rest of this is what those park cameras actually are, and why they put children at risk instead of keeping them safe.

The video of your child has almost no rules

Here is the part most people don’t know. North Carolina has strong rules for the license-plate data: it has to be deleted in 90 days, it can’t be sold, and misusing it is a crime.³

The video — the actual footage of your child’s face — has almost none of those rules. A different, far weaker law covers it.⁴ Under that law there is no limit on how long they keep the video. There is no rule against selling it. Police can hand it to other police, or to a prosecutor, without a judge — and nothing keeps it inside North Carolina. You can’t even ask to see the video of your own child, because the law says it isn’t a public record. The most sensitive thing these cameras capture — live video of your kid — has the fewest protections of all.

What these cameras really are

Flock says its cameras “don’t track people.” That isn’t true. The Condor is a camera that can swivel, tilt, and zoom, and it uses AI to spot a person and follow them. Flock’s own training videos say the camera will “acquire and track that person as they walk.” When a TV news reporter walked in front of one on a public trail, the camera turned and followed him on its own — while a Flock spokesman sat there and said the camera doesn’t track people.¹

Flock also lets police search for a person just by describing them in plain words. The New Hanover Sheriff’s Office has run that kind of search 470 times. At other departments, officers have searched by a person’s race, and even by a political bumper sticker.² A camera that can find and follow a person is now pointed at the places our kids play.

Can anyone promise these cameras aren’t being misused on children? No.

We won’t exaggerate to scare you. We read hundreds of these camera search records from around the country, and in what we could actually see, the searches that involved kids were police trying to find missing or abused children.⁵

But be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean. No one can promise you these cameras aren’t being misused against children — because no one can check. The search records are usually kept from the public, often blacked out, and almost never reviewed by anyone outside the agency. A camera pointed at your kid, running on a system the public isn’t allowed to audit, that has already been hacked and already been misused — that is the danger. Not a promise that everything is fine. The fact that no one can tell you one way or the other. Here’s what we can prove.

It’s already been hacked — and children were on camera

In December 2025, a security researcher and the news site 404 Media found about 60 of these Flock cameras streaming live on the open internet — no password, nothing. Anyone could watch the live video and download a month of recordings. One of those open cameras was pointed at a children’s playground, showing kids with no parents around. The researcher said that was the one that scared him the most.⁶

These are the same cameras New Hanover has over its parks. Flock called it a small mistake and blamed the phone company. But one of the exposed cameras was in Douglas County, Colorado — and the sheriff there was so shaken that the video was wide open before Flock even noticed that his county dropped Flock completely.⁷ Even if you believe it was just a glitch, the point stands: the video of children existed, it had no lock on it, and one mistake put it in front of the whole world.

And here is what should stop every parent cold: nothing in North Carolina law requires anyone to make sure that can’t happen. There is no required security audit of these cameras — no rule that anyone ever check whether the video of your child is sitting open on the internet, exactly the way the researchers found it. The law covering this video doesn’t even require the Sheriff to have a written policy for these cameras, let alone prove they can’t be hacked.⁴

A police officer already misused it — for a drug dealer

The whole system depends on every person with access behaving. That has already failed in North Carolina. In 2026 the SBI charged a Charlotte police officer. The records say a drug suspect asked him to look up a license plate — and he did it. The plate belonged to an undercover officer’s vehicle. A cop used this system, at a criminal’s request, to find a person the state was trying to keep hidden.⁸

Think about what that means. The system puts a “find this person and tell me where they are” button in front of thousands of people, and one of them already pushed it for a drug dealer. If it can be turned on an undercover officer, it can be turned on a child. (A charge is an accusation, not a conviction — but the point is the system got misused.)

Flock’s own workers watched kids on camera

This isn’t only about one bad cop. In Dunwoody, Georgia, a resident got the records and found that Flock’s own employees watched cameras covering a kids’ gymnastics room, a pool, and a playground — and used the live video to show off the product to police departments they wanted as customers. Flock’s CEO apologized.⁹

To be fair, Flock says this was allowed under a demo program the city signed up for, and that “no one is spying on children.” Fine — take them at their word. It still proves the point: the only thing protecting your child’s image is a company’s promise about who looks. When even Flock’s own staff were watching a kids’ gymnastics camera — until a resident caught them — “trust us” is not a safety plan. New Hanover’s park cameras run on the same system, under the same promise.

Where does the video go? The county won’t say.

The park cameras feed the county’s downtown “real-time crime center” — the Sting Center — which is built to share video with other agencies.¹⁰ We asked the county a simple question: does your real-time video go to the state, to Homeland Security, to ICE, or the FBI? The county would not answer. Under the video law, it doesn’t have to — it can share with other police on its own say-so, and nothing keeps the video in North Carolina. So the record of a child at a county park can leave the county, to agencies that owe your family nothing.

Now it’s the Commissioners’ turn

Come back to where we started. The School Board protected these children from AI cameras in the schools. The County Commissioners can protect them in the parks — and the case for the parks is even stronger. The school cameras would have sat still, stayed local, with facial recognition off. The park Condors swivel and zoom, they’re wired to thousands of outside agencies, they’ve already been hacked, and no one ever voted to put them there.

And the facial recognition the School Board refused? The Sheriff’s Office already owns it — face-matching software called Clearview AI, about $13,000 a year.¹² So the gap between “a camera zoomed in on a child” and “the county put a name to that child” is software the county already has.

This is happening in other towns too. In Anna, Texas, parents and local TV pressed their city about a Flock camera facing the children’s splash pad, and the city set a public meeting about it.¹³ The same question keeps coming up everywhere: why is a government camera pointed at the place our children gather?

What they can do: Protect our children and take them down on October 19

Protecting kids doesn’t mean building a searchable record of where they are and hoping no one ever misuses it. It means not building it. The Commissioners already did half the job — they cancelled the plate readers, and we’re grateful. Now they can finish it and take down the eight park Condors at their meeting on Monday, October 19.¹⁴ A camera that treats a playground as a place to collect faces is not protecting children. It is exposing them — and a county that can’t say where the video goes should not keep it pointed at a ball field. It’s time to protect our children.

Notes & sources

1. The Condor is a pan-tilt-zoom camera that uses AI to detect and follow people; Flock’s own training videos say so, and a Condor tracked an InvestigateTV reporter down a trail while a Flock spokesman denied it on camera: InvestigateTV (Gray Television), June 2026.
2. Flock “FreeForm” plain-language person search — run 470 times by the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, and used at other agencies to search by race and by a political symbol: FreeForm, documented.
3. Plate-data rules: N.C. Gen. Stat. Article 3D of Chapter 20 (§§ 20-183.30 to -183.33) — confidential, deleted within 90 days, may not be sold, purpose-limited, and misuse is a crime. Full text.
4. Video rules: N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1.4A. The recording is not a public record; the agency may release it to other law enforcement or a district attorney with no court order and no North-Carolina-only limit; there is no statutory cap on retention, no bar on sale, and no written-policy requirement for fixed/PTZ cameras.
5. DeFlockILM review of hundreds of Flock audit logs nationwide: in the records we could review, the child-related searches were investigations to protect children (abuse, missing or abducted juveniles). We did not find searches aimed at a child for an improper purpose — but these logs are limited, frequently redacted, and rarely public, so they cannot rule such misuse out.
6. About 60 Flock Condor cameras were left streaming on the open internet with no password in Dec. 2025 — one feed showed unattended children on a playground: Straight Arrow News and 404 Media, Dec. 2025.
7. A Condor at a Douglas County, Colorado trailhead was among the exposed cameras; the sheriff, shaken that it was open before Flock detected it, dropped Flock: 9News.
8. A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was charged (SBI, July 2026) after allegedly running an undercover Watauga County Sheriff’s vehicle through Flock at a drug target’s request. A charge is an accusation, not a conviction: the North Carolina Flock misuse record.
9. Flock employees viewed a children’s gymnastics room, pool, and playground cameras for sales demos in Dunwoody, GA; the CEO apologized, and Flock says the access was authorized under a demo program: 404 Media, Apr. 2026.
10. The Condors feed the county’s Fusus “real-time crime center”; the county has a HIDTA data-sharing agreement with a federal governing board, and federal law (6 U.S.C. § 124h) directs Homeland Security to take in fusion-center information.
11. The New Hanover County Board of Education rejected a $3.2M state-funded AI camera pilot (vendor Eviden) 4–3, and again rejected a version with facial recognition removed: WHQR and WECT, Mar. 2025.
12. The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office owns Clearview AI “Search PRO” facial-recognition software — $12,995/year, County Contract #24-0236: the records.
13. Anna, Texas residents and local TV pressed the city over a Flock camera facing the Slayter Creek Park splash pad; city leaders scheduled a public workshop: WFAA.
14. New Hanover cancelled the Flock plate readers but kept the eight Condors; the Oct. 19 vote to take the Condors down.
15. New Hanover’s Sheriff signed the county’s Flock contract on February 12, 2025; the elected Board of Commissioners never put the surveillance program to a public vote: how New Hanover’s Flock program was adopted.

General information for public discussion, not legal advice. The statutory descriptions summarize G.S. 132-1.4A and Article 3D of Chapter 20 as of October 2026; confirm the current text and the applicable DNCR retention schedule and vendor contract for any specific deployment. We do not allege that any Condor has been used to target a child; the point is that the system’s design, its documented misuse, and the weakness of the video statute leave children exposed. An indictment or charge is an accusation, not a conviction. Corrections: mark@deflockilm.org. First published October 17, 2026.