Type a Sentence. Search a Person. Across Hundreds of Cameras.

The pitch for Flock has always been about cars: read the plate, catch the stolen vehicle, find the Amber Alert. That is the version your county was sold. It is not the whole product.

On July 16, 2026, the technology outlet 404 Media published records showing that police departments have used a Flock feature called FreeForm to search — hundreds of times — not for plates, but for people. The same day, our local Cape Fear Beacon asked the question that follows from it: what happens when the cameras start following the person, not the car? We think Wilmington should sit with both stories, because the second one is about the cameras our own county already owns.

A search engine, pointed at people

FreeForm lets an officer skip the license plate and type a plain-English description instead. Flock’s AI reads the video and returns matching people or vehicles. 404 Media reports it launched in February 2025 and lives, in the camera audit logs, in a field called text_prompt. Reporter Joseph Cox describes officers using it “as though they would use a search engine.”

Here is the part that brings it home: 404 Media reports FreeForm is primarily a feature of Flock’s Condor cameras — the pan-tilt-zoom video units with “people detection” and a “Guardian Mode” that automatically zooms in on a person and follows them through the frame. New Hanover County’s contract buys eight Condor cameras. One of them overlooks a residential street off Castle Hayne Road. The capability in the national story runs on the exact hardware sitting on our poles.

“Person on skateboard.” “Male with tattoos.” “Tall man.”

These are not our characterizations. They are the search terms in the records 404 Media reviewed — audit data collected by HaveIBeenFlocked.com through public-records requests. A sample, each attributed by 404 Media to a named department:

• Milford, CT police searched for “male with tattoos,” “male with brown hair,” and “woman blue shirt” — across more than a hundred camera networks.
• The California Highway Patrol searched for someone in a “gray shirt” across 274 cameras.
• The Texas Department of Public Safety searched 96 networks for a “man wearing a black t-shirt and shorts.”
• Chamblee, GA police searched 85 networks for a “white woman wearing grey shirt, blonde hair, black shorts.”
• Pocatello, ID police searched for “a male on foot” across 38 cameras. Brookhaven, GA searched for “tall man.”

As 404 Media notes, some of these are so broad they will return innocent, unrelated people. “Imagine how many people at any given moment may be walking on foot, wearing a backpack, or existing with brown hair,” the EFF’s Beryl Lipton told the outlet.

Searches by race, and by politics

This is the line most people don’t expect a “license plate camera” to cross. According to the records 404 Media reviewed:

• Race. Atlanta, GA police searched for a “non caucasion [sic] male wearing blue shirt blue pants white hat.” The California Highway Patrol logged a search for a “white male about 6ft 1in tall, longer brown hair.”
• Political affiliation. Anne Arundel County, MD police searched 198 networks of cameras for a “white jeep with trump flag.”

Flock told 404 Media that FreeForm has “guardrails,” and that users are not able to search attributes such as “race, ethnicity, religion, nationality” — and that when they try, an alert goes to the agency’s own administrators. And yet, in 404 Media’s words, “some of the searches 404 Media found did discuss someone’s race.” A guardrail that reports a race-based search to the same office running the program is a different thing than a guardrail that prevents one.

What Flock says, and what we are not claiming

We try to be accurate about the other side, so: Flock says FreeForm “is not facial recognition,” cannot identify a person by name, and cannot search for a specific face. The company says it is meant to help investigators work from “a witness description” when they have limited information, and points to a September 2025 Amber Alert and a missing elderly man in Kansas as examples. Some of the searches in the data are tied to genuine investigations and missing-person cases. All of that is real, and we are not suggesting every search is sinister.

What we are saying is narrower and, we think, harder to argue with. A tool sold to a community as a license-plate reader also lets an officer describe a person — their clothing, their build, their race, the flag on their car — and pull matching people from hundreds of cameras at once, with the limits set entirely by the agency using it. As the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Tom Bowman put it to 404 Media: “This is a classic bait-and-switch. Your town was pitched a tool to catch stolen cars and find missing kids.”

The least-regulated camera we own is the one that does this

North Carolina’s ALPR statute, Article 3D of Chapter 20, was written for plate readers — “cameras used in combination with computer algorithms to convert images of license plates into computer readable data.” A Condor doing a FreeForm people-search is not that. As we work through in our attorney materials, the statute’s 90-day retention cap, its purpose limits, and its policy requirements appear not to reach the Condor at all. The camera most capable of following a person is, on the text of the law, the least regulated one on the pole.

The searches ran on our cameras. We cannot tell you whose they were.

New Hanover County was searched nearly three million times in about sixteen months, and the County redacted every searching agency, every officer, every plate and every case number before releasing the log.

It did not redact the Text Prompt field.

The audit the County released is its Network Audit — the log of searches run against New Hanover County’s cameras by any agency with access to them. It records 470 FreeForm searches between April 2025 and May 2026, and the text of each one is readable. 456 searched for vehicles. Fourteen searched for people.

We cannot tell you who ran them. The Organization Name is *** on all 2,980,082 rows. So these searches reached this county’s cameras, and the County has blacked out the name of every agency that did the reaching. Keep that in mind through what follows — it is the whole reason this matters.

Most of the fourteen are unremarkable on their face: a motorcycle rider, a man near a white Chevrolet truck in a missing-person case. Three are not.

Look at the clocks. Fifteen seconds. Fourteen seconds. Thirteen seconds.

Three separate times, months apart, a race descriptor was typed into the search box — and then the same search was immediately re-run with the race removed.

We think that is the guardrail working, and we will say so. Flock told 404 Media that users cannot search attributes such as race, and that attempts generate an alert to the agency’s own administrators. This pattern is what that would look like from the outside: a search rejected, and an officer retrying seconds later without the word.

Which raises the question we would rather ask than assume. Flock says those attempts alert the searching agency’s own administrators. Three such attempts were logged against this county’s network across six months. Whose administrators were alerted, and what did they do?

We cannot answer that, and neither can any resident of this county, because the answer is the redacted field. This is not an abstract transparency complaint. Somebody typed “2 young teenage black males” into a people-search against cameras New Hanover County pays for — Flock blocked it, and the same search stripped of the race word was allowed seconds later — and the County’s position is that you are not entitled to know which agency ran it. That is the field we have been asking for since June 18. (We wrote about the race searches, and where the trail points, on their own.)

Two more figures from the same log. A single FreeForm search touching this county’s network reached as many as 2,109 camera networks at once — one query, more than two thousand jurisdictions. And the same audit records 4,955 “convoy” searches, a different feature that looks for vehicles travelling together rather than for a plate or a description. We wrote separately about convoy searches and hotlists.

One thing we will not claim. We do not know that the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office ran any of these searches. Its own use is reported separately, as a summary table of offense types with no individual queries in it. Nothing in this production attributes a single FreeForm search to any named agency — which is precisely the point.

Correction, July 21, 2026. When first published, this article said we had never been shown a text_prompt from New Hanover County and were asking for them. That was wrong. The prompts were in the County’s June 2026 production; we had not yet parsed the search-type field when we published. To be precise about what they show: these are searches run against the County’s network, and the searching agency is redacted, so none of them is attributed to any particular department. The full dataset is archived here so anyone can check them.

We are a group of Wilmington citizens who want our government to respect the U.S. and North Carolina Constitutions and stop mass surveillance. We are not asking you to take our word for any of this — the 404 Media reporting is linked above, the search terms are public records, and the cameras are real and on real streets here. We are asking the county one plain question: if the cameras can be searched for a person by race and by politics, who is allowed to do that here, and how would we ever know?