They Won’t Show You Who’s Watching. These Agencies Did.
Winston-Salem State University just handed over its Flock Network Audit — the log of who has searched its campus cameras. In a single quarter, that network was queried 1,430,185 times by thousands of agencies, most of them outside North Carolina. It took the University one export from a dashboard. Which raises a plain question for the agencies still refusing to produce the same record.
There is exactly one record that answers the question that matters most about a surveillance camera: who is searching it, and why. Flock calls it the Network Audit. It is not a document anyone has to write or a file anyone has to hunt for. It is a button on the vendor’s own dashboard — an on-demand export of searches the system already logs. Push it, and out comes a spreadsheet: the searching agency, the reason typed in, whether a case number was attached, and how many camera networks that one search swept at once.
We have asked North Carolina agencies for that record all year. This week, Winston-Salem State University produced it.
What WSSU’s own records show
WSSU’s campus network — a university police department — was searched 1,430,185 times between May 30 and August 28, 2026. In a single tabulated month of that span, nearly 2,900 different agencies ran the searches, and about 86% of them came from outside North Carolina. The heaviest volume came from Texas; Houston PD alone ran 62,433 searches. More than four in ten searches carried no case number. Thousands used immigration-related reason codes; thousands more were coded for traffic — including 12,913 labeled flatly “Traffic Infraction,” a use North Carolina’s ALPR statute, G.S. § 20-183.31(b), does not permit.
That is the point of the audit: it does not just count searches. It shows the misuse.
WSSU is not alone
The University is one of many. Across North Carolina, agency after agency has produced this same record with the searching-agency field intact:
- NC A&T (Greensboro) — searched 1,390,776 times in three months.
- UNC Asheville — 1,280,229 times in three months.
- UNC Charlotte, UNC Pembroke, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, and the Whiteville Police Department — all produced their Network Audits with the searching agencies named, some showing millions of searches; UNC Pembroke’s ten cameras alone were queried more than 1.5 million times.
- Western Carolina University — searched just 15 times in four months, every one by WCU’s own police, because WCU keeps network sharing off.
Different sizes, different towns, same one-click export. None of them found it too hard. None of them told us to go ask the vendor.
So what is everyone else’s excuse?
Set that against the agencies still refusing to produce it.
New Hanover County produced its audit — 2,980,082 search entries — and then redacted the name of every agency that ran a search, telling us the identities “must be obtained from Flock.” Six peer agencies released that identical field, under the identical law, in days. Wrightsville Beach, Columbus County, Pender County, and Brunswick County have each produced contracts and policies but have not produced the Network Audit itself — the one record that names the searchers. One county produced only a screenshot of a different report; another gave no statutory basis at all. UNC–Chapel Hill has narrowed its refusal to this single record.
The common defense is that the audit is too burdensome, too sensitive, or not theirs to give. WSSU just answered all three, on the same vendor platform, under the same statute, in one export. When nine agencies can produce the record and a handful say they cannot, the issue is no longer capability. It is a choice about whether the public gets to see who is searching cameras on public streets and public campuses.
Why this is the whole ballgame
The audit is not a technicality. It is how abuse comes to light. A former Wrightsville Beach officer was indicted this week for running two strangers’ plates with no legitimate purpose — caught only because someone reviewed the log. The traffic-enforcement searches barred by state law, the immigration queries, the searches with no case number: every one of them lives in the Network Audit. An agency that withholds it is withholding the only record that would show whether its cameras are being misused.
What we’re asking
Every North Carolina agency running Flock holds this record, and producing it costs the public nothing it hasn’t already paid for. The ask is simple, and WSSU just met it: release the Network Audit, in native format, with the searching-agency field intact. The agencies that have done so have nothing to hide. The public is entitled to know which of the rest can say the same.
The full WSSU production is preserved, unaltered and with checksums, at the Internet Archive.
Source: Winston-Salem State University Police Department Flock Network Audit (three monthly batches, May 30 – Aug 28, 2026), produced by the WSSU Office of Legal Affairs under N.C. Gen. Stat. Ch. 132; figures drawn directly from those files. Comparative figures from the produced audits of the named agencies. An indictment is an accusation, not a conviction. General information for public discussion, not legal advice.
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