Sheriff McMahon Says Community Trust Comes First. Did the Flock Rollout Meet His Own Standard?

Trust isn’t a slogan. It’s the profession’s governing doctrine.

Start where law enforcement starts. The Law Enforcement Code of Ethics, promulgated by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, describes the officer’s “shield of office” as a symbol of public faith, accepted as a public trust. And North Carolina requires its certified justice officers to subscribe to a law-enforcement code of ethics as a condition of certification. Trust is not a talking point here. It is built into the requirements of the office.

The National Sheriffs’ Association has publicly engaged the same idea, convening stakeholders around the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, whose first pillar is “Building Community Trust and Legitimacy.” That framework rests on procedural justice, which the research literature describes through four elements: voice, neutrality, respectful treatment, and trustworthiness — with transparency central to earning that trust. An unannounced deployment is in plain tension with the first element and the last. And the Task Force does not stop at generalities. Its technology pillar contains a specific recommendation — action item 3.2.1 — that agencies should encourage public engagement and collaboration, including community advisory bodies, when developing a policy for a new technology. It is a professional recommendation, not a legal prerequisite — but the report is explicit that having a policy is not enough; the policy must reflect community values to enhance trust and legitimacy.

The federal guidance written specifically for plate readers says it more plainly still. The BJA/IACP License Plate Reader Policy Template lists “increasing trust by maximizing transparency” among its purposes and states that a policy “developed in a transparent manner” fosters trust. Note the phrasing: developed transparently — not merely disclosed after the fact.

New Hanover’s own Sheriff has staked his office on exactly this

This is not an outside standard imposed on an unwilling agency. The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office chose it, publicly, and built its reputation on it. The office is accredited by CALEA — the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies — a voluntary assessment Sheriff McMahon directed the office to undertake, awarded in 2015. In 2019 he became the first sheriff in North Carolina to earn the Triple Crown Award. The office states its keystone principles in four words: Professionalism, Responsibility, Accountability, and Integrity. We credit that record. It is real, and it is rare.

Accreditation also brings community-facing obligations — and it’s worth being precise about them. CALEA’s Chapter 45.2, Community Involvement, sets a community input process (45.2.1) and a citizens survey (45.2.2) as elective standards an agency may adopt, while the accreditation public-comment process (45.2.3) is mandatory and must be publicized before each assessment. None of these requires a public hearing before a technology purchase. What they establish is that the agency operates inside a framework that treats community input and public comment as marks of professionalism — which is what makes the absence of any public process around a countywide camera network hard to square. There is also a pointed records question here: CALEA’s current standards include a mandatory standard for License Plate Recognition Systems (41.3.9). If New Hanover maintains accreditation that reaches its LPR system, what written policy did it supply to demonstrate compliance — and was the Flock/Condor deployment part of its most recent assessment? Those are answerable from the agency’s own records.

And this standard isn’t imported from outside — it’s the one the Sheriff has stated in his own words. In October 2025, announcing his re-election bid, McMahon described his leadership of the office as one that “puts community trust first.” Three years earlier, seeking re-election, he pledged to “continue building on the trust we have worked so hard to establish” and to uphold standards promoting “continued trust and confidence in our agency,” and he promised to increase the exchange of information with citizens through technology (Port City Daily, 2022). Those are meaningful standards — chosen and stated by the Sheriff himself. The only question this piece asks is whether the process used to deploy this technology lived up to them. Increasing the exchange of information is the opposite of fielding a camera network the public was never told about.

Then a surveillance network went live with no public voice at all

Against that standard, look at what happened. Under the county’s $219,000 contract (#25-0364), the Sheriff’s Office fielded 20 automated license-plate readers and eight solar “Condor” PTZ cameras — not simple plate readers, but live-video, pan-tilt-zoom units that detect people and let an operator zoom the live view for identifying detail. On the public record we reviewed, we found no public debate, no public board vote, and no community input process — none of the engagement the profession’s own guidance recommends before a new technology is adopted. Residents learned the Condors existed by finding them one at a time from the public sidewalk: one aimed at a convenience-store lot, one sited to observe the youth soccer fields at Veterans Park.

We are careful here, because the argument doesn’t need exaggeration. The concern is not a claim that anyone aimed a camera at a child — we make no such claim. The concern is unmonitored, discretionary capability: a high-powered optical-zoom PTZ camera, marketed by its maker for parks, that detects people and lets an operator pan, tilt, and zoom the live view, placed over a public gathering area where children play — with no published scope-of-use limits, no Condor-specific policy we could locate publicly, and no prior public review. What that lens can do, sitting where it sits, at an operator’s discretion, under rules no resident has ever been shown — that is the problem. Capability, siting, and the absence of any public constraint are enough, and they can’t be knocked down.

“We followed standard procurement” is not an answer — it’s the problem

The county’s likely defense is that nothing was bypassed: the purchase followed ordinary rules. That may well be true — and it is exactly the point. North Carolina requires formal bidding for equipment above $90,000 (G.S. 143-129), which a $219,000 contract clears. There are lawful ways a purchase this size can be made without a public board vote — a board can delegate award authority to the manager, an agency can “piggyback” on another government’s existing contract, and some technology is bought as a service rather than as equipment, which local-government attorneys often treat as outside competitive-bidding requirements altogether. We don’t yet know which authority New Hanover used, and we won’t guess; that is a records question, and the answer belongs in the county’s own documents, not our speculation. To be clear, we are not alleging an unlawful purchase — more likely the opposite: the framework itself lets a countywide surveillance deployment proceed without a public vote. But notice where every answer lands. If it turns out that no rule required public deliberation before a countywide camera network went up, then no one broke a rule — and that is precisely the problem. The gap isn’t a loophole someone exploited. It’s a governance gap the county never closed. The remedy isn’t to fault an official for following the rules. It’s to write a better rule.

And the refusal didn’t end with the rollout — it’s ongoing, and New Hanover is the outlier

Trust is not tested only at the moment a system is adopted. It is tested again every time the public asks how that system is being used. Here the question is the one that decides everything: who has been searching the cameras? The plate data itself is confidential under state law — but which agencies reached into New Hanover’s network is exactly the kind of accountability record that other North Carolina agencies on this same system have treated as disclosable.

The County produced its audit with the name of every searching agency blacked out — 2,980,082 rows of asterisks. This is where the argument stops being about one county’s judgment and becomes a straight comparison. Five other North Carolina agencies on the very same vendor produced that exact field — naming the searching agencies while still protecting individual officers: Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, NC A&T, UNC Pembroke, and UNC Charlotte police all disclosed who searched their systems, on average in about 18 days; NC A&T in eleven. Buncombe County released it too. New Hanover has withheld it for more than three months — long enough that in August we filed for pre-litigation mediation to try to compel it.

Set that beside the office’s own keystone word: accountability. Every comparison agency we tested treated “who searched our cameras” as a producible record and produced it in weeks. The one agency among those we surveyed that has staked its reputation on accountability produced nearly three million rows with the answer redacted, and is refusing still. Agency identity alone can’t prove any single search was improper — but it is the basic accountability field, the first step in auditing who has outside access, and you cannot ask a community to trust a system while withholding it, least of all when every comparison agency we tested has shown it can be released.

Every comparison agency we tested named who searched their cameras. New Hanover produced nearly three million rows of asterisks — and is still refusing.

The vendor’s own words cut the same way

Flock frames its own pitch around transparency, accountability, and public consent, and a community’s “right to choose” — it goes so far as to describe its deployments as democratically authorized through a government’s approval or contracting process. That invites one direct question: if Flock itself says communities deserve a voice and calls its deployments democratically authorized, where did that democratic authorization happen in New Hanover County? A county cannot exercise a right to choose over a system it was never told had arrived. And the company’s private coaching runs in the opposite direction from its public language: a leaked Flock guide, reported by 404 Media and titled “Own the Narrative,” teaches police to champion the technology and win over the city council before public opposition can form at a comment period. That is the sequence problem in the vendor’s own words — convince the decision-makers first, manage the public second. It is the exact inversion of procedural justice.

Two counties, two structural failures, one result

Pender at least put the decision where democratic accountability could occur. New Hanover never got that far. Sheriff Alan Cutler brought the Flock acquisition before Pender’s elected commissioners as a budget line item. The commissioners then approved it on the consent agenda, without substantive presentation or public discussion. In New Hanover, by contrast, the network appears to have been acquired and deployed without the elected board ever being asked to authorize the decision in public. Pender provided the opportunity for democratic oversight and did not use it; New Hanover appears not to have provided the opportunity at all. This is a point about process, not personalities: Pender’s was a failure to deliberate; New Hanover’s appears to be a failure to provide the opportunity to deliberate in the first place. Same result — the residents of neither county were ever asked. (The procurement record for each government.)

And it isn’t only the county — it’s the whole coast

Zoom out from the Sheriff to the region, and the same two failures repeat, town by town. On adoption, almost no one got a public vote. New Hanover’s contract bears the County Manager’s signature, not the Board’s. In Carolina Beach, the Flock order form was signed by the Chief of Police, by himself — we read the full 2023 council slate and three budget adoptions and the words Flock, ALPR, license plate, and camera appear zero times. In Kure Beach, the town executed its Flock agreement first and adopted an ALPR policy 78 days later — with no council vote we could find in between. Pender is the lone place it reached the elected board at all, on the consent agenda. A coastline wired for plate surveillance, almost entirely without a public vote.

On transparency, the towns split sharply — and it is a clean test, because three of them received the identical records request on the same day. Carolina Beach produced in about six days. Kure Beach in about ten. Both released the audit naming who searched their cameras. Wrightsville Beach produced nothing for 45 days and referred the matter to outside counsel — then produced on Aug 14, but withheld the audit logs its neighbors released. On transparency, Wrightsville Beach earns a D (raised from F on producing, late and incomplete).

And its silence is the loud kind. The town’s police are demonstrably inside the Flock network — Kure Beach’s own event log shows Wrightsville Beach PD was granted search, alert, and analytics access on April 16, 2026. Yet the town that routed its earlier camera purchases through the elected Board — roughly $55,000 in 2017, about $88,000 in 2021 — will not show the public how its plate-reader program was authorized or how it is used. When a government votes in public on ordinary cameras but goes dark on the one system that tracks everyone’s movements, the silence is not a paperwork accident. It is the whole problem, in miniature.

Grant the other side its strongest case — the answer is the same

The case for these tools is not frivolous, and we won’t pretend it is. Proponents make four real arguments. An officer’s first duty is to protect life and property, and a network that recovers stolen cars, finds missing children, and helps solve violent crime serves that duty. Agencies buy investigative equipment — forensic software, databases, tactical gear — without a referendum every time, and treat plate readers as the next step in ordinary patrol. Courts have long held there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a plate exposed on a public road. And when a business or an HOA volunteers its own camera to help solve a local crime, refusing that help can itself feel like a failure to act.

Here is the point: you can grant all four, and the conclusion doesn’t move. Every one of those arguments is about whether the technology is useful or lawful. None is about how the decision to adopt it was made. A tool can be effective, legal, and volunteered — and the public still deserved a voice before a county stood up a searchable record of drivers’ movements, kept and shared for the length of the retention period. Efficiency is not consent. “An officer could have seen your plate from the sidewalk” is not the same as “we will capture it at county scale, keep it, share it, and search it — and we told you first.” (Whether aggregating those individually-public glimpses into a searchable record of a person’s movements is itself constitutionally protected is a separate, unsettled question — but this argument does not even need it.) The proponents can win the argument about the tool and still lose the argument about the process — which is the only argument this piece is making.

Why this framing is fair — and requires no bad faith

Here is the part that matters most. This argument does not require alleging that anyone acted in bad faith, and we don’t. A sheriff can deploy this lawfully, for genuine public-safety reasons, and still fall short of the legitimacy standard — because procedural justice measures how the decision was made, not only whether the outcome can be defended. Deploying a networked, AI-capable camera system and explaining it afterward reverses the order the profession’s own doctrine prescribes. The community got no voice; the decision wasn’t transparent; and trustworthy motive can’t be demonstrated, because it was never tested in public. There is a further cost the profession’s own literature names: when residents discover a surveillance system on street corners instead of hearing about it from their own government, many will read that as something kept from them — and an agency that did not tell the public in advance is poorly positioned to rebut that impression, even where its motive was purely crime prevention. We do not assert that anyone set out to conceal anything. We observe that the absence of prior notice creates that impression on its own.

Give the Sheriff’s Office the strongest version of its own answer, too: some capabilities shouldn’t be telegraphed in advance; procurement authority permitted the purchase; and trust should be judged by responsible use and results. That is a fair argument — and it still doesn’t reach the point. The professional standards cited here treat voice, transparency, and accountability as components of legitimacy, not optional extras, and “trust us — we used it responsibly” offered after the fact does not supply them — least of all for a technology whose operation is invisible to the person being recorded. The question was never whether a trustworthy sheriff can use this tool. It is whether an agency can claim the process put trust first when the public had no voice in it until after the cameras were already up.

Which is exactly why the fix is available tomorrow, without anyone admitting fault: publish the Condor-specific policy, release the audit data, hold a public hearing before the contract renews, and adopt a simple rule — public deliberation before the county acquires any new surveillance capability. That is not a punishment. It is the office living up to the standard it already chose.

And the tools to do it already exist elsewhere — this is a solved problem. A growing number of governments have adopted surveillance-technology oversight ordinances (often modeled on “POST” — Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology — laws) that require an agency to disclose any surveillance tool, file an impact report, and win explicit council approval before deployment. Others run public transparency dashboards showing how many cameras are active, what crimes they’re used to investigate, how long data is kept, and which outside agencies can search it. And strict, audited use policies confine the system to vehicles actually tied to a crime or an alert — not a standing ledger of everyday drivers — which is also the answer to function creep, the well-founded worry that a tool sold for stolen cars and missing children drifts into minor offenses, code enforcement, or tracking who attended a protest. New Hanover can adopt any of these tomorrow.

Legitimacy comes from how a decision was made — not only whether the outcome can be defended.

Reduced to a single question the Sheriff’s Office can answer from its own record: how does an agency build public trust by deploying a countywide network of automated plate readers and live-video cameras before telling the public, asking the public, or bringing the decision before the public’s elected representatives? Answering it does not require anyone to share our view of Flock — only the county’s own documents.

Three questions for August 17

• Do the county’s units include the eight Condor PTZ cameras named in its own contract — and if so, does the statement that the system is “not a live surveillance system” apply to those cameras, which stream live video and can be zoomed by an operator onto people?
• Will the county release the Network Audit — naming the agencies that searched New Hanover’s cameras — as Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, NC A&T, UNC Pembroke, and UNC Charlotte all did, instead of 2,980,082 rows with the answer redacted? And will it publish the Condor-specific policy — the kind of record a resident in Georgia used to learn who had been accessing that city’s cameras?
• Will the Board adopt a standing rule requiring public deliberation before any future acquisition of surveillance technology — closing the gap that let this happen?

Commissioners have already opened the door: one has said residents “deserve a transparent review and discussion by the Commission.” The cleanest way to put it isn’t “the Sheriff doesn’t care about trust.” It’s the opposite: he has staked his office on trust and accountability for seventeen years, and submitted it to a standards body whose standards institutionalize community input — so the community is simply asking him to apply the standard he already embraced.

The meeting: your county commission or town council, when it next meets. Find the date, time, and how to sign up to speak on our upcoming meetings page. To speak, sign up in person by 3:30 PM — there is no online sign-up — and plan to stay, because public comment comes at the end. Can’t attend? There is no county comment portal; email all five commissioners and the Clerk to the Board and ask that your comment be entered into the record. (The full how-to-speak guide.)

Sources

• IACP Law Enforcement Code of Ethics — the profession’s ethics standard; North Carolina requires certified officers to subscribe to a law-enforcement code of ethics as a condition of certification (N.C. Criminal Justice / Sheriffs’ Education & Training Standards Commissions)
• President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing — Final Report (Pillar One; action item 3.2.1) — IACP overview (PDF)
• BJA/IACP License Plate Reader Policy Development Template — bja.ojp.gov (PDF)
• New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office — Accreditation (CALEA; Triple Crown) — WECT (Triple Crown)
• CALEA — Community Involvement (Ch. 45.2) & Accreditation Public Comment — calea.org
• 404 Media — “’Own the Narrative’: Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech” — 404media.co
• Wrightsville Beach Police Department — mission & stated core values (“Integrity”) — townofwrightsvillebeach.com
• WECT Investigates — New Hanover Flock coverage (Jul 28 & Aug 4, 2026) — Jul 28 · Aug 4
• On the site: the contract, line by line · who voted for Flock across the Cape Fear · who’s searching our cameras — the county won’t say · Wrightsville Beach’s silence · how to speak on Aug 17.

This page is general information about North Carolina and federal law, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed North Carolina attorney.