What No One Is Telling You About Lt. Daniel Little’s Indictment in Brunswick County

The short version. Former Brunswick County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Daniel Little was indicted October 5, 2026 on 18 counts for misusing Flock. The charges are only part of the story. What the county’s own records show:

• Seven months in the system, no action. The charged conduct ran February–August 2026 before anything caught it.
• 17 employees and 145 searches flagged — none of them Little — and all cleared in one day. When the audit tool was finally switched on, it flagged 145 “Needs Review” items across 17 employees; every one was archived on August 31. Little, who had left the agency, was not among them. (the audit)
• Was there any training? The Sheriff’s attorney told commissioners deputies were trained; a commissioner said he did not think any training had happened — and no training records have been produced.
• No policy during the misuse. The only written ALPR policy in the records is dated after the conduct — yet North Carolina law requires a policy before an agency may operate the system (G.S. 20-183.31(a)).
• The records were there. Out-of-state public audits show the same Brunswick account searching the same indicted plate more than 19 months ago.

All of which raises two questions this indictment does not answer: Was Sheriff Chism really supervising? And did the Brunswick Board of Commissioners authorize a system with no checks and balances?

On October 5, 2026, a Brunswick County grand jury indicted former Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Daniel Heith Little on 18 counts for misusing the Flock license-plate-reader system — six felony counts of accessing a government computer, six misdemeanor counts under the state ALPR statute, and six for willful failure to discharge duties. Each count names a specific license plate. The charged conduct, the indictment says, ran from February 9, 2026 to August 5, 2026.

One of the plates named in the indictment is DRK***E3. We had already seen that plate — searched by a Brunswick County account — in a public records set from another state. The date on that search was February 9, 2025 — nineteen months before the grand jury returned the charges.

The plate in the indictment

Here is the felony count, as returned by the grand jury. We have redacted the defendant’s home address and date of birth, and partially masked the license plate to protect the vehicle’s owner.

The charge is specific: accessing “a government computer of Brunswick County, a county-issued cell phone, for the purpose of accessing and using the Flock Automated License Plate Reader System to obtain and access information on NC Tag Number DRK***E3 without a legitimate law enforcement purpose.” (WECT)

The same plate, in a public audit, in February 2025

Flock networks are shared across jurisdictions, so a search run from one county is logged in the audits of the other agencies whose cameras it reaches. Some of those audits preserve the exact plate that was queried. One of them — the Mecklenburg County, Virginia Sheriff’s Office network audit, a public record — captured a Brunswick County account running DRK***E3 on February 9, 2025:

Three searches of that plate in under two minutes, each logged with the reason “Law enforcement” and no case number — part of a short session that touched other plates we are not publishing, because those vehicle owners were never named in any public charge.

The same account

We will say plainly what the records show, and where they stop. The State has charged Daniel Little with searching DRK***E3 without a law-enforcement purpose. The account that searched DRK***E3 in February 2025 is logged as “D. Lit, Brunswick County NC SO” — the same abbreviated name, the same agency, the same distinctive plate the State later put in the indictment. We are not a court, and we do not declare the account holder’s identity proven. But the record is the record: the same account ran the same plate on February 9, 2025.

One caveat we won’t paper over

The indictment lists the charged conduct as beginning February 9, 2026 — exactly one year, to the day, after the February 9, 2025 search in the audit. That precise one-year gap can be read two ways, and we cannot tell which is right from the face of the documents. Either the 2025 search is a separate, earlier episode the grand jury did not charge — or the indictment contains a typographical error, 2026 written where 2025 was meant, in which case the search we found is not a separate instance at all but the very first act the State is prosecuting. We are not going to pretend to know which. What the record establishes under either reading is the same: this plate was searched by this account on February 9, 2025, and that search sat in a public audit the whole time.

Nineteen months

The Sheriff’s Office says its own Flock audit flagged the conduct in August 2026. The February 2025 search was not hidden. It sat in a neighboring state’s public audit for nineteen months — readable by anyone who asked for the file. Volunteers working from out-of-state public records found it before it ever surfaced here. Oversight of a county surveillance tool should not depend on who in another state happens to pull an audit.

Was anyone supervising this system?

The February 2025 search is one data point in a larger supervision gap the county’s own records describe. Flock’s “Audit Assistance” tool — the feature meant to flag a user repeatedly searching a single plate — was not switched on at the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office until August 18, 2026, nearly four months after Flock made it available. When it was finally turned on, it flagged 145 “Needs Review” items across 17 different Sheriff’s Office employees in thirteen days. Every one of those 145 flags was then archived on a single day — August 31 — between 9:55 a.m. and 4:10 p.m., roughly one closed every two and a half minutes, with no recorded “approved” or “resolved” outcome. The full breakdown is in our Brunswick audit explainer.

Training is still an open question. At the county’s September 21 meeting, a commissioner asked whether deputies had received proper training on the system; the Sheriff’s attorney answered that they had. No training records have been released to show it. And the county’s records contain no written ALPR policy before September 2026 — the department’s “Automated License Plate Readers” policy took effect only after the charged conduct had already ended. Sheriff Chism has defended the program publicly; we fact-checked those claims in Sheriff Chism’s Flock claims, fact-checked.

And at least one commissioner has signaled the county should not pay to close that gap. Commissioner Thompson, who signed Brunswick’s 2024 Flock contract, told the board he “disagree[s] with spending additional tax dollars on policing the police” — even while conceding the county “may not need the Flock system”. Independent auditing is exactly the tax dollars he means.

Flock asked for transparency. The county gave a dashboard.

There is a final irony. Flock itself tells the agencies that buy its cameras to be transparent — to publish a public portal with their policy and audit data. Brunswick launched one in August 2026. But a curated web page is not an answer to a public-records request: in response to ours, the Sheriff’s Office produced the contract and little else, and we still do not have the search records we asked for — records we are entitled to under North Carolina’s Public Records Act. The dashboard leaves out the one thing that matters most: the log of who searched what, and why. (See Cape Fear sheriffs are hiding their Flock records.)

Why it matters

Step back from this one plate and look at Brunswick County’s Flock program as a whole, as the county’s own records describe it. North Carolina law lists traffic enforcement as a prohibited use of plate-reader data — yet the Sheriff’s own offense-type audit logs “Traffic Infraction” on 1,005 searches (8.6%). Across the available audit data, the system was searched at least 83,232 times, roughly 90% of them with no case number. And the oversight tool meant to catch misuse sat switched off for nearly four months, then cleared 145 flags in a single afternoon. (The full Brunswick picture is here.)

All of it adds up to the same thing: a law-enforcement agency running a mass-surveillance system with no guardrails, no training it will document, and no audits running when the misuse happened. In September, the Board of Commissioners paused new Flock purchases — not the system itself, which kept running. The records that keep surfacing — a felony indictment, a search sitting in a public file nineteen months before the charges, no written ALPR policy during the misuse — are the case for finishing the job and canceling the contract, not restarting it.

Read the full redacted indictment for this count here (PDF), or see all six redacted indictments in our public archive. See every North Carolina case on the NC Flock Misuse Tracker, how the Brunswick audit works in our audit explainer, and why “no case number” is the pattern across the Cape Fear in our analysis of 90% of searches.

An indictment is an accusation, not a conviction; Daniel Little is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. The February 2025 search described here is drawn from a public network-audit record; whether it falls inside or outside the charged period is discussed above. We identify the account as it appears in that record and draw no conclusion about the guilt of any person.