“Mislabeled”? Then Fix the Labels.

On August 4, a WECT Investigates report laid out what New Hanover County’s own Flock records show — and included the Sheriff’s Office’s answer to one of them. Told that its audit logged searches coded “Traffic Infraction,” a use North Carolina law says ALPR data “shall not be used” for, a spokesperson said those searches had been “mislabeled,” and that the office does not use the cameras for traffic enforcement. (WECT)

We take that seriously, and we want to answer it fairly — because it is the defense every agency will reach for as these reason codes come to light. So here it is, concession first: some of these searches may well be miscoded. Officers work fast, dropdown menus are clumsy, and a wrong click is a wrong click. We are not calling any single search a crime.

But “mislabeled” does less work than it sounds like. Here is why.

The reason code is the agency’s own record

“Traffic Infraction” is not our characterization of anything. It is a reason an officer selected from Flock’s own dropdown menu, on the agency’s own account, recorded in the agency’s own audit. We did not assign it, infer it, or estimate it. We read it off the record the agency produced in response to a public-records request. When we say a search was coded “Traffic Infraction,” we are quoting the government’s own paperwork.

The law has no threshold

N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) does not say ALPR data shall not be used mostly for traffic enforcement, or for traffic enforcement above some percentage. It says it “shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations” — full stop. So a miscoding defense doesn’t get to argue frequency. To answer the concern it has to establish something categorical: that ALPR data was not used for traffic enforcement at all. The agency’s own record, coded again and again, points the other way — and the burden of explaining it belongs to the agency that created it.

This is not one stray click. It is a pattern, agency by agency.

The reason a single “mislabel” is hard to credit is that the same code turns up wherever an agency lets us see it:

• Kure Beach produced its audit with the reason field intact: 275 of the town’s own searches — 33.7% — coded “Traffic Infraction,” climbing to 62.8% in May.
• Carolina Beach, once its records were unredacted: 258,521 searches citing “Traffic Infraction.”
• UNC Pembroke: 71,013 traffic-infraction searches in three months.
• Pender County‘s own Organization Audit: 13.7% of the Sheriff’s searches — the third-most-common reason.

A mislabel is a mistake. A mistake that recurs across four separate agencies, thousands of times, is not a mistake anymore — it is a category. And the honest word for a category of searches an agency runs under a barred purpose is a practice, until the agency shows otherwise.

You can’t say the labels are meaningless and that the audit is the safeguard

Here is the part that should give the “mislabeled” answer pause. When these systems are defended, the audit log is the safeguard — the thing that supposedly catches misuse, the reason residents are told not to worry. Flock sells an “audit assistance” AI feature for exactly this; one North Carolina police lieutenant told us it is switched on “to help ensure I am not missing any potential violations.”

So an agency cannot have it both ways. If its audit labels are so unreliable that “Traffic Infraction” doesn’t mean a traffic infraction, then the audit does not reliably record why any search was run — and the one accountability mechanism everyone points to is broken. An audit you have to disclaim is not oversight. Either the label means what it says, or the safeguard means nothing.

And the system plainly can read those reasons and act on them. In the same WECT report, the records show a July 16 search for a person by appearance: a face-covering search Flock allowed, and a dark-clothing search the same day that Flock’s own moderation blocked. The platform read the input, applied a rule, and stopped one. The labels are not noise. The system acts on them.

And here, you can’t even check

There is a sharper problem in New Hanover specifically. When we asked for the reason field, the County produced its audit with every searching-agency name redacted, and pointed us to Flock — a private company — for the rest. On the searches it did show, the reasons are visible; on the 2.98 million it will not attribute, no resident can check what purpose was typed at all. So the County is in the position of calling its own traffic-infraction codes mislabeled while withholding the records that would let anyone verify the claim either way. The answer and the redaction cannot both stand: if labels matter enough to correct, they matter enough to show.

“Mislabeled”? Then fix the labels — on the record

None of this asks anyone to take our word for it, and the remedy is entirely in the agency’s hands. If the “Traffic Infraction” searches were miscoded, the Sheriff’s Office can:

• Correct the labels and produce the corrected audit;
• Produce the case number, or the actual reason, behind each “Traffic Infraction” search, showing what it was really for;
• and confirm in writing that no ALPR data has been, or can be, used for traffic enforcement — and that its policy prohibits it.

Do that, and we will publish it here, prominently, with the same weight as the finding it corrects. We have corrected ourselves in public before, and we will again the moment the records support it. That is the deal, and it is a fair one.

Until then, the record is the record — and it is the government’s own. “Mislabeled” is not an answer. It is a to-do list. (See the records for yourself.)