The Live Feed: These Cameras Don’t Just Read Plates — They Watch

We’ve written about the plate searches — the nearly three million queries run against New Hanover County’s Flock network. But a plate search is only half of what this system does. The other half is live video: cameras that watch people, not just tags. Until now, we had no record of how often that capability is actually used.

Now we do. A New Hanover County Fusus/Axon audit log, released under the North Carolina Public Records Act, logs 72,330 events over roughly nineteen months (late January 2025 through mid-August 2026) on the platform the Sheriff’s Office uses to view and control its cameras. It is the clearest picture yet of the real-time surveillance side of the system — and it is not a quiet one.

Live video is routine, not occasional

The single most common action in the log is “View Live” — 20,602 times. Every one of those events is an operator pulling up a live camera feed. Not a plate hit, not an automated read — a person, watching a live picture. On top of that, the log records hundreds of “View Camera” and “View Recorded” events, and footage leaving the system: a dozen clips downloaded and video screenshots taken. This is the part of the program the “it just reads license plates” description leaves out.

Operators steer the cameras

The log also records 152 “Move PTZ” events — pan, tilt, zoom — plus saved camera presets. That matters, because New Hanover is the only Cape Fear county running Flock’s Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras: steerable video cameras that can follow a person, hold on a face, and zoom. “Move PTZ” is the digital fingerprint of someone aiming one of those cameras in real time. We have documented a Condor pointed at the youth soccer fields at Veterans Park and another beside a Habitat for Humanity neighborhood. This log is the record of those cameras being actively driven. And it is not abstract: when Flock’s Condor feeds were left exposed on the open internet, researchers and journalists watched the cameras pan and zoom in on unattended children on a playground.

A second way to search

Beyond the Flock plate audits, the Fusus platform logged roughly 1,200 license-plate and vehicle-intelligence searches and more than 23,000 device-location lookups — a parallel search pathway layered on top of the Flock system itself.

The finding that should worry every resident: another agency is watching

The log is almost entirely the Sheriff’s Office. But not entirely. The Wilmington Police Department reached into the Sheriff’s system 177 times — and 154 of those were WPD watching New Hanover County’s live camera feeds, through a camera-share between the two agencies. The Sheriff’s cameras feed Wilmington’s real-time crime center, and the log shows it in use, over and over. That connects directly to a document we already hold: the Wilmington Police Department’s own Fusus “STING Center” directive, and to the fact that Wilmington already runs plate readers on Axon. And a smaller line worth asking about: five live-camera views logged from an “Axon Demo Site” — a vendor or demonstration environment — reaching New Hanover County cameras. Even the phones are watching: 173 live-video views came from the Fusus mobile app, deputies pulling up live feeds from the field.

Why this matters now

In September, New Hanover County canceled the plate-reader side of its Flock contract — but kept the eight Condor video cameras running. This log is what those cameras are for: not reading plates on a highway, but watching people in real time, steering in on them, sharing the view with another police department, and doing it tens of thousands of times. It is the live-surveillance program the public was never told it was buying.

How we know — and what we are not publishing

These figures come directly from New Hanover County’s own Fusus/Axon audit log, obtained under the North Carolina Public Records Act. In keeping with our editorial standards, a few notes on precision:

• We are not publishing the underlying file. It contains law-enforcement operational and personal detail; we report only aggregate counts from it.
• The log does not record how long each live-view session lasted, so we report the number of live views (20,602), not hours of viewing.
• “View Live” covers every camera integrated into the County’s Fusus platform — the Flock Condors and possibly other connected cameras — so it reflects live-camera viewing on the platform generally.
• All figures are through August 19, 2026, the last event in the record.

We have filed to obtain the same records in our own name, and will update this page as the County responds.