How Many Flock Cameras Are in New Hanover County?
Short answer: the county won’t tell you. But the public crowdsourced map already shows at least 62 in the Wilmington area — and the ’15 cameras’ you’ll find online is years out of date.
Short answer: New Hanover County won’t publish an official count. The crowdsourced DeFlock map currently shows at least 62 ALPR cameras in the Wilmington / New Hanover area — and that’s a floor, not a ceiling. The “15 cameras” figure you’ll still find online is from 2021 and long out of date.
- 28 devices the county bought under contract #25-0364 — 17 Falcon + 3 Falcon LR plate readers (20 in all) + 8 Condor video cameras.
- 36 cameras / 19 plate readers on the Sheriff’s transparency portal launched Aug 10, 2026 — the current operating count, higher than the 28 first contracted, with 17 devices the portal never identifies (we checked it).
- ~51–62 mapped in the Wilmington area on the crowdsourced DeFlock map — all agencies and private owners, not just the Sheriff, and the figure shifts as the map is updated.
- 15 — the original 2021 pilot, long obsolete.
Why “15” keeps showing up — and why it’s wrong
Search this question and you’ll likely hit a December 2021 story: the Sheriff’s Office asked the commissioners to approve 15 cameras for $43,750. That was the pilot. The program has grown enormously since — into the roughly $219,000 contract on the books today (Contract #25-0364). Any answer of “15” is describing a program that no longer exists.
What the public map actually shows
Because the official count is hidden, the most honest number comes from the public. We pulled the data behind the DeFlock map — a crowdsourced database of roughly 109,000 ALPR cameras worldwide — and filtered it to the Wilmington / New Hanover County area. It shows at least 62 cameras, the large majority operated by Flock Safety, plus the readers in a Lowe’s parking lot. Crowdsourced maps are incomplete by nature, so the real figure is almost certainly higher.
Why the county won’t just tell you
Here’s the part worth noticing: most agencies that use Flock have a public transparency portal showing camera counts, retention, and search totals — even tiny departments. For months the office that holds New Hanover County’s contract had no portal at all — then, a week before the August 17 county meeting, it launched one. It opened only after the records forced the issue, and it shows the Sheriff’s own searches, not the 2.98 million that include the outside agencies whose names the county still redacts. (We fact-checked the portal.) And when the county produced its search audit, it redacted the name of every searching agency and officer. A county that won’t publish how many cameras it runs, or who’s searching them, is telling you something.
When the government hides the count, the public has to keep it. That’s what the map is for.
Help get to the real number
The fastest way to replace “they won’t say” with a hard figure is to map the cameras yourself — spotting them by eye and adding each one to the public map. (A cheap RF detector can help, but it has become hit-or-miss; here’s what happened when we tested one.) Here’s how we map them. Every camera added makes the count a little more honest — and a little harder to hide.
Sources
- DeFlock crowdsourced ALPR map (data queried June 30, 2026; ~62 cameras in the Wilmington/New Hanover area — 28 of them county-purchased, the rest other agencies and private).
- Port City Daily (Dec. 6, 2021) — original 15-camera, $43,750 request.
- DeFlockILM — How much does New Hanover County pay for Flock? · Three Million Searches, Zero Names
The DeFlock map is crowdsourced and incomplete, so the 62 figure is a verified minimum, not an official total. Camera counts change. Last updated June 30, 2026.
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