How Many Flock Cameras Are in New Hanover County?

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 The “15 cameras” figure you’ll still find online is from 2021 and long out of date.

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. The office that holds New Hanover County’s contract has no portal at all; its standard Flock portal address returns a blank “no such page” error. 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. A $15 detector and a drive can log every reader you pass and add it to the public map; 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).
• 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.