“Just a License Plate Reader”? Watch This.

In his own memo to the Board of Commissioners, Sheriff Ed McMahon described the program in three words: “License Plate Reader technology.” The memo opens, “As many of you are aware, the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office has recently deployed License Plate Reader technology…” Just a plate reader. Routine. Nothing to see.

Now watch this.

We’ll let it speak for itself. Then hold the phrase “just a license plate reader” against what New Hanover County’s own records show:

• It is not only plate readers. The county’s own contract includes eight Condor PTZ cameras — live and recorded video that pans, tilts, and zooms in on people. One of them points at the children’s soccer field at Veterans Park.
• It searches for people, not just cars. The county’s audit logs contain searches for people by plain-English description — clothing, and in some cases race — and Flock’s “Nova” tool links a plate to a person through commercial data brokers.
• It is a national network, and the county hid who is using it. New Hanover’s own log records 2,980,082 searches — with the identity of every searching agency redacted to “***” in every single row.

Flock’s own patent says what the sales pitch won’t

You don’t have to take our reading of it. Take Flock’s. In U.S. Patent 11,416,545 — “System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network,” granted August 16, 2022, with Flock CEO Garrett Langley and co-founder Matt Feury named as inventors — the company describes the system behind its product line in its own words. It is a method for pulling video from many separate, unrelated cameras — neighborhood-watch cameras, home security systems, commercial cameras, traffic cameras, even “a bystander’s smartphone” — and combining them into one searchable network.

What that network is built to do is stated plainly. The patent describes the system recognizing a specific, named person and alerting a subscriber — in its own example, a subscriber’s teenage daughter:

“…alert triggering module 158 may recognize that a person detected in a video segment… is statistically similar to the teenage daughter of a subscriber to the DSOQ system and, in response, may cause an alert signal (e.g., an SMS communication) to be transmitted… to a smartphone associated with the subscriber.”

The same patent describes using “face recognition data points” to search for a specific person’s face across multiple unrelated camera networks at once. Flock says its cameras don’t run facial recognition today; the patent shows the capability was designed into the architecture from the start. And the company’s newer marketing puts the rest on the table: an LPR Pro line sold with “Convoy” search — built to identify vehicles that travel together, “accomplices, and patterns” — plus multi-jurisdiction and image-based search. None of that is reading one plate after one crime. It is mapping who moves with whom, across time and county lines.

This is not a Wilmington document, and it doesn’t have to be. It is the vendor’s own blueprint, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Clay County, Florida just paid Flock $142,500 to keep a full year of that movement data searchable instead of the default 30 days — the capability, not the plate photo, is the product. (The patent is public in full; the Clay County contracts and patent walkthrough were reported by Clay News & Views.)

“Just a license plate reader” is the sentence that makes all of that sound ordinary. The records are the reason it isn’t. We offered the Sheriff five days to confirm or correct his memo before we published anything; the deadline passed without a reply, so we answered it with the county’s own documents.

This gets decided when the officials who fund it next meet. If the video told you something, tell them.