“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.

“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 on August 17, when the commissioners who fund it meet — 4 p.m., Room 301, Historic Courthouse. If the video told you something, tell them.