Kure Beach Has Four Flock Cameras. Outside Agencies Searched Them 2.56 Million Times.

Editor’s note. We first published this story on July 14, 2026, based on the Town’s initial production. On July 20 the Town produced again — this time including the Network Audit it had not previously released. That record changed the story substantially, so we have rewritten it rather than appending an update. The original figures were drawn from the Town’s own searches and remain accurate; where the second production corrected a count, we say so below. Both productions and all correspondence are archived in full. Update — August 11, 2026: the Town re-exported the Network Audit in complete form (the earlier monthly files were capped at a spreadsheet row limit). The figures on this page now reflect the complete March 1–July 31, 2026 record: 2,560,152 searches by 3,712 organizations, 92.5% from outside North Carolina. The complete deduplicated dataset is archived here.

Kure Beach has about 2,400 year-round residents and four Flock cameras. You can drive across the town in five minutes.

Between March 1 and July 31, 2026, those four cameras were searched 2,560,152 times by 3,712 different organizations.

92.5% of those searches came from outside North Carolina.

These are the complete figures. The Town’s earlier monthly exports had been capped at Microsoft Excel’s row limit and clipped before each month ended; its complete re-export — March 1 through July 31, 2026, deduplicated by Flock’s own search ID — holds 2,560,152 searches, and the pattern below only hardens.

We know this because the Town released the record that shows it — the Flock Network Audit, with the name of every searching agency intact. Most agencies do not release that field. New Hanover County, which surrounds Kure Beach and runs a far larger system, still won’t. Kure Beach released it without being made to, and this story exists because of that decision.

The setting that explains the number

A four-camera town does not attract 1.4 million searches by accident. The Town produced the reason in the same batch.

Flock’s Network Discoverability panel offers three switches, and Kure Beach’s are set like this:

• Within 50 Miles — OFF
• Within My State — OFF
• Within Nationwide — ON

Flock’s own description of the setting, shown on the screen the Town produced, is that enabling it “will make this network discoverable to Law Enforcement agencies, based on the selected distance, so that other organizations can request access to your camera data.”

A note on how we read that screen. Flock’s wording refers to “the selected distance,” in the singular, which suggests these are nested scopes rather than three independent bands — nationwide being the widest, and taking in the narrower two. We think that is the better reading, and the Town’s own records support it: 192 of the 554 organizations Kure Beach shares with are North Carolina agencies, and North Carolina agencies ran 88,944 searches. So we are not claiming the Town shut out its neighbors while opening up to Texas. We are claiming something simpler and, we think, more serious.

The widest available setting is the one that is switched on. A town with four cameras and 2,400 residents made its network discoverable to law enforcement agencies across the entire country. The Town’s shared-networks list shows where that led: 554 organizations, 362 of them outside North Carolina.

The Event Log records exactly one change to those settings in the three months produced — on March 2, 2026. The Town redacted the user field, so the log does not say who made it. We have not asked; the setting matters more than the name attached to it.

Who is actually searching

Source: Flock Network Audit, March 1 – July 31, 2026 (complete re-export), produced by the Town of Kure Beach. DeFlockILM’s tally of the deduplicated CSV files.

The top ten account for 216,536 searches — about 15.6% of the total. The rest is a long tail of 3,489 more agencies.

Not one of the top ten is in North Carolina. Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, South Carolina — and the federal government.

The North Carolina agencies sit further down the list, and one of them is worth stopping on. Across the full five months the Town produced, the state’s heaviest in-state searcher of Kure Beach’s cameras is the State Bureau of Investigation (12,152). Next to it, though, is a name closer to home: the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, which searched this neighboring beach town’s four cameras 5,482 times — the same office that, on its own far larger network, blacks out the name of every agency and officer that runs a search. It will reach into Kure Beach’s cameras thousands of times; it will not let the public see who reaches into its own. Carolina Beach PD (1,263) and Kure Beach’s own department (939) round out the Cape Fear agencies quietly searching each other’s networks.

The FBI ran 63,213 searches

Two federal agencies appear in the log: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with 63,213 searches, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, with 12,337. Together, 75,550 federal searches over five months, against the cameras of a town of 2,400 people.

This deserves care, because Flock has made a public commitment on exactly this point — and the Town’s records let us test it.

On August 25, 2025, after reporting on federal pilots that the company had described inaccurately, Flock CEO Garrett Langley published a statement titled “Ensuring Local Compliance.” It said all federal pilots had been paused, that federal customers would be designated as a distinct category, and this:

“Moving forward, federal users will not be added to Statewide or Nationwide lookup. Any sharing request, audit or display of these agencies will clearly delineate that an organization is federal.”
— Garrett Langley, CEO, Flock Safety, August 25, 2025

Flock kept the second half of that promise. In Kure Beach’s audit, the two agencies appear as “[Federal] Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)” and “[Federal] US Postal Inspection Service.” That bracketed tag is Flock’s own labelling system, built to do exactly what Langley described. It is why we can identify them at all.

The first half is where it gets interesting.

Kure Beach’s shared-networks list — also produced — shows both federal agencies as direct sharing relationships, not lookup-pool access. And the direction is one way. For each, the column “Networks I’m Sharing” reads Kure Beach NC PD. The column “Networks Shared With Me” is blank.

Kure Beach gives its camera data to the FBI and to the Postal Inspection Service. It receives nothing from either.

We want to be fair about what this does and does not show. Langley’s commitment was specific: federal users would not be added to Statewide or Nationwide lookup — the automatic pools. A direct, agency-to-agency share is a different mechanism. On the face of it, Flock may have kept that promise exactly as worded while federal agencies still ended up with 31,476 searches of a four-camera town’s cameras.

Which is the pattern in this whole file. The safeguard is a setting. The setting has a default. And a local agency can reach past the default — on discoverability, and on who gets a direct share — without anyone outside the building knowing it happened. More on federal and out-of-state access to local cameras.

So the question we would put to the Town is not about Flock. It is this: who decided to share Kure Beach’s camera data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on what date, and under what authority? The Town’s ALPR policy, adopted January 27, 2026, does not appear to address it.

What the Town itself used the system for

Set the outside agencies aside. Kure Beach’s own officers ran 816 searches in the same three months, and here the Town filled in the reason for every one.

275 of them — 33.7% — are coded “Traffic Infraction.”

North Carolina law says this, in as few words as a statute ever manages: captured plate data “shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations.” N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b). The statute limits ALPR use to four purposes, and traffic enforcement is not among them — it is the one use the legislature named in order to exclude it.

And the share is climbing:

Month	Searches	Coded “Traffic Infraction”	Share
March 2026	268	43	16.0%
April 2026	282	65	23.0%
May 2026	266	167	62.8%

By May, nearly two of every three searches Kure Beach officers ran on this system carried a reason code the statute appears to exclude.

We say “appears” deliberately. A reason code is what an officer selected from a menu; it is not a finding of fact, and we have not seen the underlying incidents. It is possible the code is being used loosely for stops that were not traffic enforcement. That is precisely why we asked the Town to explain rather than declaring a violation, and it is why the reason codes matter so much in the first place.

A note on the numbers. Our July 14 story reported 825 searches and 276 traffic infractions, from the Town’s first production. The corrected export in the second production reports 816 and 275. The difference is nine rows; the picture is unchanged.

What we looked for and did not find

Flock’s FreeForm feature lets an officer type a description of a person — clothing, build, other characteristics — instead of a plate. We wrote about it last week, after 404 Media published records of police using it hundreds of times.

The audit export Kure Beach produced contains the field those searches are recorded in: a column headed Text Prompt. That confirms the field is standard in Flock’s audit format, which is useful to know.

It was empty in every row. It was also empty in all 816 of the Town’s own searches.

So on this record, in this window, no FreeForm search was run against Kure Beach’s cameras. We went looking for it and it is not there. We would rather tell you that than leave the impression we found something we didn’t.

The one field the Town has not produced

There is a gap, and it is a large one. The Network Audit was produced with the Reason column empty in every one of its rows.

We do not think that is a redaction. Nothing in the Town’s written responses claims to withhold it, and the Town explained the two fields it did redact. We think it is how the report was generated.

We are confident the field can be produced, because a peer North Carolina agency produced it. North Carolina A&T State University Police released its Flock Network Audit for the same three months: 1,390,776 rows — within a tenth of a percent of Kure Beach’s — with the Reason field populated in 100.0% of them. Same vendor, same report, same period. That is how we learned that 974 searches touching A&T’s network were labelled with immigration reasons.

So we know what the Town’s own officers were doing. We do not know what the thousands of outside agencies said they were doing. That is the question this file cannot yet answer, and it is the one worth answering.

Where this stands

On the evening of July 20 we wrote to Chief Bailey. The letter does three things.

It accepts, without reservation, the agreement the Town proposed: we do not seek the identity of any individual officer, and we have withdrawn that request. We do not contest the redaction of license plates under § 20-183.32(e). And we ask for one thing — the Network Audit regenerated with the Reason column populated.

We also noted three places where the Town’s written responses and the produced files do not match, and one record its own SBI certification references but did not include. We asked for a response by August 3, 2026.

We should say plainly what this Town has already done. It quoted two to three months and produced in four days. It produced twice. And it released the searching-agency field that larger agencies around it still withhold. That is not nothing, and the criticism in this piece sits on top of it rather than in place of it.

Update — July 27, 2026: the field is filled, and the Town’s own cases

The Town produced a third time. It regenerated the Network Audit with the Reason field populated for every entry — the one thing we had asked for — and produced its event log (including the department’s own custom hotlists), its SBI/DCIN user agreement, camera-maintenance records, and written confirmation that no case number was ever assigned to any Flock search. Our first look at the reasons, across more than two million searches from March through July: the leading stated reasons are Drugs/Narcotics and Wanted Person, with “Traffic Infraction” a top-four reason in every month (about 10% of outside searches) — a use § 20-183.31(b) bars. Immigration reasons are negligible, well under 0.1%. The searchers remain overwhelmingly out of state.

Including the agencies whose officers were caught abusing Flock. Every one of the six Georgia agencies whose officers were investigated for Flock misuse — the cases we documented here — appears in Kure Beach’s own search logs. Cherokee County, Georgia searched this four-camera beach town roughly 6,000 times; Richmond County about 3,000; DeKalb County about 2,900 — with Albany, Fayetteville, and Greene County adding hundreds more, well over 13,000 searches among the six. Two honest limits: the searcher-name field is redacted, so this is agency-level access, not proof the specific abusing officer ran these searches; and our figures come from parsing the Town’s PDFs, so treat them as close approximations. The pattern holds regardless — the same departments that reached into UNC Pembroke’s cameras reached into Kure Beach’s too.

One thing the Town made harder than it needed to be — and how it resolved. We asked for the audits as CSV, the format Flock exports and the one the Town itself used for its smaller reports. It first produced the Network Audits as PDFs of 18,000 to 25,000 pages each, roughly half a gigabyte per month, from which data does not extract cleanly. North Carolina’s public-records law lets a requester elect the format: under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-6.2(a), copies must be furnished “in any and all media in which the public agency is capable of providing them.” On August 6, 2026 the Town produced the Network Audits as native CSV — but each monthly file held exactly 1,048,575 rows, the maximum a Microsoft Excel worksheet can contain, so somewhere in the pipeline the export had been run through Excel and clipped at its ceiling. We asked the Town to re-export in complete form, and on August 11, 2026 it did: seven files spanning March 1 through July 31, none clipped. Deduplicated by Flock’s own search ID, Kure Beach’s four cameras were searched 2,560,152 times by 3,712 organizations — 92.5% from outside North Carolina, the median search fanning across roughly 6,100 networks at once. Its stated reasons still lead with Drugs/Narcotics and Wanted Person, and carry 274,883 “Traffic Infraction” searches (a use § 20-183.31(b) bars). The complete deduplicated dataset is archived here; the statewide aggregate carries the full methodology.

The Town also produced its own proof. Among the records is a set of incident reports — the cases where officers actually used a Flock search, offered as evidence the system works. We are still reviewing them, and because they contain personal information we are not publishing them. But an early read is worth noting, in the Town’s own words. In a stolen golf-cart case, Flock is not what solved it: the cart was located by other means, and the suspect was captured on private business cameras — not Flock — while a Flock camera later produced only a photo of the cart itself. In a second case, a misdemeanor larceny, the report states the “Flock cameras [were] reviewed but we had negative findings of the suspect vehicle.” A third is a hit-and-run. We will make additional findings after a fuller analysis. For now, the notable point is that in the cases the Town itself chose to hold up, the tool’s role was partial — or, in its own words, negative.

Read the records yourself

We are not asking you to take our word for any figure above. The complete file — the request, both productions, the 1.39-million-row network audit, and every letter in between — is archived permanently and can be downloaded in full: archive.org/details/deflockilm-kure-beach-alpr-2026. The README there lists every redaction we made and why.

All figures are DeFlockILM’s own tally of the Flock audit files produced by the Town of Kure Beach in response to a North Carolina public records request (Organization Audit, Network Audit and Event Log, March 1 – July 22, 2026). This article describes public records and the statutes that govern them; it is general information, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. We do not allege that any individual violated the law. We have asked the Town to explain its records and we will publish its response in full. If any figure here is wrong, write to mark@deflockilm.org and we will correct it in public. First published July 14, 2026; rewritten July 20, 2026; updated August 6, 2026 on the Town’s native-CSV production.