1.4 Million Searches, 16 Cameras: Inside NC A&T’s Flock Audit

North Carolina A&T State University — the nation’s largest historically Black university — runs sixteen Flock license-plate cameras around its Greensboro campus. Its own police use them mostly for traffic. Everyone else uses them for everything.

We filed a public-records request. NC A&T produced its full Flock audit, and the numbers are hard to overstate.

Between March and May 2026, the shared network those sixteen cameras feed was searched 1,390,776 times — by 3,487 different agencies. Almost none of them are in North Carolina. The heaviest searchers were the Texas Department of Public Safety (36,242), Houston PD (35,264), and Dallas PD (20,993), followed by agencies in Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Indiana. The NC State Bureau of Investigation ran 10,702. And a federal agency — the U.S. Postal Inspection Service — ran 11,781.

The 20 agencies that searched NC A&T’s network most

Every one of these searches touched the shared network A&T’s sixteen cameras feed. Only two of the top twenty are North Carolina agencies; the rest are out of state, plus one federal.

Top 20 of 3,487 organizations that searched the network in the three-month period. Full list in the downloadable dataset.

The audit hides the searchers’ names and the plate numbers behind three asterisks. It does not hide the agency. So we can’t tell you which officer searched — but we can tell you that 974 of those searches were run for immigration reasons, logged in the records as “Immigration (civil/administrative),” “Immigration (criminal),” and Homeland Security Investigations.

Now the contrast. NC A&T’s own police ran 261 searches in the same three months — a rounding error against 1.4 million. And 77.8% of them were traffic infractions. Not violent crime. Not missing persons. Traffic.

That is the shape of the whole system. A campus buys sixteen cameras for $51,240 a year to run a few hundred mostly-traffic lookups — and in doing so plugs its students, staff, and neighbors into a nationwide search grid used more than a million times over by departments two thousand miles away, and by the federal government.

It is the same story the New Hanover County records told, at a different scale: nearly three million searches, every name redacted. One campus. One county. The same machine.

We’re not asking you to take our word for it. NC A&T produced the records; we did the math; and we’ve published the entire dataset so you can check it. Download every audit file, the camera list with GPS, the network-sharing config, and the invoice — and run the numbers yourself: the complete NC A&T Flock dataset (.zip), with our full breakdown on the Records Hub.

A search should need a reason. 1.4 million times in ninety days, on sixteen cameras around a college, is not sixteen cameras’ worth of reasons.

Figures are DeFlockILM’s own tally of the Flock audit files produced by NC A&T State University Police in response to a North Carolina public-records request (Flock Organization & Network Audit, March–May 2026; invoice INV-90184). Record counts reflect parsing that accounts for multi-line fields. The full dataset is linked above.