The North Carolina Flock Misuse Tracker
A running record of the North Carolina law-enforcement officers criminally charged with — or under investigation for — misusing the Flock license-plate network. Every case comes to light the same way: only when someone finally audits the log.
Every argument for the plate-reader network assumes the people searching it are honest. North Carolina now has a documented, accelerating record of what happens when they aren’t — and of how the abuse surfaces: not by a warning light, but only when a human being reviews the search log. This page tracks the North Carolina cases as they come to light. Charges are accusations; each officer is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
| Officer | Agency (County) | Date | What the record shows | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elizabeth Anne Snowman | Mooresville PD (Iredell) | Aug 5, 2026 | Ran the Flock database 31 times (29 on duty) to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife; caught by a Flock system audit. (Our write-up & the redacted warrant) | Charged |
| Seth Elliott | Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD | Jul 29, 2026 | SBI charge: an unauthorized Flock search of an NC plate for a non-law-enforcement purpose. CMPD owns no cameras of its own — he reached the network through a data-sharing agreement. (The charge, and what our records show) | Charged |
| Ten additional officers | Mooresville PD (Iredell) | Aug 2026 | Under investigation for accessing Flock for personal reasons; the chief says three cases are “problematic,” with more arrests possible — in a 124-officer department. | Under review |
Two criminal charges in eight days, both in the Charlotte metro; ten more officers under review in a single department. We add cases as they surface — if you know of one we’ve missed, write to mark@deflockilm.org.
How every one of these came to light
Notice the pattern: none of these officers was stopped before the abuse. Snowman ran 31 searches; the review happened afterward. That is the whole problem with “the log is the safeguard.” A log is only a safeguard if a human reviews it — and North Carolina law barely requires that. G.S. § 20-183.31 requires only that an agency’s ALPR policy provide for “annual or more frequent” auditing, reported to the head of the agency. A once-a-year self-review is the legal floor. And it is thinner than it sounds, because the “reason” an officer types for each search is self-entered — the New Hanover Sheriff’s Office has already told WECT its own codes were simply “mislabeled.” If the labels can be wrong, reading the labels is not oversight at all.
Why it matters here in the Cape Fear
The scale here is not abstract. New Hanover County’s Flock network was searched 2.98 million times in sixteen months — and the county redacted the name of every searching agency and officer. And it isn’t only the county: Carolina Beach’s five cameras were searched about three million times in a single quarter, and Kure Beach’s four 2.56 million times over five months — the same nationwide network, the same anonymous searchers. The one record that would catch a Snowman here is the record New Hanover won’t show the public, and that Wrightsville Beach won’t produce at all. When someone finally audits, misuse turns up not one officer at a time, but by the handful. (The national stalking record · Every figure, sourced.)
You’re not a suspect. So stop being tracked like one.
It takes one minute. Add your name, then tell your county commissioners to cancel the Flock contract.