New Hanover County Canceled Its Flock Contract

Today the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners voted to cancel the county’s contract with Flock Safety. The vote was unanimous. Vice Chair Dane Scalise brought the motion, and he moved to cancel the program outright rather than pause it — “that’s what the community wants us to do.” Chair LeAnn Pierce seconded, and with all four commissioners present, the vote was 4-0. Scalise was careful to frame it as no knock on the Sheriff: “Our sheriff’s goal all along has been to protect the people of this county. It is not his fault, it is not his staff’s fault that the guardrails around this technology are not sufficient.”

Update — the shut-off has already begun. The same day, the Sheriff’s Office said it is immediately ending its access to the system: it disabled national sharing (outside agencies can no longer search New Hanover’s cameras), removed system access for its own employees (no new searches), contacted Flock to terminate the agreement, and notified the SBI that it has ended its plate-reader participation. County officials said the county-owned cameras have already been deactivated, and Flock will be responsible for removing them. (State-run cameras, including along I-40, are not affected.) (WWAY)

The contract that ended was the one carried in the Sheriff’s Office budget: $219,000, thirty-six cameras, set to run through 2027. It is the same agreement residents packed the chamber to oppose on August 17, when forty-one people signed up to speak and not one spoke in favor.

Commissioners named the reason plainly. Chair LeAnn Pierce said there were “just so many unanswered questions,” and that “safeguards are not in place to protect citizens at this time.” Commissioner Rob Zapple said he was “uncomfortable with the power of mass surveillance,” noting the system’s AI can “push in on” people near the cameras — “the amount of detail … is frightening” — and that any future program would need regular independent judicial audits. Commissioner Stephanie Walker noted that opposition had crossed the political spectrum in a way she had rarely seen in her career. Scalise pointed to the Flock-misuse case that surfaced next door in Brunswick County, where a Sheriff’s Office employee resigned and the matter was referred to the State Bureau of Investigation.

Why now

The vote did not come out of nowhere. It followed a WECT investigation that documented nearly three million searches of New Hanover County’s Flock network since 2025 — the overwhelming majority run by outside agencies whose names the county redacted. It followed the Brunswick misuse referral. It followed a regional turn away from the technology: Asheville, Davidson County, Macon County, and Dare County had each already voted their programs out. And it followed months of ordinary residents — more than 3,800 petition signers, and a stream of emails and public comment — telling their elected board, on the record, that they did not consent to being tracked without a warrant. The board that holds the money used the power it always had: it declined to keep funding the program.

What this does — and what it doesn’t (yet)

We want to be precise, because the reporting is still developing and the operative document isn’t public yet.

What it does. It ends the county’s Flock contract. The county stops paying, the authorization is gone, and the cameras that ran under it should come down.

On whether the Sheriff can simply fund it himself. In North Carolina a sheriff has no independent money — he is separately elected, but he cannot tax or appropriate. He spends what the commissioners appropriate to him, and the commissioners just pulled that appropriation. That is the same lever Macon and Davidson counties used. The honest caveat is that “no independent money” is not quite “no other money”: ALPR programs elsewhere in North Carolina have been funded through asset-forfeiture proceeds, state or federal grants, or donations — channels that don’t always require a fresh appropriation, and that some sheriffs have used specifically to route around a budget vote. Whether today’s action forecloses those routes depends on the exact language of the motion, which is why we’ve asked the county for it.

What it does not reach. County Manager Chris Coudriet estimated the contract covers roughly 15 to 18 stationary plate-reader cameras, and said he will work with Sheriff McMahon on the cancellation and the removal of that equipment. He was clear about the boundary: other ALPRs operated by the state and the N.C. Highway Patrol — including cameras along I-40 — sit outside the county’s control and remain. The vote also does not, on its face, address the Sheriff’s separate camera network or the Wilmington Police drone fleet. And because outside agencies reached New Hanover’s cameras through the shared national network, that traffic ends only when the cameras themselves are actually switched off and removed.

Does this remove the beach towns’ cameras? No. New Hanover County, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, and Wrightsville Beach are separate governments. The county’s vote cancels the county’s contract only. Each beach town runs its own Flock cameras, and only that town’s council can remove them — a separate decision, in a separate vote. That is why the work now moves to those town councils.

One thing we’ll say plainly

We’re grateful the board voted to cancel. In the same breath, we’ll be honest about one point in the reporting. Explaining the vote, Vice Chair Scalise said ending the contract now “doesn’t mean there won’t be sufficient guardrails in the future.” We understand the instinct — but we don’t accept the premise, and we don’t think it’s a close call.

The trouble with a plate-reader dragnet was never a missing setting, a retention window, or a better audit. It is that the system treats every driver as a suspect — logging where you go, without a warrant and without cause, and pooling it into a nationwide database thousands of agencies can search. No guardrail fixes that, because that is the design doing exactly what it was built to do. We’ve documented, page by page, why “regulation” and transparency portals don’t cure a warrantless dragnet — the guardrails that aren’t. Treating citizens as suspects is not something we believe can be made defensible with the right paperwork. If the county ever weighs a “future guardrail,” we’ll ask for the only one that works: don’t rebuild it.

What we’re still confirming

• The exact motion and resolution language — whether it simply terminates this contract or also bars county funds for any future ALPR program. (We’ve requested the minutes and the resolution.)
• The removal timeline — the County Manager said he’ll work with the Sheriff to remove the equipment; we don’t yet know when the cameras physically come down.
• The Sheriff’s Office’s own response.

We’ll update this page as the county produces the records.

This took a coalition — across every party

No single group did this, and no single group should take the credit. The pressure that moved the board came from across the entire political spectrum, working the same problem from different directions: ILMAction, Indivisible Wilmington, the NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, the New Hanover County Republican Women, the New Hanover County Republican Party, the New Hanover County Democrats, the Libertarian Party, the informal statewide DeFlock NC network, and the national DeFlock organization — alongside countless individuals of every party and of no party at all. Republicans and Democrats, civil-libertarians and civil-rights advocates rarely line up on much. They lined up on this: a government that logs everyone’s movements without a warrant is a line none of them wanted crossed.

We owe particular thanks to the residents who filled the chamber at the August 17 commissioners meeting and spoke on the record — forty-one people signed up, and not one spoke in favor of the cameras. Standing at a public microphone and saying your piece to elected officials takes something. They did it, and it mattered.

The momentum didn’t stop at the vote. Just today, a private donor funded billboards across New Hanover County calling for these cameras to come down — paid for by a resident who wanted neighbors to know the effort was real and the cameras could be removed.

DeFlockILM was one voice in that chorus, and glad to be. To everyone who signed, emailed, spoke, organized, donated, and showed up: thank you. This is yours.

A step — and only a step

Make no mistake about the size of this. A county board looked at a nationwide surveillance network and voted it off the roads it controls. That is real, and it is rare.

It is also not the end. The cameras New Hanover just canceled are the ones the county controlled. The ones it couldn’t reach are still watching — the plate readers the state and the Highway Patrol run on state-maintained roads, the program the General Assembly made permanent and pushed across most of North Carolina’s highways this year. A county vote can’t take those down. Only the State can. So here is the ask that follows the win: the same standard, applied up the chain. If mass, warrantless tracking isn’t right for New Hanover County’s roads, it isn’t right for the state’s highways either. Raleigh built that system. Raleigh needs to take it down.

What it means

For once, the answer to “who decides whether you’re tracked” was: the people who live here. Thousands of New Hanover residents — left, right, and neither — asked their board to end a program that logged everyone and answered to almost no one. Today the board agreed. The work now is simple and worth watching closely: make sure the cameras actually come down, and read the fine print when it lands.

The work continues — tonight in Carolina Beach

New Hanover County acted. Carolina Beach hasn’t yet. Tonight — Tuesday, September 8, at 6:00 PM — the Carolina Beach Town Council meets at Town Hall, 1121 N. Lake Park Blvd, and public comment is open. If you live in Carolina Beach — or you spend time there, dine there, or bring your family to the beach — your plate is read and stored too. Come tell the Council what New Hanover’s commissioners heard from their own residents: take the cameras down. Arrive about fifteen minutes early to add your name to the public-comment sign-up sheet. Bring a neighbor.

Sources: WECT, “New Hanover County pulls plug on Flock camera contract” (Kaitlyn Aguiles, Sept. 8, 2026); Port City Daily, “Flock contract canceled in New Hanover County” (Shea Carver, Sept. 8, 2026); WWAY, “New Hanover County commissioners cancel contract with Flock cameras,” “…detail Flock camera use; end contract,” and “Sheriff’s Office begins ending access to Flock camera system” (WWAY News, Sept. 8, 2026). This is a developing story; figures and language will be updated against the county’s official record. General information for public discussion, not legal advice.