New Hanover Named Two Laws to Justify the Redactions. Neither One Fits.

For two months, we asked New Hanover County a single question about its Flock license-plate network: who is running the searches? The county produced its audit — 2,980,082 searches over sixteen months — but blacked out the Organization Name field in every row, hiding the identity of the agency behind each query. On August 11, 2026, after the StarNews reported that only 3.9% of those searches came from the Sheriff’s own office, the county finally named a legal basis for the redaction. It named it to the newspaper. We read the statutes it cited. This is what they actually say.

What the county said

To be fair to the county, here is its position in full. Its communications staff told the StarNews: “Following a review of N.C. General Statutes between New Hanover County’s Legal Department and the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, it was determined that G.S. 132-1.4 and 132-1.7 places clear definitions on the scope of information that is releasable regarding several factors, including sensitive public information, investigative material and custodial priority.” Separately, county staff told us and the paper that the records “are not New Hanover County’s to release and would need to be obtained from Flock.” We take that seriously enough to read the two statutes line by line.

“Not ours to release”? The county possessed it, redacted it, and produced it.

Take the county’s other claim — that the records “are not New Hanover County’s to release and would need to be obtained from Flock” (as county staff told us and the StarNews). Read literally, it says Flock, not the county, controls the audit of searches run on the county’s own cameras. The simplest answer is what the county actually did.

It already produced the audit. Whatever the county means by “not ours,” it possessed enough of the record to review it, redact a single field, and produce all 2,980,082 rows to us. A document an agency holds, reviews, redacts, and hands over is a document in its possession — and possession is what the Public Records Act turns on, not which company’s logo is on the software.

Its own contract confirms the data is the county’s, not Flock’s. Section 4.1 of Contract #25-0364 provides: “As between Flock and Customer, all right, title and interest in the Customer Data belong to and are retained solely by Customer… Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” “Customer” is New Hanover County, and the agreement says Flock “does not own” the data three times over (§§ 4.1–4.3). Contractual ownership and statutory custodianship are separate questions — we don’t conflate them — but the contract decisively answers the county’s own framing: the vendor it points to is, by its own agreement, not the owner. “Obtain it from Flock” collapses.

(Flock’s public materials say the same — the company states the data belongs to “the community, not Flock” and calls itself only a custodian — but the controlling text is the contract.)

The fight is about one field — not the whole record

Start with what the county did, not only what it argues. It released the audit — all 2,980,082 rows — and redacted a single field. That frames the question correctly. The county is not treating this as a § 132-1.4 record that is “not a public record” and withheld in full; it is treating it as a public record produced with redactions — the ordinary “hybrid” posture North Carolina law contemplates, in which any exempt content is deleted and the rest is produced (§ 132-6(c); § 132-1.4(j)). We take no issue with that framework, and partial production waives nothing. It simply means the dispute is field-specific: the county must identify the exemption that reaches the Organization Name field in particular. That is the whole question — and it is what the two statutes it named are supposed to answer.

§ 132-1.4 protects people under investigation — not a field naming an agency

Section 132-1.4 shields “records of criminal investigations” and “criminal intelligence information.” Both definitions in subsection (b) require records “that pertain[] to a person or group of persons” compiled to prevent or solve violations of the law. The Organization Name field does not pertain to a person under investigation. It identifies a government agency — a police department that logged into a system. The operative definitions turn on information pertaining to the persons or groups of persons who are the subjects of investigative or intelligence activity. An agency identifier names the governmental entity performing a search, not the person to whom any investigation pertains.

Two provisions finish the argument, and they sit inside the very statute the county invokes. Subsection (f): “The use of a public record in connection with a criminal investigation or the gathering of criminal intelligence shall not affect its status as a public record.” And subsection (j) contemplates deleting exempt content with the deletion marked — redact and produce — the same segregation rule that § 132-6(c) states for public records generally. Nothing in § 132-1.4 authorizes blacking out an agency’s name across three million rows.

§ 132-1.7 covers sensitive security information — but a roster of searchers is a poor fit

Section 132-1.7 is narrower still. Its categories are building plans and infrastructure drawings, executive-protection patterns, prison and confinement-facility security, energy-infrastructure design, and — the only arguably relevant one — subsection (a)(4): “specific security information or detailed plans, patterns, or practices to prevent or respond to criminal, gang, or organized illegal activity.”

The county’s strongest conceivable argument is subsection (a)(4), and it deserves to be stated at its best: that organization names, taken at scale alongside search frequency, dates, and locations, could reveal patterns of interagency cooperation and investigative activity — arguably “specific security information” or “patterns or practices” for responding to crime. That is the fight, if there is one. But the fit is difficult, for three reasons. First, (a)(4) reads most naturally as protecting the playbook — the tactics, methods, and security practices used to prevent or respond to crime — while an aggregate, retrospective list of which agencies ran searches reveals no tactic, target, timing, or method; it is the identity of the searcher, after the fact. Second, subsection (c) makes information about the general adoption of public security arrangements public, and a roster of which agencies participate in a shared network looks much more like general scope-and-participation information than the detailed operational information subsection (a) protects. Third, if simply disclosing the searching-agency field exposed operational practices, the peer agencies that released it would have compromised their own — and no one contends they did. A reading that converts a list of past users into a protected “practice” would strain both the text and subsection (c).

“Custodial priority” is not in either statute

The county’s statement leans on the phrase “custodial priority.” That phrase appears in neither § 132-1.4 nor § 132-1.7 — nor anywhere else in Chapter 132. It is not a term of art in North Carolina public-records law. An exemption has to come from the statute books, not from a phrase drafted for a press statement.

What the courts have — and haven’t — decided

Be precise here, because it matters. No North Carolina appellate court appears to have decided the exact question in this dispute — whether an ALPR audit’s searching-agency field is exempt under §§ 132-1.4 or 132-1.7. We are not claiming a court has already ruled. But the appellate courts have established principles that cut against the county’s reading.

Access is liberal, and the records are the public’s. The Act declares that the records government compiles “are the property of the people” (§ 132-1(b)), and the Supreme Court has held repeatedly that “as a general rule, the public would have liberal access to public records” (News & Observer Publishing Co. v. State ex rel. Starling, 312 N.C. 276 (1984); State Emps. Ass’n of N.C. v. N.C. Dep’t of State Treasurer, 364 N.C. 205 (2010)).

“It’s another agency’s information” is not, by itself, an exemption. A record does not lose its public character merely because it contains or originated with another entity. Records in a public agency’s possession are public records (News & Observer Publishing Co. v. Poole, 330 N.C. 465 (1992)), and one public agency may not act to “prevent another public agency from producing public records” in its custody (In re Neville, 872 S.E.2d 819 (N.C. App. 2022)). Those principles sit directly against the county’s June 29 “ask each agency” and its August “obtain it from Flock.”

Even where genuine investigative records exist, the rest must still be released. In a case under § 132-1.4, the Court of Appeals held that although the SBI’s actual criminal-investigation records were exempt, the requesters remained “entitled to release of any other information classified as public records” in the agency’s possession (Gannett Pacific Corp. v. N.C. State Bureau of Investigation, 164 N.C. App. 154 (2004)). An agency cannot invoke § 132-1.4 to withhold non-exempt public material wholesale — it must identify and release what remains public, which is the opposite of a blanket blackout of one field across every row.

The comparison New Hanover has not explained

These are statewide statutes — they mean the same thing in New Hanover as everywhere else. And six other North Carolina agencies, governed by the same statewide public-records laws, released the same Organization Name field we are asking for: Carolina Beach, NC A&T, UNC Pembroke, Kure Beach, UNC Charlotte, and Buncombe County. Voluntary disclosure by others does not settle a statute’s meaning — six agencies could, in theory, all read a law the same wrong way. But the pattern is hard to dismiss: if New Hanover’s reading is right, six peer agencies reached the opposite conclusion about the same field under the same statutes. That is the comparison the county still has not explained.

The StarNews drew the same contrast in the very article announcing the county’s statutory position. A few miles down the same coast, Kure Beach released its network audit with every organization name intact — 3,712 agencies, 92.5% of the searches from outside North Carolina, from a four-camera system. Same vendor, same statutes, opposite answer.

Three reasons in three months

This is the county’s third position on the same redaction. On June 29, 2026, Deputy County Attorney Karen Richards wrote to us directly: “a PRR to NHC does not grant you information about another entity or pulled by another entity… Please feel free to contact each agency you believe uses FLOCK.” She separately raised an anonymous officer entry code — a point about a request we had already withdrawn. She named no statute. (Read the June 29 email in the archived correspondence.) By August, the position had moved to “not New Hanover County’s to release” and “obtain it from Flock” (as the county told us and the StarNews, Aug. 11). Only now — to a reporter — is it §§ 132-1.4 and 132-1.7. Whether those are genuinely different rationales or just different formulations of the same one, the county has not explained how they fit together.

We asked for the statute in writing. The county answered a reporter.

This is the part that should trouble anyone who cares about the public-records process, not only the outcome. We did not learn the county’s reasoning from the newspaper by accident — we had been asking for it, in writing, for weeks. Our June 18 demand letter asked the county, field by field, to identify “the specific statutory provision relied upon” for each redaction, and said so plainly: “Your statement that the records were redacted ‘as allowed by statute’ does not identify the provision relied upon, and I am entitled to know it.” That letter even anticipated § 132-1.4 and asked the county to “identify the specific subsection relied upon.” The county’s June 29 reply never answered the question — it said the audit was “not our record” and raised an entry-code point about a request we had already withdrawn. Our July 20 letter listed the field-by-field statutory basis among the items still unanswered. It stayed unanswered.

Then, on August 11, the county gave the answer — §§ 132-1.4 and 132-1.7 — to a StarNews reporter, not to the requester who had asked for it three times over seven weeks. We are careful about the legal weight of that: Chapter 132 does not require an agency to hand a requester a written legal brief before litigation, and we do not claim the county broke a rule by speaking to the press. The point is narrower, and still real. It is a transparency failure for a county that markets transparency — and it has a concrete consequence down the line. Under § 132-9(c), a requester who substantially prevails in a public-records suit recovers attorneys’ fees unless the agency reasonably relied on a court judgment or order, controlling published appellate authority, or a written Attorney General opinion. Here the county has cited none of those three — there is no court order, no case on point, and no AG opinion — only two statutes named to a reporter. We have again asked the county to state the § 132-1.4 / § 132-1.7 position to us directly, field by field, so the record is clear.

Finish the citation: the questions the county has not answered

The county named two statutes, but a citation is not an explanation. Both are long, multi-part laws. The honest way to end this is not to declare the county wrong — it is to ask the county to finish its own citation and answer five specific questions:

Those are not advocacy conclusions. They are questions any reporter, commissioner, or judge can put to the county directly — and questions the county has not yet answered.

One field — and where this goes next

We want to be precise about what is in dispute. We do not contest the plate reads. We contest one field: Organization Name — the names of the agencies searching New Hanover’s cameras, which residents have a right to know. On August 3 we filed for pre-litigation mediation under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-38.3E (No. 26M000599-640). Pre-suit mediation is voluntary (§ 7A-38.3E(a)), and we have asked the county to agree by August 27. If it declines, the next step is a Chapter 132 action to compel under § 132-9 — at which point mediation becomes mandatory (§ 7A-38.3E(b)). The commissioners who fund the contract meet regularly. (The full records file.)

Sources

• Wilmington StarNews — “Sheriff’s office accounts for 3.9% of New Hanover Flock searches” (Daniel Sheehan, Aug. 11, 2026), reporting the county’s statement citing §§ 132-1.4 and 132-1.7 and “custodial priority.”
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1.4 (criminal investigation records) · § 132-1.7 (sensitive public security information) · § 132-6(c) (segregation) · § 132-9(c) (fees) · § 7A-38.3E (mediation).
• The field, released by peers under the same statutes: Carolina Beach · NC A&T · UNC Pembroke · Kure Beach · UNC Charlotte · Buncombe County. Our analysis of the redacted New Hanover audit: Three Million Searches, Zero Names.
• The county’s shifting position: the June 29, 2026 email from Deputy County Attorney Karen Richards (archived correspondence) · and the §§ 132-1.4 / 132-1.7 statement made to the StarNews, Aug. 11.
• North Carolina cases cited: News & Observer Publishing Co. v. Poole, 330 N.C. 465 (1992); News & Observer Publishing Co. v. State ex rel. Starling, 312 N.C. 276 (1984); State Emps. Ass’n of N.C. v. N.C. Dep’t of State Treasurer, 364 N.C. 205 (2010); Gannett Pacific Corp. v. N.C. State Bureau of Investigation, 164 N.C. App. 154 (2004); In re Neville, 872 S.E.2d 819 (N.C. App. 2022). We are aware of no North Carolina appellate decision addressing the ALPR searching-agency field specifically.

This page quotes New Hanover County’s public statement to the StarNews and sets out our reading of the cited statutes for public discussion. It is general information and opinion, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutory text is paraphrased where noted; the linked official sources control. First published August 12, 2026.