You Thought Flock Was the Surveillance. The Sheriff Has 2,147 Cameras on His Map.

It even has a website. Go to connectnewhanoversheriff.org and the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office tells you the numbers itself, updated live. As of August 24, 2026: 2,147 registered cameras and 716 integrated cameras. Set that beside the Flock contract the commissioners are finally debating — 36 cameras — and the proportion is the story. For every Flock camera drawing public scrutiny, roughly 20 private cameras are already integrated into Fusus — and about 60 are registered to it. The camera program consuming the debate is tiny beside the one almost nobody is discussing.

“Connect New Hanover” is a surveillance platform, not a neighborhood watch

The program is branded as community partnership: “help keep your community safe,” register your cameras, work with law enforcement. Under the branding is Axon Fusus — a camera-integration platform built by Axon Enterprise, the Taser and body-camera company (its footer reads © 2025 Axon Enterprise, Inc.). It offers two levels, and the second is the one that matters.

Level 1 — registration. A business or resident puts a camera on a map only the Sheriff’s Office can see. Deputies know it is there and can ask the owner for footage after an incident. No live access — but it builds the Sheriff a private map of 2,147 participating cameras across the county that no member of the public is allowed to see.

Level 2 — integration. This is the one that changes everything. The owner plugs a small Axon FususCORE device into their camera system and grants the Sheriff’s Office direct access to the live feed — in the program’s own words, “access to your camera feed… all your cameras or some of them.” A single CORE Pro device can carry up to 50 cameras and store up to 30 days of video. 716 cameras are already at this level — a live, always-available window into private property across New Hanover County, run from a Sheriff’s console.

And there is an AI on top of it

This is not a shoebox of tapes pulled after a crime. In the Sheriff’s own privacy FAQ, Axon Fusus “utilizes artificial intelligence to rapidly search video… to automatically recognize weapons, vehicles of interest, etc.” The integration hardware markets AI “CORE Elite” devices that “put a brain inside your camera network,” pre-loaded with “dozens of search and analysis variables,” and automatic alerts the moment a match “appears on any camera in the designated area of interest.” Here is the honest boundary, and it matters: the Sheriff’s platform can do all of this. What the public has not been told is which of these capabilities the Sheriff’s Office has actually switched on — how many of the 716 feeds it can open, how often it does, which AI functions are enabled, or whether weapon- and person-detection alerts are running today. Those are questions the records can answer, and we have asked. What is not in doubt is the architecture: this is the technology of a real-time crime center, assembled in part from the community’s own security cameras.

To their credit — the safeguards, stated fairly

We will not misrepresent it. The FAQ makes real commitments, and we take them at face value:

• The Sheriff’s Office says it cannot access a private camera without the owner’s written permission.
• Access is described as “strictly one-way” and, per the FAQ, cannot be overridden remotely by deputies or Axon.
• The camera owner controls the settings and can opt out.
• The registry data is treated as non-public.
• Axon Fusus “does not employ facial recognition,” per the FAQ.

Those matter. The right response to this network is not to invent a facial-recognition system the Sheriff says he doesn’t use. It is to look hard at what he does have — and at how it got here.

The scale and the silence are the story

Here is the problem the safeguards don’t touch. This is a county-run camera program that already maps 2,147 private cameras and has integrated 716 into an AI-capable platform, growing camera by camera out of local businesses and neighborhoods — and, apart from an equipment purchase run through county purchasing, it has had no stand-alone public hearing, no recorded policy vote, and none of the debate the 36 Flock cameras are finally getting. Every safeguard above is published on the Connect New Hanover Sheriff website — branded and voiced by the Sheriff’s Office, though clearly built on Axon’s Fusus template. We have not seen a contract, a data-sharing MOU, or a written department policy for this program, so we cannot yet say whether those commitments are contractually binding or simply assurances the same office can revise — and that is one of the records we have requested. Either way, there is no county ordinance and no independent, external audit behind them. For now, “trust us” is the visible oversight model, and residents at the August 17 commissioners’ meeting already said what they think of that model when the subject was the Flock network the Sheriff does disclose.

And the “opt-in” framing hides who actually consents. When a business signs up to share its feed, the business consented. The people walking and driving past that camera never did. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that Fusus-style systems let police turn privately owned cameras into nodes of a centralized, real-time law-enforcement surveillance network — without the public conversation a government camera rollout would normally require. (EFF — “Neighborhood Watch Out”.) Wilmington’s police department runs its own Fusus program too — the STING Center — so this county has two overlapping real-time camera platforms, two agencies, one set of residents.

This was no dormant registry — the Sheriff’s Office went shopping for the capabilities

You do not have to take our word for what this Office was building. Its own 2025 Request for Proposals for “Pan/Tilt/Zoom Cameras and License Plate Readers” (advertised in October 2024) spells it out — a New Hanover County public record, its cover page listing the five county commissioners by name. The Office asked vendors for 20 license-plate readers and 8 pan-tilt-zoom cameras, and it wrote down exactly what the system had to be able to do (read the RFP):

• Existing integration with the FUSUS platform — the RFP required cameras and network devices that already integrate with Fusus “for intelligence and video collection.”
• Enhanced AI for video analysis, with live-view capability and storage of a minimum of 30 days of video from all streams.
• A web-based console with a layered, toggleable map of New Hanover County — the same kind of camera map residents are not allowed to see.
• Vendor heat-map analysis to guide the “deployment of cameras in high crime areas.”
• Training for 25 “power users” and administrators.
• And, remarkably, the vendor must provide “external affairs” by “educating community stakeholders, governing bodies, and other members of the public,” plus “Public Relations as needed… for press releases to the local media outlets.”

Read that last line twice. The Sheriff’s Office wrote into its own solicitation that the surveillance vendor would help message the program to the commissioners and to the press. That is not a description of an independent public debate. It is a plan to manage one.

Be precise about what this document proves. An RFP is a shopping list, not a receipt. It shows what the Sheriff’s Office deliberately set out to acquire — AI video analysis, live view, 30-day retention, a countywide map, Fusus integration — and that these capabilities were the goal, not an accident. It does not by itself prove that every one of the 716 integrated private feeds is being run through that AI or stored for 30 days today. That is exactly the gap the public records should close, and exactly the question the commissioners have never made this Office answer on the record.

The city police already wrote the playbook — and put two things in writing

You do not have to imagine how a Fusus network operates in New Hanover County. The Wilmington Police Department runs one, and — unlike the Sheriff — it published its written policy (WPD Written Directive .07.17, “Fusus Operations & Public Safety Camera Network”). The directive describes Fusus in its own words as a platform for “monitoring of video feeds from multiple public and privately-owned sources, all in real time,” overseen from the department’s STING Center — a real-time crime center staffed by sworn intelligence officers and civilian analysts. It sorts cameras into the same categories the Sheriff’s map uses: agency, jurisdiction, traffic, and private-donor feeds.

Two lines in that policy tell you how the transparency is engineered — on purpose:

• Agency camera locations are “exempt from public records,” and officers are told not to put exact camera locations in their reports. You are not allowed to know where the cameras are.
• Private-donor camera footage “is not subject to public records requests.” The most powerful category — live and recorded feeds from private businesses — is walled off from the records law by design. The business that signed up can be made to answer for its camera; the public that walks past it cannot reach the footage at all.

Sit with the second one. The single largest slice of this surveillance layer is the part the public has the least ability to inspect. The business consented. The people on the sidewalk never did — and the one record that would let them check the system is defined out of reach.

Now the connection the public has never been shown. The Sheriff’s Office and WPD do not operate in separate worlds. In a recorded interview, Sheriff McMahon said the two agencies “work together” and share information (interview) — and we are told a WPD–Sheriff data-sharing MOU exists. We have not seen it, and McMahon did not specifically describe a Fusus link. But if that agreement exists, then the Sheriff’s 716 integrated feeds and WPD’s STING Center network may reach each other — widening both beyond anything either agency discloses on its own. That MOU is precisely the kind of document that should be public. It is not.

In that same interview, Sheriff McMahon said “it is very important that we be transparent to our community.” Good. Then publish the Connect New Hanover contract, the Fusus records, the WPD–Sheriff MOU, the AI configuration, and the list of integrated cameras — the same records WPD’s own directive shows an agency is capable of writing down. Transparency that stops at a reassuring FAQ is not transparency. It is a brochure.

Put it in plain terms. You could drop your child at school, walk into a grocery store, or pull into a church parking lot without any way of knowing whether the camera over that lot is one of the 716 the Sheriff’s Office can already pull up — or one of the 1,400-plus it has mapped and asked to add. You never signed up. The business did.

What we still don’t know — and what we’re asking

The public site gives numbers and reassurances. It does not give the documents. We do not have the county’s Axon Fusus contract, the FususONE and CORE purchase records, the list of integrated cameras, the data-sharing MOUs, the retention terms, or the AI/analytics configuration — none of which has ever been produced or debated in open session. And cameras are only one layer: New Hanover agencies also participate in LInX, a cross-agency law-enforcement records warehouse founded by the Navy’s NCIS and now governed by the state’s Criminal Justice Information Network — a reminder that the data-sharing plumbing runs wider than any single camera map. So we are asking the Sheriff’s Office for all of it, the same way we asked for the Flock records: in writing, on the record. We have also asked the Office to explain why it chose this platform and how it is used, and we will publish its response in full — if any of the safeguards above turn out to be legally binding, we will say so plainly.

But understand the ask underneath the records request. The problem is not that this network is badly run, and it is not that a court has called it illegal — none has. The problem is that a second, larger, AI-assisted camera network was built over the public’s head — no vote, no hearing, no ordinance — and is still growing. And here is the part that should bother everyone: when a business signs up to share its feed, the business consented — the people walking and driving past its cameras never did. Transparency is the floor. The real question is the one the commissioners have never allowed a vote on: does New Hanover County want a standing, government-run, AI-driven surveillance layer stitched from its neighbors’ cameras — at all? The county functioned without a 2,147-camera watch layer a few years ago. It can again.

And the connected ask: pause the Flock renewal until New Hanover County publicly debates its entire surveillance architecture — Flock, Fusus, the private cameras, the AI, and the Wilmington STING Center — not one vendor at a time.

Join the 3,614+ residents who’ve signed Ask the commissioners these questions →

Figures and quotations are drawn from the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office’s own public program pages at connectnewhanoversheriff.org (Home, Camera Integration, and Privacy FAQs), captured August 24–25, 2026; the platform is Axon Fusus, © 2025 Axon Enterprise, Inc. We describe the Sheriff’s Office’s own stated safeguards accurately and take them at face value; this article is general information for public discussion, not legal advice, and alleges no misuse. Camera counts are the program’s own live tallies and change over time. Corrections: mark@deflockilm.org. First published August 25, 2026.