The New Hanover Sheriff Bought Facial Recognition

For weeks the answer to one question has been the same: do New Hanover’s cameras use facial recognition? The Sheriff’s answer, as WECT reported on August 10, 2026, from a July email to county leaders, was that the county’s system “does not use facial recognition,” is not used for traffic enforcement, and is not a live surveillance system. Every word of that can be true. It still is not the whole truth — because the county’s own purchasing records show the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office bought facial-recognition software of its own.

The document

In 2024 the Sheriff’s Office purchased Clearview AI — the facial-recognition company built on billions of photos scraped from social media without consent, the one an ACLU lawsuit and multiple state attorneys general have gone after. The county’s records show the product (“Clearview Search PRO”), the price ($12,995 per year, plus a $500 implementation fee), the paperwork (County Contract #24-0236, Purchase Order #20241713), the vendor path (procured through Carahsoft‘s federal contract), and the term (auto-renewing in one-year increments). This is not a free trial and not a leaked client list. It is a signed contract and a purchase order, on the county’s own letterhead. (The full records are on the Internet Archive and in our records hub.)

Read the county’s own words. The purchase order does not hedge: the line item is titled “NHCSO Facial Recognition Software” — the Sheriff’s Office naming it plainly — for 25 users, under a three-year contract dated September 25, 2023, not to exceed $39,485, with a non-appropriation clause the commissioners could invoke. The Sheriff’s Office has therefore held facial-recognition software since 2023 — the whole time this debate has been playing out.

The truth, and the whole truth

Sheriff McMahon told the truth — but not the whole truth. Flock’s platform does not run facial recognition; that part is accurate, and we have said so ourselves. But facial recognition was never a Flock camera feature — it is downstream software you feed an image to. And the Sheriff’s Office bought the downstream software. So “Flock doesn’t use facial recognition” answers a narrower question than the one residents are asking. The question was never whether the plate reader identifies faces. It is whether the office that runs the cameras can identify a face. The answer, on the county’s own paper, is yes.

How the pieces fit — the Benn Jordan demonstration

In December 2025, security researcher Benn Jordan showed, in reporting by 404 Media and IPVM, how Flock’s system could be made to hand over imagery that was then run through facial recognition — a live demonstration that the “Flock doesn’t do faces” line misses the point once images can be exported. New Hanover now holds every piece that demonstration required, in one office: eight Flock “Condor” live-video cameras and a 2,147-camera Fusus network that capture faces, Flock’s export/API that moves imagery to other systems, and Clearview to identify what comes out. We are careful here, and it matters: we have no evidence any camera image has been run through Clearview, and the county’s usage logs are exactly what our new records request seeks. What the contract proves is not that it happened — it is that the capability is no longer hypothetical and no longer elsewhere. It is owned, in-house, by the Sheriff.

And it isn’t only faces

The same records show the Sheriff’s Office also runs Pen-Link — software for analyzing phone records, call-detail data, and real-time geolocation, including a mobile app that maps a target’s location on iOS and Android. New Hanover has paid for it since 2021 (Contract #21-0081) and renewed it through 2026 (#26-0212). Plate readers track your car; Pen-Link tracks your phone; Clearview identifies your face. Three different kinds of tracking, one Sheriff’s Office, none of it put to a public vote.

New Hanover is not alone — facial recognition is already in the Cape Fear region

Down the road, the Carolina Beach Police Department — a New Hanover County town — holds an active Clearview license with unlimited searches. And in Fayetteville, records we obtained show the police department ran 3,013 Clearview facial-recognition searches between December 2019 and April 2021, 1,739 of them (57%) returning a matching face. Facial recognition in North Carolina is not a future risk to debate. It is a present fact to govern.

The deeper problem: no one is allowed to check

A facial-recognition contract would be less troubling if it came with oversight. It does not. Every tool on this list is audited only by the office that runs it. When commissioners pressed for answers, the Sheriff confirmed the reviews are internal — misuse stays sealed unless it becomes a crime, and no outside body audits the system. That is the trust problem in the office’s own words. The public-facing “transparency portal” is not transparent: it hides camera locations, undercounts the network, and cannot show the roughly nine-in-ten searches that come from outside North Carolina. The camera network itself was enrolled in a nationwide surveillance system without a public vote. And the structural flaw is the one we have written about before: an internal-only audit is only as trustworthy as the person holding the office — a system built for the best sheriff, when the law should be designed for the worst.

Set the transparency failure beside the capability and the picture is troubling. The public was told “no facial recognition” while the office quietly held a facial-recognition contract since 2023; the audits that might catch misuse are run by the same office that would answer for it; and the field that would show who is searching is redacted. The ethics of the profession call for candor and for independent oversight of exactly this kind of power — and here there is neither. It is not any single tool that should worry a resident. It is the combination: sweeping capability, assembled quietly, checked by no one outside the building.

Why this lands on September 21

Stack it up and the picture is complete: the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office runs Flock plate readers, a 2,147-camera Fusus network and real-time crime center, its own drone program (an Air Operations Unit federally cleared for drone-as-first-responder flights), Clearview facial recognition, and Pen-Link phone-location surveillance — assembled piece by piece, without a single public hearing on the whole. On September 21, the Board of Commissioners takes the Flock contract back up. They are the body that holds the money, and they are entitled to ask the question the “no facial recognition” answer was built to avoid: what, exactly, has this office bought to watch us with — and who reviews how it is used?

Sources: New Hanover County contracts and purchase orders for Clearview AI (Contract #24-0236; PO #20241713; Carahsoft PO #20250876) and Pen-Link (Contracts #21-0081 and #26-0212), obtained by public-records request and preserved on the Internet Archive; Sheriff McMahon’s July 2026 email to county leaders as reported by WECT (Aug. 10, 2026); 404 Media / IPVM reporting on the Benn Jordan Flock exposure (Dec. 2025); Fayetteville PD and Carolina Beach PD Clearview records. This page reports on documents; it does not allege that any specific image has been run through facial-recognition software, a question our pending records requests seek to answer.