A Public Park Is Not a Suspect Line-Up. Take the Flock Condors Down.

A free country does not treat everyone as a suspect

Start with the principle, because everything else follows from it. You are presumed innocent — and that is not only a rule for the courtroom. It is a posture the government is supposed to keep toward you: it leaves law-abiding people alone, rather than watching, following, or studying their movements because it can. A camera a government operator can train on anyone in a public park, aim, and zoom in on turns that posture inside out. It treats every person in the park as a potential suspect — the jogger, the family at a birthday party, the kid at soccer practice — none of whom has done anything wrong.

That is the objection to the eight Flock “Condor” cameras still running in New Hanover County parks. It is not that the rules around them are too loose, or that someone has already misused them. It is that directed government surveillance of people who are doing nothing wrong is itself the harm — whether or not anyone ever abuses it. A free society does not put its residents under continuous, steerable observation and call it safety.

What these cameras are

These are not plate readers on a highway. They are remotely controlled live-video cameras: a government operator can change where the camera looks and what it magnifies, in real time. The county’s own Chief Financial Officer confirmed the Condors were left running in county parks when the Board canceled the plate readers. Flock markets its PTZ cameras with remote controls and a video platform that offers people-detection alerts, searchable footage, and sharing (its own product page); the county should say which of those features are switched on here. But the core point does not depend on the answer. A steerable camera pointed at a public park exists to watch people — and the people it watches have been accused of nothing.

Built to find and track people — by face, by race, by what they believe

A Condor is not a passive recorder. It feeds a platform Flock designed to find and follow specific people. Flock holds a U.S. patent — No. 11,416,545, signed by its own CEO — that describes tracking a named person across unrelated cameras and searching by face. And Flock’s plain-language “FreeForm” search lets an officer describe a person in ordinary words and pull matches from the network. The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office has already run 470 FreeForm searches.

What does “describe a person” mean in practice? At other agencies, officers have used FreeForm to search by race — one ran “non caucasion male,” and a search blocked for a race term was simply re-run without it seconds later — and by political affiliation: one agency searched “white jeep with trump flag” across 198 camera networks. A system that can be queried for a person’s race, or their politics, and then pointed at the public parks where people gather, is not a neutral safety tool. It is an instrument for sorting and tracking people who have done nothing wrong — which is the whole objection.

This Sheriff’s Office has already pointed Flock at a protest

This is not a hypothetical worry about what some future official might do. It is what this Sheriff’s Office has already done. On the morning of November 22, 2025 — hours before a protest outside its own doors — the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office ran four broad plate searches under a case its own system labeled “Protest,” with the reason entered as “Intel.” One of the plates searched matched a leader of that evening’s demonstration. Those were plate-reader searches — and the Condors are something more direct: live cameras an operator can point and zoom at the very people standing in a public space.

So ask the question the Board cannot wave away. This system lets police watch people who peacefully assemble in a park — a neighborhood group, a church gathering, a political campaign. A commissioner could hold a meeting of their own supporters at a county park, and the Sheriff’s Office could watch it on a live, zoomable feed and record it. Is that acceptable? The First Amendment protects the right to assemble and speak without the government compiling a record of who showed up. A steerable camera over the places people gather is built to compile exactly that record — and this office has already shown it will reach for surveillance when the subject is a protest.

Why are these cameras pointed at the ball fields — and who else can see the feed?

Residents have confirmed the Condors beside the county ball fields at Ogden Park, and at Veterans Park and Haven Place, overlooking the fields and recreation areas where children play. (Residents have located seven of the eight and mapped them — see what a Condor looks like and where they are.) That raises two questions the county should answer before October 19. First, why are government cameras trained on playgrounds and ball fields at all? Flock’s own marketing says a Condor can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk down a street, cross a parking lot, or “play on a playground” (Flock’s product page) — and the county should disclose whether that feature is switched on.

Second, what — in writing — stops these feeds from being watched by people who have no business watching them? In December 2025, 404 Media found at least 60 Flock Condor cameras live-streaming to the open internet: anyone could view the feeds, download 30 days of archived video, and in many cases change the settings, with no password at all (a reporter confirmed it by watching himself on a feed in Bakersfield, California). Those are the same cameras New Hanover County has pointed at its parks. If 60 of them could be streamed to the world once, the county owes residents a straight answer about the eight over our ball fields — or it should simply take them down. (404 Media, Dec. 2025.)

Where does the video go? The county won’t say.

The Condors do not sit on an island. They feed New Hanover County’s Fusus real-time crime center — a platform built to share camera feeds across agencies, which the county already owns and operates. The federal framework pulls the same way. Federal law, 6 U.S.C. § 124h, directs the Department of Homeland Security to take in and incorporate information gathered by state “fusion centers.” North Carolina’s fusion center is NCISAAC, run by the State Bureau of Investigation. And New Hanover has signed a HIDTA data-sharing agreement (effective March 2025) that feeds a three-state database whose governing board includes federal agencies. The pipe is built, the software is installed, and the federal data-sharing agreements are signed.

So we asked the one question that matters: does the county’s real-time-center video flow to NCISAAC, DHS, ICE, CBP, or the FBI? The county refused to answer. When a government builds the pipeline, buys the software, signs the federal data-sharing deals, and then won’t tell parents whether their children’s park video is going to Washington, residents are entitled to assume the worst — and the county has no one to blame but itself. If the answer is no, the Board can say so in a single sentence on October 19. It has not. Until it does, we do not know where our children’s park video goes — and a county that cannot answer that question has no business keeping the cameras up.

The Board already acted on this principle once

On September 8, the Commissioners voted 4–0 to cancel the county’s stationary Flock license-plate readers, recognizing that logging the movements of ordinary, law-abiding drivers was more than a free community should accept. That judgment was right. The Condors raise the same objection, only more directly: a plate reader records a car passing a point; a Condor lets an operator follow a person across a park. If it was wrong to treat every driver as a suspect, it is wrong to treat every park visitor as one. The principle the Board applied at the roadside should not stop at the roadside.

There is also a trust problem the Board should not ignore. On September 8, the Sheriff’s Office told WWAY it was ending its access to the Flock camera system — and the public reasonably understood the whole contract was canceled. One week later, the office told Port City Daily it “will continue using Condor cameras for video.” What was announced as ending Flock quietly narrowed to ending only the plate readers, while the Condors — which run on Flock’s own platform — stayed on. A commissioner has since acknowledged the resulting “misconception the whole contract was canceled.” Saying a program is over and then keeping the most intrusive part of it running is not how an agency earns the public’s confidence. It is how an agency loses it. We traced that reversal in detail here.

Some of these cameras may not even be lawfully placed. Several of the Condors sit in the state right-of-way, and Flock never obtained the NCDOT encroachment agreements the law requires. NCDOT said so in writing and named the consequence itself: a device placed in the right-of-way without approval “may be in violation of GS 136-18(10).” Sit with the double standard. A homeowner cannot put up a shed, a fence, or a driveway in the public right-of-way without a permit and an inspection — but a private surveillance company mounted pan-tilt-zoom cameras there with neither. If the rest of us cannot build without a permit, the county should not keep running cameras that were never permitted. We asked the Department to enforce it.

“It might help” is not the standard

The strongest argument for keeping the cameras is that the footage could someday help solve a crime, find a missing person, or manage an emergency. Take it seriously — and then be honest about where it leads. Yes, watching everyone catches some wrongdoers. It always has. A government that watched every person, everywhere, all the time would catch more still. That is exactly why “it might help” cannot be the test: by that logic there is no camera a county could ever refuse. Effectiveness was never the question. The question is whether a free people should be watched by default in the places they gather — and the answer a free country gives is no.

So the burden belongs on the government, not the resident. Residents should not have to prove the cameras have been abused, or explain why being watched makes them uneasy. The county should have to justify why it needs to keep innocent people under directed observation in a public park at all — and “it could be useful” is not a justification. It is an excuse that fits every camera ever sold.

Remove the cameras — don’t just rename the debate

Commissioners do not need to declare every security camera unacceptable to reject these eight Flock Condors. They need only conclude that remotely controlled surveillance of public parks has not earned its place as a routine county service. We ask the Board, on Monday, October 19, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. (New Hanover County Historic Courthouse, 24 North Third Street, Room 301), to:

1. Direct staff to end the Condor portion of the Flock arrangement through the applicable contractual process, and disable live access.

2. Arrange removal of the equipment from county parks.

3. Preserve any records needed for lawful evidence retention and public accountability.

4. Publish the termination terms and the financial reconciliation — including the $53,571.43 refund the county has already requested.

Any future proposal for comparable park surveillance should return as a separate public decision — with a documented need, alternatives, costs, and explicit limits — not continue by default because it survived a vote about a different product. The September decision established that public-safety technology must answer to the public. Apply that principle in our parks. Take the Condors down. (A model resolution is here.)

You do not have to be doing anything wrong to be watched by these cameras. That is the problem. In a free country, the government does not treat everyone as a suspect — least of all in a public park.

Sources

• New Hanover County Board of Commissioners, 4–0 vote to cancel the county’s stationary Flock license-plate readers (Sept. 8, 2026). WHQR · our account.
• The eight Condor cameras were excluded from that cancellation and remain active in county parks; the county’s $53,571.43 refund is still pending. WECT Investigates · details.
• Flock Safety video-camera product page, describing PTZ remote controls, a video platform with people-detection, searchable footage, and sharing, and automatic face-zoom as people walk, drive, or “play on a playground”: flocksafety.com. Which features are enabled on the county’s park cameras is for the county to disclose.
• New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office plate searches logged under a case the office labeled “Protest,” reason “Intel,” the morning of Nov. 22, 2025, one matching a demonstration organizer (the documented case).
• 404 Media, “Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet” (Dec. 2025): at least 60 Flock Condor PTZ cameras found live-streaming to the open internet, viewable and controllable without a password. 404media.co.
• Flock’s U.S. Patent No. 11,416,545 B1 (CEO Garrett Langley, inventor), describing tracking a named person across cameras and searching by face (the patent); Flock’s plain-language “FreeForm” person-description search, run 470 times by NHCSO, and used at other agencies to search by race and by political symbol (FreeForm, documented).
• Federal pathway: 6 U.S.C. § 124h (DHS incorporation of state fusion-center information); NC’s NCISAAC fusion center, run by the SBI (NC surveillance infrastructure); New Hanover’s HIDTA data-sharing agreement, effective March 2025 (where the data goes). The county withheld its answer on whether real-time-center data flows to those agencies; we do not claim the Condor video has, only that the pathway exists and the county will not map it.

General information for public discussion, not legal advice. Facts are drawn from New Hanover County’s public meetings and records and the sources cited above; which Flock camera features are enabled on the county’s park cameras is for the county to disclose. Confirm the meeting date, time, and room on the County’s published agenda before attending. Corrections: mark@deflockilm.org. First published October 13, 2026.