Two Watauga County Agencies Turned Off Nationwide Flock Sharing. New Hanover Won’t.

The single most important fact about a Flock camera is not how many plates it reads. It is who can search it. A camera set to share “nationwide” is not a local tool — it is one node in a coast-to-coast network that thousands of agencies, including federal ones, can query without ever telling the town that owns it. This year, two public agencies in Watauga County proved that setting can be turned off. New Hanover County has been asked to turn it off too, and has refused.

Appalachian State: 1.5 million searches, then the plug

DeFlockILM filed public-records requests with the UNC System campuses to see how each handles Flock. Appalachian State University‘s answer was stark. Over three months this spring, App State’s campus cameras were searched roughly 1.5 million times by 3,487 different agencies — and only about 15% of those searches came from within North Carolina. The single busiest searcher of a Boone university’s cameras was not a Watauga agency. It was the Houston Police Department, which ran 177,461 searches in three months. (The Watauga Democrat independently reviewed the same records; our full App State audit is here.)

None of that was visible on App State’s public transparency portal. This is the point that matters for every county, including ours: Flock generates two kinds of report. An Organization Audit lists only the searches an agency’s own officers ran. A Network Audit lists every outside agency that searched the cameras. The public portals show the first and hide the second — making a camera’s true reach look a fraction of its actual size. The 1.5 million searches surfaced only because someone asked for the network audit in a records request.

Then App State did the thing that counts. In early August, the university cut off national sharing. Its police department now allows only the SBI and local Watauga County law enforcement to search the campus cameras. A senior university official cited “nationwide privacy concerns.” The setting that let Houston reach into Boone was switched off — by administrative decision, in the space of a summer.

Boone: a Town Council resolution, then 1,000+ agencies cut to 41

The Town of Boone went further, and did it the way a democracy is supposed to. On May 13, 2026, the Boone Town Council passed a Flock transparency resolution. Acting on it, the Boone Police Department cut off data sharing with more than 1,000 agencies — including every federal agency — and limited access to North Carolina departments and agencies within 50 miles that had an existing working relationship. Then it cut further still: to 41 agencies as of August 20.

Boone’s chief, Daniel Duckworth, also described the safeguards New Hanover’s Sheriff has declined to adopt: every search must carry a case number and a description tying it to a specific investigation, and a records officer runs a quarterly audit that spot-checks ten randomly selected officers. Duckworth was candid about why this is happening now: “The technology was rolled out quickly, and law-enforcement agencies did not do a great job from the beginning developing comprehensive policies and procedures before allowing broad access to the system.” He added that he is “very open to having a conversation with the public about what responsible use of this technology should look like.”

Read those two Watauga County stories together. A university and a town council — different institutions, different mechanisms — both reached the same conclusion this year and narrowed their sharing from the whole country to their own corner of one state. One did it by administrative decision; the other by a public vote its police department then carried out. Both are proof the “nationwide” setting is a choice, not a fact of nature.

New Hanover was asked. On the record. On August 17.

Now bring it home. On August 17, 2026, at the New Hanover County Commissioners meeting, DeFlockILM asked the Board to do exactly what App State and Boone have since done: pause the county’s nationwide data sharing, release the audit naming who searches its cameras, and hold a public hearing before any further funding.

The county’s answer, so far, is the opposite of Watauga’s. In his written answers to Commissioner Stephanie Walker, Sheriff McMahon confirmed the New Hanover network is shared with six federal agencies — including the FBI — that searches require only a “purpose code,” not a case number (the very safeguard Boone requires), that no one outside his office reviews the audit logs, and that the office will keep redacting the name of every searching agency. The county’s own audit shows its network was queried 2,980,082 times, with the searching agencies hidden — the field App State and Kure Beach both released.

The contrast is no longer theoretical. When New Hanover says nationwide sharing is just how the system works, a university one mountain range away and the town around it have already answered: it is a switch, and you can turn it off. Boone shows that a governing board can direct its police on Flock by resolution — there, a transparency resolution the department then carried out by cutting nationwide sharing. DeFlockILM’s model resolution for New Hanover goes further: it asks the Board to cancel the Flock contract outright and remove the cameras. But even the narrower Boone step — simply ending nationwide sharing — is a choice the Commissioners could make today. Either way, the county has a live decision in front of it when it next returns to the Flock contract.

Seven agencies have named the searchers. New Hanover redacts every one.

App State and Boone are not outliers, and neither is the record they released. The searching-agency field — the single line that shows who is really reaching into a community’s cameras — has now been produced to DeFlockILM by at least seven North Carolina law-enforcement agencies: Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, NC A&T State University Police, UNC Pembroke, UNC Charlotte, the Whiteville Police Department, and now Appalachian State. Buncombe County released the same field as well. Every one of them named the outside agencies while still protecting individual officers and plate numbers. It is a routine export, produced on request, up and down the state.

New Hanover County alone insists it cannot be done. Sheriff McMahon has confirmed in writing that his office will keep redacting the name of every searching agency (his answers, in full), and his “transparency portal” publishes only the Organization Audit — the count of the office’s own searches — while omitting the Network Audit that would show the thousands of outside queries. That is the exact sleight-of-hand App State’s records exposed, and we fact-checked the county’s portal against it.

And the gap is wider than one field. UNC Wilmington — New Hanover County’s own university — has now answered, and to its credit runs no Flock cameras (records show it trialed a different vendor’s ALPR system, KNC’s ‘Cloudrunner,’ on a free demo that ended in June 2026). But across the county, other ALPR public-records requests still sit unanswered — the Columbus County Sheriff most conspicuously — and the Sheriff who runs the county’s own network still redacts the one field that would end the argument.

Which leaves an uncomfortable question for a coastal county that prides itself on good government. Watauga County is rural, conservative mountain country. Its town council and its university looked at the same technology and chose transparency — a public resolution, a case-number rule, an audit, and a decision to stop feeding the national network. Why does a conservative community in the mountains act with more transparency than New Hanover County?

App State turned it off. Boone voted to turn it off. New Hanover was asked to turn it off five weeks ago. The only question left is why our county’s cameras are still open to Houston.

Sources

• Moss Brennan, “App State’s Flock cameras searched 1.5 million times over three months before university cut national access,” Watauga Democrat, Aug. 26, 2026 (App State and Boone figures, Chief Duckworth and App State PR statements, the May 13, 2026 Boone Town Council transparency resolution).
• DeFlockILM — the App State audit in full · who is searching North Carolina’s Flock cameras · the New Hanover Sheriff’s written answers · the model resolution · the 2,980,082-search county audit.

General information for public discussion, not legal advice. App State and Boone figures are drawn from the Watauga Democrat’s Aug. 26, 2026 report and the underlying Flock audit records DeFlockILM obtained by public-records request. Corrections: mark@deflockilm.org. First published August 27, 2026.