Two Sheriffs, One Week: Why You Only Hear About Flock Misuse When Charges Are Filed

On September 1, 2026, the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it had referred one of its own to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation after a routine audit of Flock activity flagged alleged misuse of the agency’s plate readers. The employee resigned. Sheriff Brian Chism disclosed the matter himself, in a public video statement. Asked about it, our founder, Rice Law attorney Mark Williams, credited the sheriff and then named the problem out loud (WWAY, Sept 2): “My read of the law is, he was not required to do that, and that’s part of the problem — if you misuse the system within law enforcement, nobody knows. Usually the only way we know is if criminal charges are filed.”

That sentence is the whole subject of this piece. Brunswick is not the worrying part — a sheriff who runs an audit, acts on it, hands the matter to an outside agency, and then tells the public is doing it right. The worrying part is everything that has to go right for you to hear about a case like this at all. (The full case: a Flock misuse case in Brunswick County, caught by an audit.)

Every North Carolina case we can name surfaced the same way

Look at how misuse actually comes to light. Not a warning light, not a blocked search — a human reading the log after the fact. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer charged in July; the Mooresville officer who ran the system 31 times to track a private citizen; and now Brunswick. In each, an audit caught the conduct after it happened, and the public learned of it only because the audit was followed by a referral, a charge, or a sheriff willing to speak. The plate-reader network does not prevent misuse. At best it records it — and whether anyone outside the agency ever sees that record is a separate question entirely. (We keep the running list on our North Carolina Flock misuse tracker.)

The sheriff next door stated the rule out loud

This is not a theory about how agencies behave. Fifty miles east of Brunswick, New Hanover County Commissioner Stephanie Walker asked Sheriff Ed McMahon whether confirmed misuse would be reported to the Board and the public or only reviewed internally. He pointed to personnel-confidentiality law and drew the line himself, at criminal charges:

“If a deputy or other employee were to misuse the system in a manner that resulted in criminal charges, that criminal matter would be a public record… We will not use personnel confidentiality laws as a means of concealing criminal conduct.”

We take him at his word on criminal conduct. But read what the sentence draws its line around. The public record he promises is triggered by a criminal charge. Misuse that never becomes a charge — a search run out of curiosity, a favor for a friend, a look at an ex — is exactly the category personnel confidentiality keeps sealed. By the sheriff’s own account, unless a search becomes a crime, you will not hear that it happened. Two sheriffs, one week: the one who volunteered the story is the exception; the one who defined the limit is the rule. And a rule that leaves disclosure to each sheriff’s discretion is only ever as safe as the worst person who will ever hold the office — which is the whole problem. His own office already shows how misconduct claims resolve here: New Hanover County records reveal that the Sheriff’s Office has paid roughly $108,000 to settle at least six civil-rights suits against Sheriff McMahon and his deputies — three of them jail cases, including an alleged assault inside the New Hanover County Detention Center — each paid by insurance, each denying liability, and not one requiring a criminal charge. The public learned of those payouts the same way it learns of camera misuse: not from a criminal case, but from a records request. (His full answers: the Sheriff answered, and the answers confirm the problem.)

Why a criminal charge is the only reliable trigger

Three doors normally keep these cases dark, and a criminal charge is the one thing that opens all three at once. Personnel law seals the discipline — an officer’s internal reprimand, suspension, or even firing is confidential under North Carolina’s personnel-privacy statutes (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 160A-168 for cities, § 153A-98 for counties); handled purely as a personnel matter, misuse can end in a quiet resignation and never be described. The audit that caught it is the record agencies fight hardest to withhold — the Flock Organization and Network Audit shows who searched, when, and why, yet New Hanover produced its 2.98-million-row search audit with the searching agency blacked out on every line, and Wrightsville Beach has argued the audit is unavailable at all. And an open investigation is exempt under § 132-1.4 while it is active. A criminal charge blows through all three: it is a public court record, filed in the person’s name, that has to describe the conduct — most often felony illegal access of a government computer under § 14-454. Absent that charge — or a sheriff who volunteers the story — the public typically gets nothing.

The oversight the statute requires is thin — and the portals do not fill it

You might expect a system this powerful to carry real oversight. It does not. North Carolina’s ALPR statute, § 20-183.31, requires only that an agency’s written policy provide for auditing — “annually or more frequently” — reported to the head of that same agency. No independent auditor. No public report. No duty to notify the person whose plate was misused. The agency audits itself and reports to itself. Agencies answer that the public “transparency portal” closes the gap — so we tested that, reading every downloadable North Carolina portal audit, 26 agencies. They publish the wrong tenth of the system: each shows an agency searching out, none shows who is searching in, 41% of the searches state no reason at all, and the barred “Traffic Infraction” uses that do appear will never produce a charge. A portal is not the audit that matters.

So the cases we can count are a floor, not a ceiling

Put those facts together — misuse is visible only through self-audits, and disclosure is essentially voluntary unless a charge is filed — and one conclusion follows. The misuse we can name is a floor. We see the cases that produced a public charge or a voluntary disclosure. We cannot see the ones resolved quietly as personnel matters, the ones an audit was never run to catch, or the ones an agency reviewed and chose not to refer. When the safeguard is “we audit ourselves and tell you if we decide to,” the true rate of misuse is not low — it is unknowable. Every documented case is evidence that the machinery can fail, not evidence that failure is rare.

The fix is the record itself

The remedy is not exotic. The very record that caught the Brunswick employee — the audit — is the record that would let the public see misuse without waiting on a prosecutor. Treat the Organization and Network Audit as the public record it already is under Chapter 132; agencies redact and withhold it, but the statute does not require that. Require independent, public audit reporting — a review the agency does not simply write to itself. And notify people whose plates were accessed outside a legitimate law-enforcement purpose. Until those exist, prying loose that one record, agency by agency, is much of what our public-records work is for — because the audit, made public, is what turns “trust us” into “show us.”

Credit Brunswick again: it disclosed a case it could have buried. The lesson is not that one county is uniquely troubled. It is that no resident should have to depend on a sheriff’s goodwill or a district attorney’s charging decision to learn how a surveillance system trained on their own street is actually being used.

Sources: Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office statement by Sheriff Brian Chism (Sept. 1, 2026) and Mark Williams interview, as reported by WWAY (Sept. 2, 2026); New Hanover County Sheriff Ed McMahon’s written answers to Commissioner Stephanie Walker (WHQR, Aug. 23, 2026; WECT, Aug. 25, 2026); N.C. Gen. Stat. §§ 20-183.31, 14-454, 132-1.4, 160A-168, and 153A-98; prior North Carolina Flock-misuse cases (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Mooresville, Brunswick). Allegations are not findings; no charge has been filed in the Brunswick matter, and any former employee is presumed innocent. This article is general information about North Carolina law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship; consult a licensed North Carolina attorney about any specific situation.