Pender Taxpayers Are Funding a Spy Network — for Texas.

Here is what the paper says, plainly. The taxpayers of Pender County — the farmers and families along US-17 and NC-53, the folks in Atkinson who just voted to ban these cameras outright, everyone who pays a county tax bill — are footing the cost of a Flock plate-reader network. And the county’s own records show who actually uses it: not Pender. Over a single three-month stretch this summer, the cameras Pender residents pay for were searched 2,101,548 times — and about nine of every ten of those searches came from outside North Carolina. A rural county of 63,000 people is running, on the public’s dime, a search node for the nation.

Sit with the Atkinson piece of that for a second. The people of Atkinson looked at these cameras and said no — the first town in the state to ban automated license plate readers. And they are still paying, through their county taxes, for the Sheriff’s county-wide network that does the very thing they rejected. They voted it out of their town and are billed for it anyway.

That is the finding from the Flock Network Audit the Pender County Sheriff’s Office produced on October 15, 2026 — the inbound access log naming which outside agencies reached into Pender’s cameras. The Office had first produced this audit with the searching-agency names redacted; after we pressed, it released the names. Here is what they show, for June 1 through August 26, 2026.

2,101,548 searches, 3,591 agencies, and a 94% out-of-state tilt

In those three months, 3,591 different law-enforcement agencies ran searches that reached Pender’s cameras. Of those agencies, 3,386 — about 94% — are outside North Carolina. Counted by searches rather than agencies, roughly nine of every ten came from out of state. 423 agencies ran a thousand or more searches each. A single search reached as many as 7,143 camera networks at once.

The heaviest users are not Pender’s neighbors. They are, in order: the Louisville Metro, Kentucky Police Department (43,533 searches), the Texas Department of Public Safety (38,857), Hillsborough County, Florida (38,842), the Jacksonville, Florida Sheriff’s Office (34,021), Broward County, Florida (27,922), Atlanta (27,488), Palm Beach County, Florida (27,396), and the Houston, Texas Police Department (25,733) — the same out-of-state department that tops the UNC Charlotte and UNC-Chapel Hill audits. The busiest North Carolina searcher, the SBI, ran 11,683 — barely a quarter of Louisville’s total.

One honest clarification, because it matters: these agencies did not necessarily single out Pender. A single Flock query can sweep thousands of camera networks at once, so Louisville appears here because its searches included Pender’s cameras — not because an officer in Kentucky set out to watch Pender County. That is the design, and it is the point: cameras a small North Carolina county put on its own roads spent the summer answering queries run a thousand miles away, automatically, with no request to Pender and no way for anyone here to see them until we pried the log loose.

What they were searching for

The audit records a reason for each search, chosen from Flock’s own menu. The most common were Drugs/Narcotics (120,840), Wanted Person / fugitive (111,292), Motor-Vehicle Theft (91,162), and Traffic Infraction (83,346). That fourth one is worth pausing on. North Carolina law, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b), provides that ALPR data may not be used for ordinary traffic enforcement. The bar governs North Carolina agencies’ use of this data; it does not reach a Texas trooper’s menu choice. But it is a measure of what a “public safety” network is actually used for — and a reminder that when Pender’s own deputies coded a comparable share of their searches “Traffic Infraction,” that is the use the statute forbids.

Who built it, and who it serves

Set aside every abstract worry about surveillance and look only at the ledger. The Sheriff’s Office put these cameras on the county’s roads, and the Board of Commissioners pays the bill out of county taxes. They told residents the system was for local public safety. Its own access log says the cameras’ daily working life is as a free search node for police departments in Texas, Kentucky, Florida, and Georgia — agencies that answer to no one in Pender County, under rules no one here wrote, searching for reasons the county cannot audit. The cameras sit on US-17, US-421, NC-210, and NC-53 — the arterials that carry Pender residents in and out of the county seat, Burgaw. So when the Texas Department of Public Safety runs a plate, its search can sweep in the cars moving through a town of four thousand people on the North Carolina coastal plain — and nobody in Burgaw ever gets to see it, or say no. North Carolina law bars selling this data; it does nothing to stop a sheriff from giving away access to three thousand outside agencies for free. And those guardrails stop at the state line. North Carolina’s no-sale rule binds North Carolina agencies — not the Texas, Florida, or Kentucky departments now searching Pender’s cameras, many of whose states place no comparable bar on selling or commercially reusing plate data. That is not hypothetical: a Texas broker has already resold North Carolina plate data back into the state. Once Pender’s data crosses into a system Pender does not control, North Carolina’s protections travel with it exactly as far as the county line.

There is a particular irony in how this was defended. When residents raised privacy concerns, Board Chairman Randy Burton held up his own cell phone from the dais and said (video): “this right here that is in every person’s pocket in this room, I can guarantee you, captures more information and gives [it] to Russia and China than a Flock camera will ever give anyone in this country … it’s listening right now. I can open up Google and it will say something about Flock cameras tonight.” Set that deflection beside the record he was defending. The cameras he brushed those worries aside to keep are, by the county’s own audit, sending Pender’s plate data to Houston, Texas — and to Louisville, and to half of Florida. The Chairman held up a phone and pointed at Russia and China to change the subject; the paperwork points at Houston. And the difference is the whole argument: the phone is one a resident chose to carry, while the camera is a government system the resident is forced to pay for and never agreed to.

We credit the Sheriff’s Office for one thing: after redacting the agency names, it reconsidered and produced them — the record that makes this story checkable. That is more than New Hanover has done with its own 2.98-million-row audit, where the searching agency is still blacked out on every line. But the plain fact remains: the hard-working people of Pender County, Atkinson included, are paying their taxes so that a sheriff and a county board can run a nationwide spy network on their behalf — one whose busiest customer is a state trooper in Texas, watching the comings and goings on the roads through Burgaw. That is not a service the people of Pender asked for, and it is past time their commissioners explained why they are buying it.

The complete, unredacted Network Audit (three monthly CSV files) is mirrored at the Internet Archive so anyone can check these counts. Plate numbers and individual officer names were redacted by the Sheriff’s Office before production; the files name the searching agency, not any person. Our earlier reporting on Pender’s cameras, costs, and camera locations is here.