Build the Database and It Will Be Abused

Every argument for Flock cameras assumes the people searching the database are honest. Here is what the record shows happens when they aren’t — and who catches them.

The Institute for Justice has documented at least 21 cases through June 30, 2026 — with at least 6 more reported in the two weeks since (5 Georgia officers, 1 in Milwaukee) — of officers using license-plate readers to stalk romantic interests — a tally it updated in June 2026 and calls almost certainly an undercount. An Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate at least 69 times — and her mother’s 24 times, and her father’s 15 — before he was arrested. Sedgwick, Kansas police chief Lee Nygaard used Flock to search for his ex-girlfriend 164 times — 228 searches counting her new boyfriend, over four months in 2023. In February 2026, prosecutors charged a Milwaukee officer who ran 179 searches in two months tracking a woman he was dating. In July 2026 a second Milwaukee officer was charged — Detective Tehrangi Chapman, the internal-affairs investigator who had worked the first officer’s case — accused of running about 20 unauthorized searches of his own over six years. The department could not trust the man it assigned to watch the watchers. (FOX 11.) And it isn’t only Flock: in July 2026, 404 Media published cruiser video of a Florida Keys deputy who met a woman on a TV set, ran her through police databases, put her plate on an ALPR hotlist (using a Flock competitor, Guardian), got a real-time ping when she drove past a camera, and chased her down at 70 mph — nearly causing a head-on collision. She was suspected of nothing. The abuse follows the technology, not the brand. (404 Media.)

The detail that should worry you most

Almost none of these cases were caught by the system’s own safeguards. They surfaced because victims noticed — an ex who kept appearing where she’d just driven, a colleague who saw the searches happen. The audit logs Flock points to as accountability recorded every abusive search faithfully, and flagged none of them. An audit log nobody reviews is not a safeguard. It is a diary of abuse, read only after the harm.

Now look at our county’s audit

New Hanover County’s Flock network was searched roughly 2.98 million times in sixteen months. When we obtained the audit through a public-records request, the county redacted the name of every searching agency and every officer. And consider how rarely anyone even looks: the Sheriff’s own written policy commits the office to auditing its license-plate-reader use only once a year — and to auditing itself (New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office SOP 222, § 222.4(A)(9)). A Kansas police chief ran more than 200 stalking searches before a victim noticed. An annual, self-conducted audit would give that same pattern up to twelve months to run here before the office that operates the cameras got around to checking its own work. And there is a deeper problem with even that once-a-year look: the field any reviewer would lean on — the reason each officer types for a search — is self-entered, and the Sheriff’s Office has already told WECT that its own Flock “traffic infraction” codes were simply “mislabeled.” If the labels can be wrong, then reading the labels is not oversight at all — which makes us more concerned, not less, about how this system is actually used in North Carolina. So ask the question this page forces: if a police chief in Kansas could run 200 stalking searches before anyone noticed, what exactly would catch the same behavior here — where the public isn’t even allowed to know who is searching? Not one wrongdoing is alleged; that is the point. Nobody can check. A database this powerful, with oversight this thin, doesn’t require bad intentions to produce abuse — it only requires time. See the record for yourself, then tell the commissioners to cancel it.