The Contract, Line by Line
We obtained New Hanover County’s entire Flock Safety contract and read all 82 pages. Here is exactly what the county bought, in the contract’s own words — including the eight live-video cameras the public reporting and the AI chatbots keep missing.
Most of what’s said about this program second-hand is close but wrong. So here is the source itself: the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office Flock Safety agreement, Contract #25-0364, in plain English with the exact page citations, and the full PDF to download at the end. Every number below is taken directly from the signed Order Form (Exhibit A).
The county’s Flock contract buys twenty license plate readers and eight “Solar Condor PTZ” live-video cameras — for a $219,000 total, on a 24-month term, with a 30-day retention period.
Source: New Hanover County SO / Flock Safety Order Form (Exhibit A), Contract #25-0364, p. 2. DeFlockILM.org.
What the county actually bought
| Line item | Qty | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety Falcon® | 17 | Fixed automated license plate readers (ALPR) with “Vehicle Fingerprint” recognition. |
| Solar Falcon® LR | 3 | Long-range, solar-powered plate readers (no wired power/internet needed). |
| Solar Condor PTZ | 8 | Live-video pan-tilt-zoom cameras with dual lenses and AI “Visual Alerts.” These are not plate readers — they watch, zoom, and track. |
| FlockOS — Essentials | 1 | The software platform: search, alerts, and the nationwide lookup network. |
The money (p. 2, p. 4): Year 1 subtotal $119,000 (invoiced at signing) plus $100,000 annual recurring, for a Contract Total of $219,000 after a $12,300 discount and $15,330 estimated tax. Term: 24 months, with a 24-month renewal. Retention Period: 30 days.
Yes — there are eight live-video cameras
This is the part the news coverage and the AI chatbots keep getting wrong. The contract doesn’t just buy plate readers. Under “Flock Safety Video Products,” the Order Form lists eight Solar Condor PTZ cameras (p. 2), and the contract describes them plainly (pp. 5, 59):
“Solar Condor PTZ — Solar-powered PTZ camera with dual lenses.” … “Flock Safety Condor live video is a subscription-based… hardware solution… With Condor’s high-resolution live and recorded footage, coupled with AI enhancements… Condor video is AI-enabled with Visual Alerts. Visual Alerts identify and match suspect vehicles across your entire camera network based on visual similarity.”
In plain terms: a Condor is a networked, always-on video camera that pans, tilts, zooms, records, and uses AI to find and follow vehicles by how they look — the same kind of live-video Flock camera that, elsewhere, was found streaming a children’s playground on the open internet. New Hanover County has eight of them. We photographed one on Castle Hayne Road on July 3.
The 30-day retention promise has an asterisk
Officials point to the contract’s 30-day retention period. But read Section 4.4, “Data Distribution” (p. 13). When data is shared with a third-party “Recipient,” the county grants Flock a very different license:
“Customer hereby grants to Flock a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free, perpetual license to access, share, view, record, duplicate, store, save, reproduce, modify, display, and distribute Customer Data… Customer acknowledges that such data may be… retained by Recipient for a period longer than Flock’s standard retention period and hereby provides consent to such retention period.”
What it means: the 30 days binds the county’s own copy. Once a plate read or a vehicle record is shared out to another agency on the network, the contract says it can be kept longer than 30 days — and the county consented to that in advance. A retention limit you can share your way around is not much of a limit.
Who owns the data
To be fair and exact: the contract says the county owns its data and that “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data” (§ 4.1), nor Anonymized Data (§ 4.3). But the same sections grant Flock a “limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, worldwide license” to use that data, plus the perpetual distribution license above. Ownership on paper, and a broad, lasting license in practice, are not the same thing. (Note: the ACLU documented in 2026 that Flock removed its former “won’t sell” language from its master terms elsewhere — worth watching at renewal.)
What the AI chatbots get wrong — and why it matters
Ask ChatGPT or Gemini about surveillance cameras in New Hanover County and you’ll be told there are “no Condor cameras,” only plate readers — or, in Gemini’s case, “a video camera and a mobile unit.” The Order Form says eight Condor cameras, twenty plate readers, and no mobile unit. The models aren’t lying; they’re repeating the public reporting, which framed this as “ALPR” and never counted the video cameras — because the detail lives in a contract the county doesn’t advertise and whose camera locations it redacts. That’s the whole point of this page: the primary document is the correction. The county even put “8 PTZ cameras” in its own public Request for Proposals.
Read it yourself
We show our work. Here is the complete, unredacted 82-page contract as the county produced it: download the full Flock Safety contract (#25-0364, PDF). Read the Order Form on page 2, the data clauses on pages 12–13, and the Condor spec sheet on pages 59–60, and check every number above for yourself.
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