The Officer Was Charged in Charlotte. Look What His Department Did to the Campus Across Town.

We asked the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for the records behind its Flock cameras — the contract, the policies, and the Network Audit, the log of every outside search that touches the campus’s cameras. On July 30, 2026, the University produced them: the executed Flock contract, an MOU with the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation, the police LPR directive, and three months of Network Audits (March, April, and May 2026). The whole file is mirrored at the Internet Archive. As with every campus, the University redacted the searcher’s name, the plate, and the stated reason — but not the searching agency. So we can see who reached into this public campus’s cameras, even if we cannot see which officer or why.

A campus searched more than a million times a month

The scale is hard to fathom. Each monthly Network Audit is so large it hits the maximum number of rows an Excel file can hold — 1,048,575 — and stops. Every one of the three months is truncated at exactly that ceiling, which means the real monthly totals are higher than the file can even show. (This is also why we asked for the reports in native CSV, which has no such limit; the University produced Excel. We’ve asked for the CSV.) Taken together, the three months record at least 3.1 million searches of one public university’s cameras — and the true figure is larger.

And it is not the campus doing the searching. UNC Charlotte’s own police account for a rounding error — about 228 searches across the entire quarter. The volume comes from roughly 3,300 outside agencies a month, overwhelmingly from other states. In each month the single heaviest searcher is Houston, Texas PD, which ran about 57,000 searches a month — roughly 173,000 lookups of a North Carolina campus’s cameras in a quarter, from thirteen hundred miles away.

The department with the charged officer

Here is where the two records meet. On July 29 the SBI charged Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer Seth Elliott with accessing a computer without authorization — querying a North Carolina plate through Flock and a state database for a non-law-enforcement purpose. CMPD owns no Flock cameras of its own; its officers reach other agencies’ cameras through a data-sharing agreement. And the university on the other side of the same city shows the result of that access in hard numbers: “Charlotte Mecklenburg NC PD” searched UNC Charlotte’s cameras 13,733 times in three months — 4,907 in March, 4,276 in April, 4,550 in May.

We will be careful about what that does and does not mean. Those 13,733 searches are not, in themselves, evidence of a crime. Most are presumably ordinary police work, and the audit redacts the individual searcher’s name — so we cannot say which officer ran any of them, and we make no claim that the officer charged this week ran a single one. What the record establishes is narrower, and it is enough: one city police department reached into a public university’s cameras more than four thousand times a month — and that department just had an officer criminally charged for reaching into this system for the wrong reason. The volume is routine; the oversight is not. It took the SBI to catch one search out of millions.

What the University still won’t show — and shares with the SBI

The University produced the audit, but it withheld two things under North Carolina’s “sensitive public security information” exemption, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1.7: the number of cameras it operates, and its sharing configuration — the setting that determines whether its data flows to Flock’s state and nationwide networks, and which agencies it shares with. We think that reading stretches a narrow, enumerated exemption past its terms, and we’ve asked the University to reconsider — especially since the audit it did produce already names the searching agencies. And there is a simpler problem with the claim: UNC Charlotte’s own peers produced exactly this record. North Carolina A&T and UNC Pembroke — fellow UNC System universities, bound by the same public-records law and the same § 132-1.7 — each disclosed their Flock sharing configuration (A&T produced its shared-networks and owned-networks exports; Pembroke confirmed in writing that its network is set to “Nationwide”), as did the town of Kure Beach and Madison County. A statewide exemption cannot mean one thing at A&T and the opposite at UNC Charlotte. If this configuration were genuinely sensitive security information, none of them could lawfully have released it — and the SBI, which oversees the state network, has not said they were wrong to. Their disclosure is evidence the record is public. What the University did confirm is that its campus police hold a memorandum of understanding with the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation. The pipes run in every direction.

Why this lands in New Hanover

UNC Charlotte is not an outlier. It is the same architecture New Hanover County residents live under: a Flock network wired into a nationwide pool, searched by thousands of agencies most people have never heard of. The difference is that UNC Charlotte’s audit names the searchers, so you can see the reach. New Hanover’s audit blacks out every one — 2.98 million searches, every agency hidden. If a campus in Charlotte draws a million searches a month from across the country, ask what a county network with roughly thirty-six cameras draws — and then ask why the Sheriff won’t let you see who is looking.

Check it yourself

Every figure here is our own count of the University’s own audit files, which we publish in full at the Internet Archive — the contract, the three Network Audits, the SBI MOU, and the policies. Open the audits, filter the “Org Name” column for “Charlotte Mecklenburg NC PD,” and count the rows. The point of publishing the government’s records is that you do not have to take our word for any of it.

Search counts are DeFlockILM’s own tally of the Flock Network Audit files produced by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (March–May 2026, Request #26-206), counting rows whose searching organization is logged as “Charlotte Mecklenburg NC PD” and other agencies. Each monthly file is truncated at Excel’s 1,048,575-row limit, so the totals stated are floors. Individual searcher names, plates, and reasons are redacted in the files; we attribute no search to any named individual and allege no wrongdoing by any specific searcher. The criminal charge against a CMPD officer is an accusation; he is presumed innocent. This article describes public records and is general information, not legal advice. If any figure here is wrong, write to mark@deflockilm.org and we will correct it in public. First published July 31, 2026.