Are Flock Cameras Being Misused in North Carolina?

UNC Pembroke is a public university in Robeson County — the historic home of the Lumbee tribe, and one of the most diverse counties in the state (about 37.5% American Indian, 25% white, 22.5% Black, and roughly 10% Hispanic, close to the statewide average). Its campus police run a small ring of Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras. In response to a public-records request we filed on June 28, 2026, the University produced its Flock Network Audit — the log of every search that touched its cameras over three months (April 24 to July 24, 2026). It produced the audit first with the “reason” field redacted; after our July 24 deficiency letter, it produced the reason unredacted on July 27. The whole file is now mirrored at the Internet Archive for anyone to check.

The log records 1,529,853 searches in that quarter, run by roughly 3,480 different agencies. (How does a small campus network draw millions of searches from thousands of agencies? One broad search reaches across every network that shares data — and is logged by each one it touches.) What those searchers typed as their reason is where the record turns from striking to legally serious.

What North Carolina law allows — and what it forbids

North Carolina regulates ALPRs under Article 3D of Chapter 20. Two provisions matter here. First, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.30(5) defines the only permitted “law enforcement purpose” for this data, and the list is narrow: a criminal investigation, arrest, prosecution or supervision; apprehending someone with an outstanding felony warrant; locating a missing or endangered person; or locating a lost or stolen vehicle. Second, § 20-183.31(b) puts it beyond doubt: data obtained under the Article “shall be obtained, accessed, preserved, or disclosed only for law enforcement purposes,” and — in the statute’s own words — “shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations.”

A routine traffic infraction is not a felony warrant, a missing person, or a stolen car. In our reading, it is neither a permitted “law enforcement purpose” under § 20-183.30(5) nor a lawful use under § 20-183.31(b). The statute names traffic enforcement as the one thing this data may not be used for.

What the audit shows: 156,730 traffic searches

Of the 1,529,853 searches, 156,730 — more than one in ten — cited a traffic infraction as a stated reason. That is not a stray entry. It is the second-largest reason category in the entire log, behind auto theft.

Here is the part that matters legally. UNC Pembroke’s own campus police ran only 39 of those traffic searches, and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) 121. The traffic searches came overwhelmingly from other agencies reaching into the shared network — and two of them are North Carolina sheriff’s offices bound by the same statute:

• Polk County Sheriff’s Office (NC) — 2,673 traffic-infraction searches
• Union County Sheriff’s Office (NC) — 2,436 traffic-infraction searches
• and out of state: Texas DPS (9,902), Tulsa County OK (7,641), Hoover AL (4,186), Lake County IN, Oklahoma City, and hundreds more.

So on the face of the University’s own records, North Carolina law-enforcement agencies ran roughly five thousand searches of a North Carolina university’s cameras for a purpose § 20-183.31(b) says the data may not be used for. That is not our characterization of the searches — it is the searchers’ own stated reason, in the government’s own audit. This appears to be exactly the misuse the statute was written to prevent.

Two honest caveats, because they matter. A stated reason of “Traffic Infraction” is strong evidence of a prohibited use, but not conclusive proof that a traffic citation followed or that the officer who selected that reason correctly identified the purpose for the search; and North Carolina’s authority over an out-of-state department searching the network is an open question. The North Carolina agencies are clearly subject to NC law — they are squarely within the statute’s reach.

A rural campus, searched by the whole country

The other thing the log makes plain is that this is not a local safety tool. The single largest searcher of UNC Pembroke’s cameras is Houston, Texas Police Department — 210,170 searches, roughly one in every seven — a department more than a thousand miles away. Texas agencies together (Houston, the state DPS, Dallas, Fort Worth) account for close to 285,000 searches. Then come Coweta County, Georgia (19,224), Hillsborough County, Florida (13,730), the Kansas Highway Patrol, Bay County Florida, Lake County Indiana, Tulsa, Oklahoma City. The N.C. SBI ran 12,952 — a footnote next to Houston. A camera on a rural North Carolina campus is, in practice, a node in a nationwide dragnet.

Among the searchers: agencies caught abusing Flock

There is a sharper edge to that out-of-state list. Over the past month, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has fired or arrested officers at a string of departments for misusing Flock — running searches for personal, non-law-enforcement reasons. Several of those same agencies appear in UNC Pembroke’s audit, searching its cameras thousands of times:

• Cherokee County, GA Sheriff’s Office — 5,819 searches (a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a deputy were terminated and charged)
• DeKalb County, GA — 2,477 · Richmond County, GA — 2,411
• Greene County, GA — 593 · Fayetteville, GA — 418 · Albany, GA — 138 (five Albany officers were fired and arrested)

That is nearly 12,000 searches of a North Carolina university’s cameras by departments whose officers have been criminally charged for abusing this exact system. We cannot say the charged officers ran these particular searches — the University redacted individual names, by agreement. But we can say that agencies under active investigation for Flock misuse had full reach into a Pembroke, North Carolina campus network, thousands of times over. (Sources: WRDW; Reason.)

The immigration searches

Because the reason field is now visible, one more category is readable. More than 600 searches were explicitly labeled with an immigration reason (Flock’s “Immigration — criminal” and “civil/administrative” categories), and the number rises to roughly 830 once you add searches tagged for ICE, HSI, CBP, or DHS. The free-text entries are specific: “287g investigation,” “ICE deportation warrant,” “WARRANT // ILLEGAL ALIEN,” “HSI/ICE Target,” “Assist ICE.” It is a small share of 1.5 million searches — but it is federal and out-of-state immigration enforcement reaching into the cameras of a public university that sits at the center of a Native American community. Whatever one thinks of immigration policy, a state university’s surveillance network being queried for deportation warrants is a fact the public is entitled to know.

One question the record can actually answer: who ran them. Flock Safety says it has no contract with ICE and that federal data-sharing is off by default, leaving the switches to local departments. The audit is consistent with that — and that is exactly why the pattern matters. Not one of the roughly 900 immigration-tagged searches was run by a federally named agency; there is no ICE, HSI, CBP, DHS, or FBI in the searcher field. Every one came from a local or state police agency — Florida Fish & Wildlife, St. Johns County (FL), Gretna (LA) PD, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, among others — several citing “Assist ICE,” “287g,” or an “ICE deportation warrant.” That is the pattern watchdogs call a “side door”: not federal agents querying the cameras directly, but cooperating local and state police running the immigration lookups on their behalf. On this data we can see no direct federal immigration search — only local and state agencies doing that work.

Not just plates: searching by description

Most of these were plate lookups. But roughly 65,000 were “FreeForm” searches — Flock’s tool for finding a vehicle by description instead of a plate — plus 2,519 “convoy” searches, which surface vehicles seen traveling together. The University redacted most of the search text, but the handful that came through show what that means in practice: “silver sedan with heavy rear-end damage,” “red Toyota 4Runner, front right damage,” “white GMC truck, Rose Garden Care,” a “1960s-model Camaro.” A plate you might cover or change; a description of your car, its damage, and the magnet on its door, you cannot.

What we can see, and what we can’t

We can see the searching agency and the stated reason. We cannot see the individual officer’s name, the license plate searched, or the case number — the University redacted all three, and we did not contest the officer-name redaction (we withdrew any request for individual identities). Where a handful of officers had typed their own government email address into the free-text reason field, we removed those emails before publishing, to keep the officers anonymous as the University intended. Everything else is exactly as produced.

Two campuses, one pattern

This is the second UNC System campus whose audit we’ve obtained. NC A&T’s 16 cameras were searched 1,390,776 times in three months; UNC Pembroke’s, 1,529,853. Both are minority-serving public universities. Both networks are queried far more by distant agencies than by anyone in North Carolina. And in both, the reasons include ordinary traffic and immigration enforcement. Two files is no longer an anomaly. It is a pattern — and the state’s new budget just made the underlying program permanent statewide.

Update — July 29, 2026: what the University’s own officers searched for

Everything above concerns the network audit — the roughly 1.5 million searches run against UNC Pembroke’s cameras, overwhelmingly by outside agencies. The University has now also produced its Organization Audit: the searches run by its own police. It is a small and telling record. From April 24 through July 27, UNC Pembroke’s own officers ran just 295 searches, and the profile is squarely campus-safety: the leading reason is “Stalking” (122, about 41%), followed by welfare checks (44), larceny/theft (30), and alcohol offenses (20). Not one was a traffic-infraction search. None.

That matters, for fairness and for accuracy. The 156,730 traffic searches and the immigration lookups documented above were not run by UNC Pembroke — they were run by the outside agencies reaching in through the shared network. The University used its own cameras for the campus-safety purposes the law contemplates; the barred and questionable uses came from the hundreds of departments the network let in. That is the problem with a shared, nationwide network in one sentence: a campus can use its cameras responsibly and still have them turned to uses it never chose.

A good policy, a wide-open network

The University has now also produced the last pieces we asked for: its written LPR policy, its camera locations, its retention schedule, and its network’s sharing configuration. Together they draw the sharpest version of the point.

The policy is real and it is not careless. General Order 300-15, effective July 1, 2023 — in place before the cameras went live — restricts the system to legitimate law-enforcement purposes, forbids searches based solely on someone’s religious, political, or social views or their presence at a lawful event, and requires that every time data leaves the department the reason and the requesting agency be documented. On paper, UNC Pembroke did the governance homework that many agencies skip.

And it made no difference to the number that matters. The University confirms its network sharing is set to “Nationwide.” Ten cameras on a rural campus — including one at the soccer-field entrance — retained for 30 days, and readable by police departments in every corner of the country. A department can write a careful policy governing its own officers and still, with a single sharing setting, open its cameras to the hundred-thousand-plus searches its own rules would never have allowed. The policy governs the people who wrote it. The network setting governs everyone else. That is not a UNC Pembroke problem. It is the design.

Check it yourself

We are not asking you to take our word for any of this. The complete production — the vendor contract, the unredacted network-audit files, the University’s own organization audit, its written LPR policy, the camera-location list, and the correspondence — is public at the Internet Archive, and indexed in our records hub. Run the numbers. Filter the reasons. The point of publishing the government’s own records is that you don’t have to trust us — you can read them.

Figures are DeFlockILM’s own tally of the produced audit files, parsed for accurate counts. Statutory descriptions are general information about North Carolina law, not legal advice, and the conclusions drawn (that certain searches “appear” to be a prohibited use) are our reading of §§ 20-183.30 and 20-183.31, not a finding of any court. Last updated July 29, 2026.