Whiteville Produced Everything. The Sheriff Next Door Went Silent.

Transparency in a Flock records fight is not a matter of resources or lawyers. It is a matter of will. We can prove that, because on July 1, 2026 we sent the identical nine-item request to two agencies in the same small county — the Whiteville Police Department and the Columbus County Sheriff’s Office — and watched them make opposite choices.

Whiteville produced — and produced the record that matters most

The Whiteville Police Department answered ahead of schedule. Chief Paul Rockenbach forwarded the request to the city’s legal team, and by his letter of August 10 the Department had furnished, in his words, all the documents requested and considered the file closed. What arrived was substantive and specific:

• The Flock Order Form — a 60-month term, a $123,900 contract total — and the invoices and purchase orders behind it.
• The Department’s ALPR policy, Written Directive 800-60, adopted May 31, 2023 and revised September 2025 — a real, dated, signed policy, in force before the cameras went live. That is the sequence § 20-183.31(a) requires, and it is cleaner than what larger agencies produced.
• A straight answer on scale: nine cameras — eight fixed, one mobile — at the city’s entrances, plus a Raven audio sensor, with data kept 30 days (moving to seven).
• And the four months of Flock audits: the Organization Audit, the Event Log, and — the field that decides these fights — the Network Audit.

That last item is the one that matters. A Network Audit names the outside agencies that reached into a department’s cameras. It is exactly the field the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office redacts on every page of its own production. Whiteville released it. Credit where it is due: on the records, the Department did what it said it would do.

What Whiteville’s own records reveal about the network

We read the Network Audits. Across April through July 2026, outside agencies searched Whiteville’s nine cameras 1,167,710 times — and roughly 93 to 99.9% of those searches came from outside North Carolina. The single largest searcher, every single month, was Houston, Texas. Not a neighbor. Not the SBI. Houston.

The most revealing number is the climb. Count the distinct agencies searching Whiteville’s cameras each month:

From 34 agencies to nearly 2,900 in ninety days. That is the fingerprint of Flock’s nationwide sharing being switched on sometime in the spring. In April, before the switch, almost no one could reach these cameras — and Houston alone ran 56,334 of April’s 75,740 searches, roughly three-quarters of them, reaching into a small North Carolina town before its network was broadly shared. After the switch, the whole country could look.

Here is the part worth sitting with. When we asked for the Department’s communications about data sharing, network configuration, or federal access, the answer was “none.” We take that at face value. Which means the decision to expose Whiteville’s cameras to thousands of out-of-state agencies was not debated, not documented, and not voted — it was a setting, flipped inside a software console, that quietly enrolled a Columbus County town in a national surveillance network. The scale is enormous; the paper trail is empty.

And we state one thing plainly, in fairness: even the transparent department has the statutory question every Flock agency has. Whiteville’s own officers ran 1,605 searches in these four months, and 224 of them — about 14% — are coded “Traffic Infraction,” a use N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) expressly bars. We allege no misuse; we note the Department’s own reason codes, and we credit it for producing the record that let anyone check.

Whiteville has also seen the technology work as advertised — an LPR alert in March 2026 helped produce a homicide arrest — and we do not pretend otherwise. The point of this piece is not that Whiteville did wrong. It is that Whiteville did right by the public records law, and that makes the agency next door impossible to excuse.

The Sheriff next door: fifty-six days of silence

The Columbus County Sheriff’s Office received the same nine-item request, by email, on the same day — July 1, 2026. It did not respond. When more than a month passed, we followed up on August 5, and because WECT had confirmed the Office runs Flock, we forwarded the request to County Attorney Amanda Prince to be sure it was routed. Still nothing. On August 20 we sent a second formal notice, asking the Office to produce, or to certify item-by-item that no record exists, or to cite a statutory basis, by August 29 — and reserving the preservation duty under § 132-3 and the remedies under § 132-9.

The silence is not for lack of a program to describe. On August 26, Sheriff Bill Rogers went on WECT and described his cameras in detail — five of them (one stolen off a pole in Tabor City), data kept 90 days. He will talk about the program on television. He will not produce a single page about it in response to a lawful records request. As of today, that request is fifty-six days outstanding.

We will give the Sheriff’s Office its due, too: in July 2026 it credited Flock with helping arrest a man tied to a string of larcenies, including a stolen utility trailer and a stove taken from a Tabor City home under construction. Real crimes, real result. But a public agency does not get to publicize the benefits of a surveillance system while hiding the records that show who else can use it.

One county. Two answers. The difference is will.

Set the two side by side. Same request. Same day. Same county. The city police department — smaller, no in-house records staff of the kind a Sheriff commands — produced its contract, its policy, its invoices, and the audit that names every outside searcher, in about three weeks, and told the truth about its cameras on the record. The county Sheriff’s Office has produced nothing in eight weeks, while its Sheriff narrates the program to a TV camera.

That is the whole argument against every agency that says transparency is too hard, too burdensome, or too sensitive. Whiteville proves it takes a records officer and a decision. The rest is a choice. We will publish the Columbus County Sheriff’s production the day it arrives, in full and unaltered, exactly as we did Whiteville’s. We are still waiting.

Sources

• Whiteville Police Department production (July 1 request; response letter dated Aug 10, 2026, Chief Paul D. Rockenbach): Flock Order Form and invoices, ALPR Written Directive 800-60, and the Flock Organization Audit, Network Audit, and Event Log for April–July 2026. Mirrored, unaltered, at the Internet Archive.
• Network-audit figures computed by DeFlockILM from the produced monthly Network Audits (1,167,710 outside searches; distinct-agency counts of 34 / 2,319 / 2,858 / 2,800; Houston, TX the top searcher each month). Organization-audit reason codes computed from the produced Organization Audits (1,605 searches; 224 “Traffic Infraction”).
• Columbus County Sheriff’s Office: DeFlockILM request July 1, 2026; follow-ups Aug 5 and Aug 20, 2026 (Internet Archive). Sheriff Bill Rogers’ camera and retention statements: WECT, Aug 26, 2026.
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1 et seq. (Public Records); § 20-183.30–.33 (ALPR use and retention). See our plain-language guide to the ALPR statute and the records repository.

General information for public discussion, not legal advice. Charges referenced are allegations. This article alleges no wrongdoing by the Whiteville Police Department, which produced its records in good faith. Corrections: mark@deflockilm.org. First published August 26, 2026.