The People Who Run North Carolina’s Surveillance Help Write Its Laws

Here is a rule of thumb for any surveillance program: the people who run it should not be the same people who authorize it. Operators run the cameras; someone independent — elected officials answerable to the public — decides whether they should exist and how they may be used. That separation is the whole idea of oversight. In North Carolina, it has largely collapsed. At nearly every link in the chain that built the state’s surveillance apparatus, the decider is law enforcement, former law enforcement, or its closest political ally.

We say this carefully. It is not a claim that anyone broke the law, and it is not an attack on the people who do police work. It is a structural observation about who holds the levers — and it matters because a surveillance system checked only by the people who run it is checked by no one.

Who runs it

Start local. The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office operates the county’s Flock plate-reader network, its 2,147-camera Fusus real-time crime center, its Clearview facial recognition, and a federally approved drone program. The Sheriff, Ed McMahon, is the official at the center of this county’s surveillance debate. He is also something more: in July 2021 he was elected President of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association — the statewide body that represents all 100 sheriffs and lobbies the General Assembly on their behalf. The man who runs New Hanover’s cameras also led the lobby that helps shape the laws governing them.

Whom the sheriffs honor in Raleigh

That lobby has a way of recognizing the legislators who deliver for it — the Sheriffs’ Association’s “Defender of Public Safety” award. Look at who holds it, and you are looking at the people who control the state’s money and its legislative calendar:

• Sen. Brent Jackson (R-Sampson) — Chair of the Senate Appropriations/Base Budget Committee, one of the few legislators who actually write the state budget. It was in that budget — not a standalone bill — that North Carolina’s statewide plate-reader expansion became law. Announcing his Defender of Public Safety award, then-President McMahon credited Jackson with “advancing the legislative priorities of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association.”
• Rep. Brenden Jones (R-Columbus) — the House Majority Leader, who steers what reaches the House floor. Named a Defender of Public Safety this year; in his own words, “standing up for public safety is critical to my role.”
• Rep. Ted Davis (R-New Hanover) — Wilmington’s own representative, a member of House Appropriations and House Rules. By his own account he holds “Defender of Public Safety Awards from the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association” and an “Honorary Wilmington Police Department Officer Badge,” and has signed a pledge to oppose any effort to cut police funding.

These honors are for general support of law enforcement, not for plate readers specifically, and we do not suggest any of them was a reward for surveillance. The pattern is quieter than that: the people holding the budget pen and the floor calendar are the people the sheriffs’ lobby counts as its own.

Who sponsored the bill

And when the statewide program did get a standalone bill — House Bill 206, written to make the SBI’s highway plate-reader program permanent — its primary sponsors included two former career lawmen from the Cape Fear region: Rep. Carson Smith (R-Pender), a 16-year Pender County sheriff, and Rep. Charlie Miller (R-Brunswick/New Hanover), a 33-year officer and former Brunswick County chief deputy. When the plate-reader language drew bipartisan opposition, it was stripped from HB 206 and rerouted through the budget — the one Jackson’s committee writes — where it passed anyway. A former sheriff helped write the bill; the budget chair the sheriffs honored carried it home.

Who oversees the overseers?

Lay the chain end to end and the problem states itself. Law enforcement requests the technology, deploys it, lobbies for it through an association once led by our own Sheriff, sponsors the bills that authorize it, and sits on the committees that fund and clear it. Every link is held by the same profession — the one the surveillance is supposed to answer to the public for, not answer to itself.

This is the flaw we have described before — what a Sheriff Hoover could do with Flock cameras. A system watched only from the inside is exactly as trustworthy as the people inside it, on their worst day — because North Carolina law names exactly one recipient for the audit of a sheriff’s plate-reader system: the sheriff himself. And it is why nobody was asked before the cameras went up: these decisions never had to survive an independent vote, because the people making them and the people running the cameras were the same people.

The remedy is not to distrust police. It is to restore the missing half of the equation — independent oversight and a public vote — so that surveillance answers to someone other than the people who operate it. In New Hanover County, residents can supply that check in person: the Board of Commissioners takes the Flock program back up on September 21. It is the one room where the people being watched, not the people watching, get to decide.

Sources: WECT (New Hanover Sheriff Ed McMahon elected President of the N.C. Sheriffs’ Association, July 2021); North Carolina General Assembly member biographies and committee assignments for Sen. Brent Jackson, Rep. Brenden Jones, Rep. Ted Davis, Rep. Carson Smith, and Rep. Charlie Miller; the N.C.G.A. bill record for House Bill 206 / S.L. 2026-53 (primary sponsors and history); WRAL reporting on the statewide ALPR expansion enacted through the state budget (July 2026); and the officials’ own public statements and the N.C. Sheriffs’ Association’s award announcements. This page reports on public records and public statements.