Everything Watching Wilmington: A Surveillance Inventory

Debates usually happen one system at a time — a Flock renewal here, a ShotSpotter line item there. Seen together, the picture is different: a resident driving through Wilmington can be scanned by a plate reader, watched by a live-video camera, pulled up in a real-time crime center that stitches in private feeds, and recorded by microphones on the utility poles — each run by a different agency, on a different contract, with different rules or none. This page is the whole map, so the conversation can finally happen all at once.

The inventory at a glance

1. Flock ALPR — about $219,000 over 2 years

New Hanover County pays roughly $219,000 for its Flock license-plate program under contract #25-0364 — up from a $43,750 pilot in 2021, originally paid from controlled-substance tax funds. The cameras photograph every passing plate and build a searchable “vehicle fingerprint.” DeFlockILM’s review of Sheriff’s Office records found the network was searched nearly three million times in about 16 months, with the name of every searching agency and officer redacted. (What it costs; the three-million-searches analysis)

2. Condor live-video cameras — 8 of them, buried in the same contract

The county’s Flock contract doesn’t stop at plate readers. It includes eight Condor cameras — Flock’s live-video product — with a $750 implementation fee billed for each. These are pan-tilt-zoom video cameras, and officials previously indicated none were deployed here. Because the contract shields camera locations, the public may never be told where the Condors sit. (What’s in the contract)

3. The STING Center & Fusus — the pane of glass

Wilmington Police run the STING Center, a real-time crime center built on Fusus, a product now owned by Axon Enterprise (the Taser and body-camera company). Fusus is the integration layer: it lets staff pull live feeds from city cameras, Traffic & Engineering cameras, and private cameras that owners connect — all in one console. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s warning about Fusus networks nationwide applies here: they expand real-time police access to footage that would otherwise require a warrant and a public conversation. The County Sheriff runs a separate Fusus program worth the same questions. (Inside the STING Center)

4. ShotSpotter — $433,000 a year, always listening since 2011

Before you blame Flock for the microphones: Wilmington’s gunshot-detection sensors are a different company’s product. ShotSpotter, made by SoundThinking, Inc., has been listening on city poles since 2011, and the City pays roughly $433,000 a year to keep it on. Its effectiveness is contested — a MacArthur Justice Center study found tens of thousands of dead-end police deployments in Chicago, and Durham declined to renew its contract — and always-on acoustic sensors raise a live question under North Carolina’s electronic-surveillance statute (G.S. § 15A-287). (The full breakdown)

5. Wilmington PD drones — eyes overhead

The newest layer isn’t on a pole — it’s in the air. In 2024 Wilmington PD retired its helicopter and, with grant funding, built a drone fleet: DJI aircraft for indoor searches and rapid response, a thermal drone that can track a person at night, and non-DJI tethered drones for “persistent overwatch” that can hover over a crowd for hours. Its stated next step is a “drone as first responder” program — UAVs that auto-deploy to calls and stream live video to dispatch. We could find no published policy governing retention, flight limits, or audits. (The full breakdown)

Records update — Sept 2, 2026. The City produced part of the drone file. It confirms a ~18-aircraft fleet (Autel EVO II including the 640T thermal, DJI Matrice M30T/4TD, Avata and Mavic, a U.S.-made Teal 2, and a Fotokite Sigma tethered drone), operated as the multi-agency SABLE unit (Wilmington PD + New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office), with a federal FEMA Port Security Grant (EMW-2024-PU-05533) funding the newest tactical drones and flight data kept in a cloud platform (“DroneLogBook”). The City withheld the flight logs, any drone-as-first-responder plans, the grant paperwork, and any Fusus/STING integration; a deficiency letter followed.

6. ShadowDragon SocialNet + Horizon — social-media surveillance, bought quietly

The newest system to surface isn’t a camera at all. A public-records request revealed that the Sheriff’s Vice & Narcotics unit bought ShadowDragon’s SocialNet and Horizon — open-source-intelligence (OSINT) software that maps a person’s identity, aliases, and social network across more than 500 online sources, including social media, forums, dating apps, breach data, and the dark web. The purchase was $13,399.92 for a 12-month, 1,000-queries-per-day subscription (Sheriff’s Office PO #20250876-00, Vice & Narcotics), bought through the reseller Carahsoft on a GSA schedule — no competitive bid, the same procurement shortcut used for Flock. ShadowDragon has drawn sustained criticism: The Intercept described it as software that “can watch your every move,” EPIC and the EFF warn it enables warrantless social-media monitoring with a chilling effect on protected speech, and 404 Media documented its use to monitor pregnancy-tracking sites and gaming platforms. So the county’s surveillance reach now extends past license plates and into residents’ online lives — their identity, associations, and speech. The full story, and the invoice.

What ties them together

Individually, each system has a story and a sales pitch. Together, they’re an infrastructure — and Fusus is the technology designed to fuse them into a single view. The more feeds that flow into one console, the closer Wilmington moves to continuous, searchable tracking of ordinary people who’ve done nothing wrong. That’s why the honest question isn’t “is this one camera useful?” It’s “what does the whole system add up to, and who can search it, under what rules?” So far, the answer for Flock is: the county won’t even say who’s searching.

Judge each camera alone and every one sounds reasonable. Add them up, and Wilmington is building a surveillance grid no one voted for.

What we’re asking

• A public inventory. The City and County should publish every surveillance system, its vendor, its cost, its retention period, and its sharing rules — in one place, updated annually.
• A warrant standard and audit logs for any system that can track or identify individuals — with the logs open to the public.
• Cancel the Flock contract, which the county can end at any time, without cause, and stop expanding the grid before the rules exist to govern it.

Sources

• DeFlockILM — What New Hanover County pays for Flock (contract #25-0364), citing WECT Investigates and Port City Daily
• DeFlockILM — The Flock contract’s 8 Condor live-video cameras
• DeFlockILM — The STING Center & Fusus, citing the City’s STING Center page, Axon Fusus, and EFF
• DeFlockILM — Wilmington’s ShotSpotter/SoundThinking system, citing the SoundThinking release, The Assembly NC, and MacArthur Justice Center
• DeFlockILM — Nearly three million searches of New Hanover’s Flock network