2026 08 17 14 Public Comment
The short version: A Wilmington-area resident's public comment to New Hanover County Commissioners shows how local pushback on Flock ALPR cameras starts at the podium, not in Washington.
Our Take
Credit to DeFlockILM for documenting this one on the ground: a resident standing up at a New Hanover County Commissioners meeting to question why the county's Flock Safety cameras exist, who controls the data, and whether anyone asked the public before the contract was signed. This is the unglamorous, essential work of accountability — showing up, speaking for two or three minutes, and making elected officials go on record about a surveillance system most residents don't know is scanning their plates every time they drive to the grocery store.
These county-level fights matter more than people realize. Flock's pitch to local governments is always the same — stolen cars, Amber Alerts, officer safety — but the actual deployment is a blanket dragnet that logs every vehicle, innocent or not, and feeds it into a network that other agencies, including ICE and out-of-state police, can query without a warrant. New Hanover County isn't unique; it's one node in a system that now blankets thousands of American communities, and the only check on it is local residents asking hard questions before commissioners rubber-stamp another renewal.
If you want to see how many of these cameras are already running near you, check our map, and if you're ready to show up at your own county meeting like this resident did, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of DeFlockILM, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.