2026 08 17 35 Public Comment
The short version: A New Hanover County resident takes the mic to challenge Flock ALPR cameras, and DeFlockILM's footage shows what grassroots pushback at the local level actually looks like.
Our Take
Credit to DeFlockILM for doing the unglamorous work of showing up to a county commissioners meeting and getting it on camera. This is how surveillance expansion actually gets challenged in America — not through viral outrage, but through a resident standing at a podium in New Hanover County, on the record, asking elected officials to account for a network of license plate readers most constituents never voted on.
Public comment periods like this one matter more than they get credit for. Flock Safety's pitch to local governments is almost always the same: approve the cameras quietly, frame it as a tool for solving car break-ins, and avoid talking about the retention windows, the data-sharing agreements with other agencies, or who actually gets to query the system. When someone forces that conversation into a public meeting, it puts commissioners on record and creates a paper trail — which is exactly why DeFlockILM is archiving this at DeFlockILM.org.
If you're in New Hanover County or anywhere else wondering whether your daily commute is being logged by a Flock camera, check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and visit our take-action page for concrete steps — public records requests, meeting scripts, and more — to push back the same way this commenter did.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of DeFlockILM, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.