New Hanover County pulls plug on Flock camera contract
The short version: New Hanover County, NC walked away from its Flock Safety contract, and WITN-TV's report shows a local government actually listening when a surveillance deal stopped making sense.
Our Take
Credit to WITN-TV for covering this one, because stories about counties backing out of Flock contracts don't get nearly the airtime that ribbon-cutting announcements do. New Hanover County pulling the plug is a reminder that these contracts aren't permanent fixtures — they're line items that elected officials can and should revisit when the costs, privacy tradeoffs, or performance don't hold up.
Every ALPR deal gets sold the same way: a handful of success stories, vague promises about deterrence, and little public accounting of how many scans happened, who accessed the data, or whether it actually reduced crime. When a government walks away, it's worth asking what changed — was it price, public pushback, a records request that didn't look good, or just a council finally doing the math on a mass-surveillance tool bolted onto every road in the county. WITN's report is short on those details, but the fact that it happened at all is the story.
This is exactly the kind of local accountability we track. Check our camera map to see what's running near you, and if your county is still weighing a Flock contract, our take-action guide walks through how to push for the same kind of reversal.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WITN-TV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.