NC police chief defends Flock cameras amid concerns

Our Take

WLOS News 13 captures a scene playing out in towns across the country: a police chief standing behind Flock Safety cameras while residents voice unease about being tracked every time they drive through town. Chief Blair Myhand's defense is the standard script — the cameras solve crimes, deter bad actors, keep the community safe. What's missing, as usual, is any real accounting of how much data is collected, who can access it, how long it's kept, and what happens when the system is wrong or misused.

That's the pattern we keep documenting at DeFlock: officials ask for public trust while offering minimal public oversight. Flock's network doesn't just catch the car involved in a robbery — it logs every plate that passes, building a movement history on anyone who drives through Hendersonville, guilty of nothing more than existing. 'Concerns' from residents aren't paranoia; they're a rational response to a surveillance system deployed with little public debate about its limits.

If you want to see how far this network already reaches, check our camera map — Hendersonville isn't an outlier, it's one node in a sprawling system. And if you'd rather not just watch this fight from the sidelines, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing your local council and police department toward real transparency instead of reassurances.