Brunswick County Commissioner Sykes Raises Surveillance Concerns — Sheriff Chism Responds | 9/8/26

Our Take

Credit to DeFlockILM for posting this meeting unedited — that matters. When elected officials start asking basic oversight questions about license-plate-reader networks in open session, residents deserve to hear the exchange in full, not a press release summary. Commissioner Pat Sykes raising the issue publicly, and Sheriff Chism having to answer for it on the record, is exactly the kind of accountability moment that rarely happens until something goes wrong first.

And something did go wrong: a Brunswick County deputy is now under State Bureau of Investigation review for allegedly misusing the Flock system — one of multiple ALPR-misuse cases surfacing across North Carolina this year. That's not a hypothetical privacy concern, it's a documented pattern. These networks log the movements of ordinary people who've done nothing wrong, and the technology is only as trustworthy as the audit logs, retention limits, and access controls a sheriff's office chooses to enforce — or doesn't.

The questions Sykes raised — who can search the cameras, how long data is kept, what oversight exists — are the exact questions every county board with a Flock contract should be asking before the next misuse case, not after. If Brunswick County has ALPR cameras near you, check our camera map, and if you want your own commissioners asking these questions, see our take-action page.