Flock Surveillance: My Testimony to the Carolina Beach Town Council — Sept. 8, 2026

Our Take

Credit to DeFlockILM for doing something most of us never see: standing up at a town council meeting and reading the numbers back to the officials who approved them. The timing couldn't be sharper — the same morning New Hanover County commissioners voted 4–0 to scrap their Flock contract, Carolina Beach was left holding its own, separate deal with its own cameras and its own liability. Local government fragmentation is exactly how surveillance infrastructure survives: one body says no, and the next town over just keeps running the same system under a different letterhead.

The real story here is the audit trail, or lack of one. Roughly three million searches of Carolina Beach's plate reader data in a single quarter, the majority coming from agencies outside North Carolina, and most with no case number attached — that's not targeted investigative work, that's a database being treated as an open tap. Pair that with a Brunswick County deputy under criminal investigation for misusing Flock and a former Wrightsville Beach officer indicted for running plates on private citizens for no legitimate reason, and the pattern stops looking like isolated bad apples. It looks like a system that was never built with guardrails, only the promise that nobody would peek behind the curtain.

This is why these fights have to happen town by town, council meeting by council meeting — county cancellations don't automatically save you if your own town signed a separate contract. If you want to see what's logging your plates in your area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to show up at your own council meeting, our take-action page has what you need to get started.