2026 08 17 17 Public Comment
The short version: A New Hanover County resident takes the mic to challenge Flock ALPR surveillance, proving local meetings are still the front line against camera creep.
Our Take
Credit to DeFlockILM for filming and posting this public comment from the New Hanover County Commissioners meeting — the kind of unglamorous civic footage that rarely gets views but does the real work of accountability. Someone showed up, used their three minutes, and put county officials on record about why Flock Safety's license plate readers are parked on their roads. That's the whole ballgame right there: these systems get approved in meeting rooms most residents never attend, and they stay in place because nobody shows up to ask hard questions.
What makes local channels like DeFlockILM valuable is that they're building a paper trail county by county, meeting by meeting. Flock's pitch to commissioners is always the same — solve crime, find the bad guy — but the actual deployment is a blanket dragnet that logs every plate that passes, regardless of suspicion. A single public comment won't reverse a contract, but it forces the vote onto the record and gives other residents a template for showing up at their own county seat.
If you want to see whether your own neighborhood already has these cameras logging your movements, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back the way this commenter did, our take-action page has the playbook for getting on your commission's agenda.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of DeFlockILM, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.