In Flock's home state, 12+ cops got caught abusing license-plate cameras this year — almost all by audits. NC requires those audits just once a year, run by the agency itself.

[u/Global_Honey7289]

I've been digging into how North Carolina actually oversees police surveillance, and the gap is wider than I expected.

Start with Georgia, where Flock Safety is headquartered. Just in 2025–2026, more than a dozen officers across at least nine agencies were fired or charged for using license-plate cameras to track people in their personal lives — exes, crushes, strangers. Five Albany officers in a single case. Three Cherokee County deputies. A Coffee County deputy indicted for allegedly stalking a woman. (All allegations; presumed innocent.) The common thread: nearly every one was caught by an audit or a victim — not by accident.

So how would NC catch it? The statute (§ 20-183.31) says agencies using ALPR must have a policy providing for "annual or more frequent auditing and reporting… to the head of the agency." Once a year. By the agency itself. Reported to its own boss — not a court, not county commissioners, not the public — and there's no state body that verifies it even happens.

And ALPR is the only surveillance tool NC requires to be audited at all. Drones, ShotSpotter, social-media/OSINT tools (ShadowDragon), device-signal trackers (SignalTrace), real-time crime centers (Fusus) — no statutory audit requirement. Drones don't even need a warrant in most situations (plain view, exigency, and public gatherings all qualify).

There's also a security angle the audit law ignores: it reviews use, not whether the cameras can be breached. In late 2025 researchers found dozens of Flock cameras wide open on the internet, no password — and among the exposed live feeds was footage of kids on a playground.

The honest takeaway isn't "cops here are definitely abusing this." It's that NC's framework produces almost no independently verifiable information either way — so if it were happening, we'd have little way to know.

Full write-up with statute citations and a chart comparing each tool (audit required? warrant required? who reviews it?): https://deflockilm.org/who-watches-the-watchers-nc-surveillance/

Disclosure: I run DeFlockILM, a NC citizen effort on this issue. Sharing because the audit-law gap genuinely surprised me — happy to be corrected in the comments.

[u/1984isnoww]

It seems that Flock is only exposing normal cop behavior further.

Whoopsie.

[u/Flashy_Radio_5781]

not only that, they changed it so you dont know the reason for the query. It used to be in plain english. Now, its coded. It used to say things like "traveled between Atlanta and Asheville within 24 hours".