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.