Camera by camera, North Carolina police build growing network to track vehicles
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Take a drive down hundreds of North Carolina roadways — from Carolina Beach to Concord — and there’s a good chance you’re being watched.
In the span of a few years, more and more privately owned, automated cameras have emerged along street corners and straightaways across the state, scooping up data on every vehicle they see.
The millions of cars they surveil don’t have to be linked to any crimes. And the data they collect can be searched for weeks by any police officer with access, whether they’re in the next town over or on the other side of the country. No warrant necessary.
In North Carolina and nationally, one company is the biggest player in this city-by-city scramble for surveillance.
Flock Safety, a private Atlanta-based firm operating in 47 states, offers police more than just local surveillance. The company grants law enforcement the ability to seamlessly tap into a nationwide network of cameras — tens of thousands of unblinking eyes — that gather data around the clock without most of us even realizing it.
In the seven years since Flock got its start, the company has installed at least 700 cameras in more than 70 counties and municipalities across North Carolina, The News & Observer found, earning millions in public money. It’s done so despite operating for years without a required license in the state — one of several places the company’s faced regulatory trouble.
The company claims it has helped solve 10% of the nation’s reported crimes, something experts dispute.
Flock is poised for more growth here, buoyed by a recent change in the law supported by police that will for the first time allow license plate cameras on 80,000 miles of state-maintained roads and highways, where they’re now banned.
Flock Safety
Other ALPR companies
The company’s rapid expansion — so far into 4,000 communities nationally — isn’t exactly a secret. Flock says the adoption of its technology is done in full view of the public, debated by elected leaders or publicized via numerous press releases the company has issued nationally.
“This is a tool that police are using in order to solve crime, and it is being done in the light of day,” Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin said.
But Flock’s reach in North Carolina, detailed by The N&O for the first time, is much bigger than the company has disclosed to state regulators, records show. And where its cameras watch us is very rarely made public.
The N&O’s investigation found:
At least 90 law enforcement agencies in the state — from the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office to the Craven County ABC Board — have access to or contracts for Flock cameras.
Nationwide, Flock cameras routinely capture tens of millions of vehicles over each 30-day period, the company’s default length of time for keeping data.
Only a small percentage of those vehicles — less than 1% — are linked to wanted suspects, missing persons or auto thefts, company data shows.
Police and sheriff’s departments allow up to hundreds of other law enforcement agencies across the country to see what their Flock cameras collect. Such liberal access heightens concerns over potential misuse.
Compared to some other states, North Carolina has little oversight into how law enforcement agencies audit their use of license plate reader systems.
Police in some of this state’s largest cities refuse to say where they’ve placed license plate readers, making it impossible to know which neighborhoods are surveilled more than others. Law enforcement agencies are tight-lipped on their own internal efforts to check for abuses of the system.
Street by street, those cameras add up. And when they connect, privacy advocates say, they create a privately owned surveillance apparatus that rivals any the country has ever seen — accessible to even the smallest cities and towns.
“Police departments have never had the ability to look at the history of movements of a vehicle all around the country,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “That’s a very significant power for anybody to have — including police.”
Hundreds of Flock cameras now watching NC roads
Like a lot of surveillance technology, costs of these license plate readers have dropped dramatically in recent years, and competitors like Motorola and Rekor have filled the space with their ALPR offerings.
But in North Carolina at least, it’s Flock that rules the roost.
No agency in the state officially tracks law enforcement use of the automated license plate readers permanently installed along city streets.
So The N&O surveyed more than 160 of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, reviewed hundreds of pages of public contracts and use agreements and scoured vendor websites to create the most comprehensive tally to date.
At least 90 agencies now have fixed, automated license plate readers installed in their jurisdictions. And at least 79 of those contracts were signed with Flock Safety — a company that didn’t even register to do business in the state until May 2021.
Based on the N&O’s review, more than 700 Flock cameras now sit along North Carolina streets. And at $2,000 to $3,000 per camera — each owned by and leased from the company — communities statewide are paying at least an estimated $1.4 million annually.
Each camera silently captures images of every vehicle that passes by. From those images, algorithms attempt to figure out the license plate number, vehicle make, type, color — even details like the presence of roof racks and bumper stickers.
Vehicles are not linked to specific drivers, which law enforcement would need to look up in separate systems with access to DMV’s database.
As the cameras capture data, the system sends alerts on any vehicles that match data from the National Crime Information Center and other databases containing lists of license plates associated with everything from stolen cars and wanted suspects to missing children.
The information also flows into a searchable database, where it’s kept for a month by default.
Raleigh Police Capt. Matthew Frey said such evidence has helped detectives narrow down suspects, even if the car spotted leaving a crime scene is as common as, say, a white Honda.
“There’s tons of white Hondas out there. But if you can look at the Flock camera during that time frame when that vehicle would have passed by that camera and you find a white Honda, that gives you at least a lead to jump on,” Frey said. “Before, you just had one in a sea of white Hondas.”
But when the data is collected and kept for weeks — whether the car was involved in illegal activity or not — privacy activists say the technology can be problematic.
“It is just functioning as a giant dragnet capturing data on everyone without the idea of there being any kind of crime,” said Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for digital civil rights.
The spread of license plate readers isn’t likely to slow down any time soon.
A state law effective in January will allow fixed license plate readers on 80,000 miles of state-owned highways through a new pilot project run by the N.C. Department of Transportation and State Bureau of Investigation. The measure also makes misuse of data captured by the cameras a Class I misdemeanor.
Prior to the new legislation, a legal interpretation issued under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory decreed that state law prohibited such devices from DOT right of ways.
As of early April, SBI spokesperson Angie Grube said “discussions and meetings continue” about the program, and that the agency isn’t ready to describe what the process of installing the cameras along state roads will look like.
But last year the issue was urgent enough to draw law enforcement leaders to the legislature to advocate for the change.
“We spend thousands of staff hours searching and looking for offenders,” Raleigh Police Chief Estella Patterson told lawmakers at a hearing in April 2023. “If we had the authority to install ALPRs along DOT right of ways, it would greatly enhance our ability to locate these offenders and victims in a more timely manner.”
The network effect
This data collection becomes far more powerful when those cameras connect.
Law enforcement agencies signed up with Flock can request access to data from any other agency across the country with a few clicks.
Once granted, this network effect considerably amplifies the reach of every search.
Flock doesn’t disclose how many cameras are deployed across more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies — or exactly how many of those agencies have linked their data.
But one of the company’s own tools does provide some clues.
In June 2021, the company began offering its clients the option of setting up special websites called “transparency portals” — pages that contain numbers of the cameras deployed, vehicles captured and other details, automatically updated daily.
The company provided a list of more than 30 North Carolina agencies with these portals earlier this year at the request of The N&O. But a spokesperson said the company doesn’t maintain a list of the sites nationally.
So the N&O built its own list, based on online searches and public records.
The transparency portals show Flock devices, as of April, captured more than 98 million vehicles — unique to each agency — on the roads throughout the United States during the prior 30 days.
The N&O found more than 360 such portals set up by law enforcement, about 7% of the agencies that Flock currently says have signed up for the service. Given the limited number of portals found, this is likely a significant undercount.
Flock's own marketing has claimed that across the country, its devices read more than 1 billion plates every month, a number that includes repeat scans of some vehicles.
In most cases, the portals identify which outside law enforcement agencies have access to a department's Flock data — so even a small number of sites can reveal the massive scope of the Flock network.
Here's the Huntersville Police Department, just north of Charlotte, which shares its Flock data with Raleigh police.
Raleigh's transparency portal doesn't list who has access to its data. But other portals reviewed by The N&O show its officers can access data from at least 14 other agencies from the Craven County ABC Board to police in Wytheville, Va.
In addition to Raleigh's data, Huntersville officers can access vehicle information collected by at least 31 other law enforcement agencies in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Indiana. And the department has so far granted 180 police and sheriff's offices access to its own data.
Visualized nationally, even the limited number of transparency portals in The N&O's analysis shows the scale of this data sharing — nearly 40,000 connections between law enforcement agencies.
Those connections vastly increase the power of police departments to search vehicle data captured across the country. Since July, for example, investigators conducted at least 600 searches of data collected by 10,000 or more Flock cameras.
How it’s supposed to work
There are cases in North Carolina where the cross-country reach of Flock’s cameras have led to arrests.
Take the case of Daquan McNair.
St. Pauls police Capt. Michael Seago was well acquainted with McNair, a resident of the Robeson County town of about 2,000 people.
He and other officers pulled the man over several times on the roads around St. Pauls dating back at least 10 years. And McNair was convicted of multiple charges since 2013, including misdemeanor drug possession and larceny.
In October 2019, McNair was one of two men charged with the shooting death of a 20-year-old area man.
While out on bond in late September, McNair was charged with the attempted murder of another man, who police found shot inside a St. Pauls home. Another suspect in the shooting turned himself in.
But McNair, it seemed, was on the run.
So Seago, one of 15 or so officers in town, turned to Flock and typed in the license plate from a traffic stop of McNair’s months earlier.
In seconds, Seago’s searches for McNair’s plate spanned more than 1,200 cameras across the country, data from the department’s transparency site shows. They returned multiple hits on his black Chevy Malibu along a route that stretched from St. Pauls to Texas.
“You could see the picture of his car in Houston,” Seago said.
Texas authorities arrested McNair within days before extraditing him to North Carolina.
Court records show his case is still pending before Robeson County Superior Court.
Flock’s capabilities had a “big impact,” Seago said, since tracking him down using other means would have required the U.S. Marshals Service and search warrants to locate McNair’s cell phone — provided they had a working number for him.
Accessing a multi-state collection of license plate data needed none of that.
When police break the law
Maass notes, however, that such ease of access — and the absence of outside oversight from a judge, for example — creates the potential for misuse.
“Every agency you share with, every person with that agency is an avenue for a breach of the system,” Maass said.
ALPR data isn’t exactly unique in this regard.
“We have a long history of law enforcement officers and departments that do engage in surveillance of people, not because they’re suspected of wrongdoing, but because of their political beliefs and activities,” Stanley said.
In 2019, The Sacramento Bee detailed how about 1,000 California police officers misused sensitive databases over the prior decade, using the information to dig up dirt on romantic rivals, harass citizens and retaliate over personal legal disputes.
But expansive access to Flock data has seen similar misuse.
In October 2022, a Kansas woman asked her boyfriend, a Wichita police officer, how a friend could get a domestic protection order. The woman was concerned her estranged husband was tracking her somehow after he made “several comments about her whereabouts,” according to an affidavit from the resulting investigation.
The officer knew Wichita used Flock, and asked a supervisor if other agencies had access to the department’s data.
Wichita detectives soon learned that 32-year-old Victor Heiar, a police officer from the small town of Kechi north of the city, used that access to search for his wife’s license plate at least nine times in less than an hour — shortly before texting the woman that she was “spotted” in several locations away from home.
“When asked how it made her feel to have her movement tracked, she said that she felt violated, and had no source of privacy, and unsafe,” the affidavit says. She said “she did not know what Victor was capable of.”
Heiar was convicted of stalking and kicked off the force, The Wichita Eagle reported. And the Wichita Police Department revoked the Kechi Police Department’s access to its license plate data.
A Wichita detective’s affidavit includes a Flock audit that shows the exact date, time and other details the former officer used to track his former partner down.
Such tools, Beilin said, are proof of the company’s commitment to transparency and accountability.
“Putting this stuff in the light of day, with auditing, with transparency portals — this is all a good thing,” Beilin said.
In Raleigh, scrutiny of license reader tech is unclear
Beilin said Flock doesn’t have any proactive tools to automatically flag suspicious use. That means auditing is left up to the law enforcement agencies.
Since at least 2016, Raleigh Police Department policies have required an annual audit of its automated license plate reader technology — a report that’s supposed to be delivered directly to the chief.
But the agency has provided no evidence that such a review has been completed.
In response to a public records request for the most recent audit in July 2023, city officials said they had no documents to provide.
Despite being asked multiple times since July 2023 about whether the audit had been conducted, Raleigh Police spokesperson Lt. Jason Borneo would not answer the question directly. In a statement on Dec. 31, he told the N&O that responsible use of technology is “essential to helping achieve our mission.”
While he did not comment on the status of the audit, Frey, the Raleigh police captain, told The N&O in late February that police were too busy with solving crimes to misuse the system.
“I can’t think of a single time in which we have gone after somebody that was not a criminal in any of these cases,” Frey said.
After The N&O continued to press for an answer about the audit, Borneo on March 13 suggested some type of evaluation of the license plate reader system was in the works.
“A review of the data was conducted before the end of the retention periods. The data will be compiled and provided to the chief of police,” Borneo said in an email.
North Carolina law does force police departments to establish policies for how the data is captured and used. That includes a requirement to audit the system’s use and effectiveness annually. But there’s no oversight laid out in the law for ensuring agencies follow their own rules.
That stands in stark contrast to other states like New Jersey, which more heavily regulate the operation of ALPR systems.
A 2022 directive by the New Jersey attorney general says that agencies must audit their ALPR programs annually and report results to the state. A state ALPR coordinator is also required to publicly report who followed the rules and which agencies saw violations and complaints.
In Greensboro, Black residents live closer to cameras
Beyond intentional misuse, privacy advocates also fear the rapid adoption of license plate readers — like the growth of other technology before — could contribute to the overpolicing of communities of color.
There’s some evidence ALPR devices are more heavily surveilling Black neighborhoods here.
Greensboro is a rare North Carolina city to release where it has placed Flock cameras. City police have 15 Flock cameras installed along city streets throughout the city, largely in a line cutting from south- to northeast.
A majority of Greensboro’s Black residents live in neighborhoods within a 5-minute drive of one of those cameras, an analysis by The N&O shows. By comparison, about a quarter of the city’s white residents live in neighborhoods that close to a Flock camera.
The heavier presence of license plate readers in Black neighborhoods, though, doesn’t mean race drove police decisions about where they were installed.
Greensboro police Lt. Ryan Todd told the N&O that race was never a factor in the placement of Flock cameras. Instead, the department uses a federally endorsed “hot spot” model to decide where to deploy resources, based on traffic data and locations of crimes like murder and assault.
“Where you can marry those two in the Venn diagram — where you have violent crime and heavy vehicular traffic — was essentially the formula that we use to find out where the most effective locations for these would be,” Todd said.
But even if it’s unintentional, Maass of EFF said, the effect of adding more cameras in and around Black and brown neighborhoods means more surveillance on the drivers in those areas.
“License plate readers are not documenting crime — they are documenting the perfectly legal activity that is driving your car on a public road,” Maass said. “It’s capturing more information on innocent people in that neighborhood. And as a result, that is going to put more people under scrutiny when a crime happens.”
Assessing whether Greensboro’s placement of its cameras is an outlier in North Carolina, though, is nearly impossible.
It’s one of the few cities that discloses the locations of its license plate reader cameras — whether from Flock or its competitors.
Raleigh and Charlotte have refused to release the locations of their cameras to The N&O, citing exemptions in North Carolina’s public records laws designed to protect “sensitive security information.”
Failed oversight, little transparency
In North Carolina, Flock has largely evaded the reach of the only agency with any oversight power over the industry.
The Alarm Systems Licensing Board, an obscure regulator housed within the N.C. Department of Public Safety, was tasked decades ago with background checks and certifications for technicians and companies that install everything from burglar alarms to video surveillance.
For more than two years, the board worked to force Flock Safety to get a license to do business in North Carolina — ultimately suing the company and convincing a judge to halt the company’s expansion unless it found a licensed third-party to install additional devices.
Flock has argued, both to the board and to the courts, that its systems do not meet the legal definition of an alarm system.
But the company in late March agreed to apply for a license with the board by June 1 — or risk being banned from the state by a judge.
In late April, almost a full month after the company’s deal with the board, a technician submitted an application on Flock’s behalf, according to Paul Sherwin, whose division at the state Department of Public Safety supports the board’s operations.
Amid the legal wrangling, the company never disclosed to the board an accurate number of its clients across the state, according to a list The N&O obtained from the regulator.
The document, compiled by the board based on contracts provided by Flock, shows 28 law enforcement clients. That’s less than half of the tally compiled by The N&O’s survey.
After reviewing the newspaper’s own list of Flock clients in February, Sherwin acknowledged that the use of ALPR technology in North Carolina “is more widespread than I thought.” And in an email this week, he said the board expected the company to be “honest and transparent about their operations.”
“But they weren’t; either on purpose or because they didn’t know the correct answer — both of which are concerning,” Sherwin wrote.
Beilin said the company believes in regulations of its technology and is committed to following them.
That hasn’t stopped it from running afoul of those regulations.
In February, Forbes reported that Flock has installed hundreds of cameras in Florida, Illinois and South Carolina without proper permits, prompting rebukes from transportation and local government officials.
And in Tennessee, the only other state where the company has encountered a similar alarm board to North Carolina’s, regulators fined the company $1,000 in 2019 for operating without a license, the board’s meeting minutes show.
Records obtained by The N&O show the penalty went unpaid for nearly two years — until Tennessee lawmakers narrowed the definition of an alarm system and a state regulator closed the matter with no action.
A Flock camera, the Tennessee regulator wrote, “is a tool to use in the investigation process, but not a device to alert or detect activity on behalf of its users and do not detect crimes being committed.”
The assessment freeing Flock from state regulation, however, doesn’t mention Flock’s “hotlist alert” ability, which automatically notifies law enforcement when it detects vehicles wanted in crimes or for other reasons flagged by police.
A cop on every corner
In talks and interviews, Flock CEO Garrett Langley has often framed his company’s value as a force multiplier for law enforcement, especially for a public service sector that has struggled to fill open positions.
“I don’t think magically, all of a sudden a thousand, another couple hundred thousand people want to become police officers,” Langley told an Atlanta Business Chronicle podcast last year. “So the only way to quickly solve the problem is with technology.”
Beilin said the company has highlighted plenty of cases where investigators have used evidence captured from Flock cameras to recover stolen cars, find missing people and clear cases.
In Raleigh, Patterson told legislators in April 2023 that her officers used the devices to make scores of arrests within weeks of installing them.
Police departments, Beilin said, wouldn’t use their services if investigators didn’t find it helpful.
“We’re seeing this technology work,” Beilin said. “It’s actually solving crime, and so we want to have it in more cities.”
Such stories of technology saving the day, Stanley says, are compelling. But they can also lead to “policymaking by anecdote.”
“At the end of the day, Americans have to decide to what extent they want to allow themselves to be watched by the government all the time,” Stanley said. “And they need to ask very sharp questions about exactly how much security they’re getting for the privacy they give up.”
Yet independent research on the effectiveness of ALPR systems has shown mixed results. Across multiple studies, license plate readers demonstrated few clear benefits for crime and clearance rates, and such research has found it often takes a saturation of devices that few communities have implemented.
Flock’s own claims have come under scrutiny in recent months, from police departments and even researchers involved in the company’s most recent study, which although supervised by academics has not been peer reviewed. The company has used that white paper, published earlier this year, to claim — in press releases, infographics and product updates — that its devices have been used to help solve 10% of the country’s reported crimes.
Andrew Wheeler, a data scientist and criminal justice researcher whose previous work has analyzed the performance of ALPR systems, told The N&O it was “quite a leap in logic to go from that paper to that claim.”
Beilin said related research is ongoing. That includes a yearlong study due out this summer from the National Policing Institute, where Flock and the Taser company Axon paid for about two dozen ALPR cameras for 90 agencies across the country, including Raleigh and Greensboro.
Meanwhile, the Flock CEO said, the company has gone from “single-digit millions to over a hundred-million in revenue in four years.”
A researcher who focuses on a range of surveillance technologies, Maass said he has a particular problem with license plate readers because every driver needs a tag to get on the road. It’s a requirement, he said, “that was not designed for this purpose.”
“There’s not a lot you can do to protect yourself from them other than just stop driving,” Maass said. “They’re set up in this way that, in order for you to get to work and to travel freely, you have to submit to your data being monetized by a private company and then sold to law enforcement.”
On the podcast, Langley said the company loves the criticism. Flock’s used it, he said, to evolve. But whether a community uses his devices — and how — isn’t ultimately his call.
“I just build technology and let them decide.”
Credits
Tyler Dukes | Reporter
Travis Long | Photographer
Cathy Clabby | Editor
Susan Merriam | Data visualization and design
David Newcomb | Development and design
Sohail Al-Jamea | Illustrations and animation
News & Observer transportation reporter Richard Stradling contributed reporting. Charlotte Observer public safety reporter Ryan Oehrli, Wichita Eagle investigative reporter Chance Swaim and Tennessee-based freelance investigative reporter Jessica Jaglois assisted with public records.
How we reported this story
To track the growth of Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers across the state, News & Observer investigative reporter Tyler Dukes used multiple search engines to build a list of web addresses for "transparency portals" set up for the company's law enforcement clients.
Because the pattern of the addresses were relatively consistent, he also created a list of known Flock clients and possible URLs. He added more web addresses after The N&O surveyed more than 160 North Carolina law enforcement agencies about their use of ALPR vendors. The N&O supplemented its list with records from the State Bureau of Investigation, which provided details on the law enforcement agencies that link national wanted vehicle databases with Flock or other ALPR services.
After building the list of sites and potential sites, Dukes used code to collect data on each valid web page from late July to mid-April. Because most sites list which external agencies have access to their data, The N&O used these lists to further supplement its collection of transparency portals.
Dukes also used code and GIS software to calculate the distances between the camera locations provided by the city of Greensboro and the city's census block groups. After matching each block group's closest camera with 5-year 2022 American Community Survey data, he calculated the demographics of neighborhoods within a 5-minute drive of a camera compared to those further away.
The N&O is making the data collected from the law enforcement survey and the Flock transparency sites available publicly for all uses.
