We Have the Contract. ALPRs Must Be Banned in Dare County. Full Stop.
DeFlock Dare has obtained a copy of the actual Master Services Agreement between Flock Group, Inc. and the Dare County Sheriff's Office. Section 5.3, "Disclosure of Footage," on page 19, is part of why this technology cannot be reformed, negotiated, or "fixed" with better contract language.
What it says: Flock, the company, not our elected officials, not our Sheriff's Office, can access, use, preserve, and disclose our license plate footage to law enforcement, government officials, or unnamed "third parties" whenever Flock decides it has a "good faith belief" that doing so is "reasonably necessary." No warrant. No written request. No supervisory approval. No case file. No exception to protect an ongoing investigation. A private, for-profit surveillance company gets to unilaterally decide who sees footage of every vehicle that passes through our county, and residents have zero say in that decision.
This is not a loophole. It is the business model. This same clause is standard Flock boilerplate, appearing in contracts from California to North Carolina, because mass data collection and discretionary sharing is the product. Hillsborough, NC officials admitted they missed this language before signing and reversed their decision once they saw it.
Five agencies. One surveillance network. No single agency in control.
No single entity runs this system. Dare County Sheriff's Office operates 14 cameras across seven locations, Southern Shores runs 12, Nags Head runs 12, and Kill Devil Hills runs 6, adding up to 48 cameras total across the county. This isn't one countywide network with one point of accountability; it's five separate law enforcement agencies, each with its own Flock contract, each containing the same discretionary disclosure language, and none of them coordinating on a single public accounting of how the combined system works.
These numbers should give you pause: across those five agencies, Dare County has 12.55 ALPR cameras per 10,000 residents, the highest rate in North Carolina. Wake County, home to Raleigh and 1.26 million people, sits at 2.55 per 10,000. Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and nearly as many residents, sits at 2.37 per 10,000. Combine Wake and Mecklenburg into one urban bloc of 2.5 million people and 619 cameras, and Dare County still out-surveils them by a factor of five, on a permanent population of just 38,245, split across five separate contracts.
Charlotte has an NFL team, an international airport, and over a million residents. They still don't come close to this camera density. Raleigh, the state capital, doesn't come close either. The gap exists likely because Dare County reports an average daily population of 225,000 to 300,000 people during peak summer months, driven almost entirely by tourism. That's not a footnote; it's the entire economic engine of this county, and it's also who this network is actually watching most. On a busy July weekend, these five networks combined aren't logging 38,000 residents. They're logging a visiting population six to eight times that size, families driving down from Ohio or Pennsylvania for a week at the beach, renters getting to a Corolla or Duck property, day-trippers bouncing between towns for dinner and the beach. None of them know their plate is being fingerprinted the moment they cross the bridge, and none of them have any way to find out afterward whether their footage was retained, shared, or handed to a third party under Section 5.3. That should concern every business owner in this county. Dare County's entire economy depends on visitors feeling welcome, not tracked. A tourist who finds out after the fact that their vacation drive was logged into a nationwide law enforcement database isn't likely to feel great about booking again, and word travels fast in a market that lives and dies on repeat visitors and referrals. This is a surveillance network sized for a major metro area, quietly built on top of the one industry this county cannot afford to alienate.
The people operating these cameras admit they don't understand the system they're running. At the August Kill Devil Hills commissioners meeting, KDH police told commissioners directly that they have not activated Flock's own promised public transparency portal, and gave the reason themselves: officers say they are "uncertain about the workings of the portal". Read that again. The department deploying these cameras on our streets cannot explain a basic transparency feature Flock built specifically to reassure the public. If KDH PD doesn't understand how the transparency portal works, what confidence should any resident have that the department fully understands data retention, who accesses footage, when Section 5.3 gets invoked, or where that data ends up? This isn't a training gap. It's proof that the agencies running this technology are operating a system they don't fully control or comprehend, and asking us to trust it anyway.
Even elected officials with oversight responsibility are raising alarms. Commissioner B.J. McAvoy called the program "ripe for abuse." Commissioner T. Dillon Heikens said, "I don't like it". When the department can't explain its own tools and the commissioners overseeing that department are this uneasy, that combination should end the conversation about "improving" the program.
We are not asking for oversight committees, transparency portals, or amended data sharing language. We are asking for removal. Every camera. Every jurisdiction, county and municipal. No renewals, no new deployments, and no acceptance of "improved" contract terms as a substitute for ending unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance of our community and it's visitors. Ban ALPRs!
📝 Sign and SHARE the DeFlock Dare petition, now past 710 signatures, demanding full removal of ALPR cameras across Dare County and every town operating them. Show up to your town council or county commissioners meeting and say it plainly: ban ALPRs. Not reform them. Remove them. All of them.
Upcoming Dare County-Area Meetings:
Dare County Board of Commissioners
Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 9:00 a.m., Manteo
Southern Shores Town Council
Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10:00 a.m. (regular meeting), followed by a special meeting at 11:00 a.m., Pitts Center, 5377 N. Virginia Dare Trail
Nags Head Board of Commissioners
Wednesday, September 2, 2026, 9:00 a.m., Municipal Complex, 5401 S. Croatan Highway
Duck Town Council
Wednesday, September 2, 2026, 1:00 p.m., Paul F. Keller Meeting Hall, 1200 Duck Road
Kill Devil Hills Board of Commissioners
Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:00 p.m., Town Hall Meeting Room, 102 Town Hall Drive
Dare County Board of Commissioners Review Meeting
Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 3:00 p.m., Manteo