George Hogan has a mission: to stop the Apex Police Department from renewing its contract with Flock, which sells automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), or cameras that track cars by license plate number.
“Last night, I was taking my kids to gymnastics. A six-minute drive,” Hogan said during a recent town council meeting. “On that drive, Apex police and Flock photographed my car 50 times.”
Flock cameras capture six to 12 images of each car that passes, noting the car’s make, model, color, and “unique features like roof racks and bumper stickers,” according to the company’s website. That information is then stored in a central database, along with data from tens of thousands of other cameras across the country, creating a widespread network for tracking drivers.
“The standard for Apex cannot be ‘Is this technically legal?’” Hogan said. “The standard has to be ‘Is this wise, is this necessary, is this who we are?’”
Apex isn’t alone; hundreds of Flock cameras are deployed around the Triangle, according to crowd-sourced maps. And neither is Hogan. Residents in Hillsborough and Pittsboro have recently raised concerns about the cameras. The town of Hillsborough cancelled its Flock contract last year “due to concerns about data privacy.” And Chatham County cancelled its contract just last week, ABC11 reported.
“We don’t have the volume of crime that warrants a surveillance system that observes everyone, anywhere, at any time,” Hogan told the INDY. “There’s no justification in Apex, no justification anywhere in NC. The ultimate outcome here is that they [Flock cameras] need to be removed.”
Apex approved its contract for 10 Flock cameras on Jan. 14, 2025, and the cameras were installed later that year. The contract expires in January 2027 unless the town council renews it. Apex Police Chief Ryan Johansen says these ALPRs help track stolen cars, which are connected to the “vast majority” of crimes committed in Apex, he said during a work session in January 2026.
Since Apex signed its contract with Flock, however, news outlets, civil liberties organizations, and amateur sleuths have revealed misuse of the Flock system in other towns across the United States, prompting community pushback.
In May 2025, news broke that ICE was accessing data from Flock’s nationwide network of cameras through local police departments. That same month, tech news site 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer had searched the Flock network for a woman who had an abortion. In November, an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that more than 50 law enforcement agencies had used Flock to monitor protests, including No Kings demonstrations.
“We worry that, essentially, it is mass surveillance,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the INDY. It collects data on passing cars “without individualized suspicion of wrongdoing,” he added.
“I don’t think Americans would love it if there was a police officer standing on their street 24 hours a day, writing down every time they drove by,” Stanley said. “And not only somebody on their street, but on every block in a city, writing down everywhere they’re going. And yet, that’s basically what this technology does.”
In response to a request for comment, Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin wrote in an email to the INDY that, “Flock builds its products with privacy in mind. We believe public safety and privacy can coexist when technology is designed thoughtfully and backed by accountability.”
What is Flock?
Around town, you can spot Flock cameras by looking for small, rectangular black boxes mounted on tall poles, typically alongside small solar panels.
Police generally don’t release the locations of these cameras because it would allow people to circumvent the system—but they are often posted at major intersections or throughways. Johansen said the Apex Police Department places ALPRs in areas where more crime occurs.
One concern Stanley has, though, is that these cameras will be disproportionately deployed in low-income neighborhoods or neighborhoods of color, as has historically been the case with law enforcement surveillance.
In the past, police departments have used ALPRs locally, checking data against “hotlists” of cars that were stolen or associated with criminal activity. What makes Flock different is its cloud service.
“[The company] gives you the option of having the ability to search, not just the data collected by your devices locally, but also devices in your state or across the country,” said Stanley. “And you can only do the nationwide searches if you allow your data to be, in turn, searchable nationwide.”
Activists and civil liberty organizations across the U.S. have obtained public records that give an incomplete picture of how Flock cameras are being used. One dataset from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, for example, shows instances when its Flock cameras were included in searches by other law enforcement agencies, including in North Carolina.
More than 85 North Carolina agencies searched Danville’s Flock cameras from June 2024 to May 2025, including the Raleigh and Fuquay-Varina police departments, according to the dataset. One search by the Raleigh Police Department covered more than 6,200 Flock networks, including Danville’s, and more than 76,000 devices, the data shows.
How Many Flock Cameras Are in the Triangle?
Across Raleigh, some 60 Flock cameras are in place, according to DeFlock, an open-source mapping project that allows community members to report the location of ALPRs. They are mostly spread out across the city, including downtown, North Hills, Millbrook, and Six Forks Road.
But not all Flock cameras are owned or operated by local police departments. Some are owned by private businesses, homeowners’ associations, or residents. The Raleigh Police Department owns and operates only 32 of those cameras, according to its Flock “transparency portal.”
Most suburbs of Raleigh also have Flock cameras. In addition to the 10 in Apex, there are a dozen or so in Cary, including seven set up around local Lowe’s and Home Depot stores. Lowe’s and Home Depot, which have shared Flock data with law enforcement, are often the target of immigration raids—including one in Cary in November 2025.
The Cary Police Department (CPD) doesn’t own or operate these Flock cameras, according to town business specialist Colette Sweeney. But Cary police can access them due to an agreement with private property owners that took effect March 2025.
The Garner Police Department owns and operates 20, according to its transparency portal, while the Fuquay-Varina Police Department has 16. There are also between 20 and 30 cameras in Holly Springs, Knightdale, and Wake Forest, according to DeFlock.
Meanwhile, Durham has about 46 cameras and there are another 23 around Raleigh-Durham International Airport and Brier Creek.
Are North Carolina Flock Cameras Being Accessed by Federal Agents?
Flock usage logs show information about the agency conducting the search, the officer’s name, the time of search, the license plate searched (often redacted), and the justification for the search.
The INDY found that “ICE” was listed as the reason for at least two searches by the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) from September 2024 to February 2025, according to usage logs obtained by others through public records requests and published on MuckRock. The RPD also conducted searches for specific FBI cases, although the majority of searches were for “wanted person.”
The INDY didn’t find any evidence Cary cameras had been searched on behalf of ICE, examining usage logs provided by the town in response to a public records request. Only one search—of the more than 3,000 conducted by Cary PD between March 1, 2025, and April 15, 2026—seemed related to a federal investigation, with a note reading “fed case.”
While Apex police allow its data to be searchable by other law enforcement agencies, “we only share with local police departments who we know are engaged in the same business we are,” Police Chief Johansen said at the January work session.
“We do not share with federal entities, hard stop,” Johnasen, the Apex police chief, added. “We don’t share our data with the FBI, we don’t share our data with DHS, we don’t share our data with ICE. We just don’t do it.”
How is Flock Used?
The INDY submitted public records requests for Flock usage logs from the Raleigh, Durham, Apex, and Cary police departments. The Raleigh and Apex requests are pending, while the Durham Police Department said Flock usage logs “constitute a record of a criminal investigation … and are not public records.”
The Cary PD provided usage logs, but did not include information about the license plate numbers searched or the specific time and date of searches—citing the same North Carolina law that protects certain information from becoming public because it is part of a criminal investigation.
The usage logs show about 3,200 searches conducted by Cary PD in a little more than a year. Roughly 39% of those searches were connected to a specific case number. But another 58% included no notes about why the search was conducted.
The Apex PD, meanwhile, performed thousands of Flock searches—all with the search reason redacated—between August 2025 and March 2026, according to usage logs obtained by independent watchdog website Have I Been Flocked and shared with the INDY.
In police departments across the country, search reasons can be blank or vague, said Dave Maass, investigations director for the EFF. EFF is a national nonprofit that “defends civil liberties in the digital world,” according to its website.
“There are millions of searches where there’s not even enough information to determine whether the search was valid or not,” Maass said.
Back in Apex, the police department has taken some steps to address these concerns. At the January work session, Johansen said he had created a standard operating procedure requiring officers “to enter a case number or an incident number, and a detailed description of the reason they are accessing the database to run a license plate.”
As more people push back against Flock cameras in their communities, some local governments have refused to renew their contracts with the company, while some states have put in place laws to restrict the use of ALPRs and address privacy issues.
Others, including local police departments like Apex PD, have put safeguards in place in an attempt to address community concerns about privacy. But in Maass’ opinion, no number of safeguards is enough.
“You can add training on and say, ‘Don’t do this.’ You can add two-factor authentication. You can have an audit system in place. You can reduce the retention period [of the data] from 30 days to two days, or one day, or 30 seconds,” said Maass.
“But even once you’ve done all of that, and it is really, really narrow, who can access the ALPR system, ultimately, you’re still reliant on a third party company. If that data is still there, it can be abused.”
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