Private Eyes: 5 things an N&O investigation into NC license plate cameras revealed

Automated license plate reader cameras can be hard to spot if you’re just driving by.

But along hundreds of North Carolina streets, these shoebox-sized devices are quietly capturing details on every passing vehicle, data easily made accessible to law enforcement officers across the country.

Until now, no one in North Carolina had a full picture of how widespread these cameras have become. But a News & Observer investigation shows they’re a much more common tool for law enforcement, who say the devices can act as a force multiplier for solving crime.

In our series, Private Eyes, we show these cameras have generated a lot of success stories for closing cases — recovering stolen vehicles, finding missing children, even arresting an attempted murder suspect who fled out of state. But the embrace of these devices by law enforcement has also raised serious privacy concerns from groups worried about cases of misuse, overpolicing and misidentification leading to arrests.

Here’s a look at five major things our reporting over the last several months revealed.

From rare to regular practice in just a few years

Flock Safety got its start in 2017. It didn’t officially register to do business in North Carolina until 2021.

Yet the company has in that time signed contracts with at least 80 law enforcement agencies across the state, from the Nags Head Police Department to the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, The N&O found. Our survey of police and sheriff’s departments statewide has so far tallied more than 700 of Flock’s fixed cameras on North Carolina roads, a count that far exceeds any of the company’s competitors, like Rekor and Motorola.

And because Flock doesn’t sell its cameras — it leases them — that can mean big money for the private company.

Contracts with several North Carolina clients show the cameras cost between $2,000 to $3,000 each annually. So a conservative estimate is that North Carolina law enforcement agencies are spending upwards of $1.49 million on the devices every year.

And it’s not just law enforcement. Flock markets its cameras to companies and HOAs, which as we explored in our series sparked controversy in one Knightdale neighborhood.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley has discussed that explosive growth nationally, telling an Atlanta podcast in 2023 that the company has gone from “single-digit millions to over a hundred-million in revenue in four years.”

Private Eyes: How we tracked the spread of license plate readers across North Carolina

ALPR cameras don’t have the same safeguards

From the video camera inside Target to the doorbell camera on your neighbor’s front porch, Americans are already awash in surveillance.

So what makes automated license plate readers from Flock or any other vendor different?

Access, for one.

With some exceptions, the vast majority of privately operated video surveillance isn’t readily available for law enforcement to search or review. Camera owners can turn it over on request, sure. But forcing the matter requires a warrant issued by the court, based on probable cause.

What if police wanted GPS location data tracked by your phone? That also requires a search warrant served on Google (at least it did before the company announced in late 2023 it would cut off access to such data).

Could detectives acquire your mobile device’s location via cell towers? Or attach a GPS device to your car? Both techniques require search warrants, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

In North Carolina, state laws place protections on license plate data captured for certain non-law enforcement purposes.

Toll cameras, for instance, capture and retain images of vehicles and license plates for 90 days to bill drivers. But the agency requires a subpoena to provide police with any of that footage, says N.C. Turnpike Authority spokesperson Logen Hodges.

When police officers search for license plates or other vehicle data through an ALPR system like Flock, they don’t need a warrant — or any other external oversight. And although state law now makes misuse of ALPR devices a misdemeanor, privacy advocates are concerned.

Flock and police departments argue, however, that license plate readers capture information available in public spaces where there is no expectation of privacy — the equivalent of an officer standing on a corner to jot down every plate number.

Across North Carolina, transparency isn’t consistent

Much of The N&O’s reporting was built on the collection of thousands of data points from Flock Safety’s transparency portals, websites that provide basic details on a department’s use of the cameras. That’s everything from how many cameras they have installed to the number of cars they’ve detected in the last month or so.

The portals are optional, and not all of Flock’s clients have committed to using them.

Flock did provide a list of about 30 North Carolina agencies using the transparency portals. That’s far short of the 80 or more agencies The N&O independently counted that are using the service in the state so far.

A number of law enforcement agencies told us through our survey that they have no plans to use the sites.

Case in point: police at UNC-Chapel Hill. The university, which fought to keep its contracts with Flock Safety secret from the public before relenting earlier this year, “has not discussed the creation of a transparency portal,” according to spokesperson Kevin Best.

The N&O found more than 360 of the sites across the country. But it’s hard to know how many of the company’s 5,000-plus law enforcement clients actually have the portals activated because the company hasn’t told us.

Neighbors watching neighbors? HOA vehicle surveillance irks some in NC neighborhood

Oversight in other states exceeds regulation here

North Carolina has a law on the books that regulates the use of automated license plate readers.

The rules limit retention of license plate data to 90 days and prohibit its use for enforcing simple traffic violations. The law also requires agencies using these systems to have a written policy that addresses, among other things, training, oversight and “annual or more frequent auditing.”

But the regulations don’t require anyone to oversee whether agencies follow their own rules.

And North Carolina law enforcement agencies aren’t always forthcoming about how they abide by those rules.

The Raleigh Police Department, for example, has provided no evidence that an annual audit of its ALPR system has been completed.

New Jersey, by contrast, issues a report publicly through its attorney general’s office on which law enforcement agencies completed audits and which saw violations and complaints.

The limit on how long North Carolina agencies can keep data, meanwhile, pales in comparison to New Hampshire.

The Granite State — whose motto is “Live Free or Die — requires law enforcement to purge license plate data after 3 minutes. New Hampshire is one of only three states where Flock does not operate.

What’s next for these cameras on state highways? Unclear.

Over the last several years, lawmakers introduced bills to undo a decade-old legal interpretation that prohibited automated license plate readers from state-maintained roads and highways. Those efforts failed repeatedly over objections by Republican legislators with privacy concerns about the technology.

In early 2023, a new version of the bill drew support from law enforcement, including Raleigh Police Chief Estella Patterson and Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone, who testified to lawmakers that the devices were critical tools for fighting crime.

The legislature approved the measure in October, allowing the devices on N.C. Department of Transportation right-of-ways through a pilot program run by DOT and the State Bureau of Investigation. The SBI, either on its own or on behalf of a local law enforcement agency, would need to enter into an agreement with NCDOT on where to place the devices.

That will likely mean more ALPR cameras along 80,000 miles of North Carolina streets. But when those new cameras will start appearing — that’s hard to say.

Despite the law going into effect in January, neither agency has not provided any detail on how they’ll implement it.

“Discussions and meetings continue” about the pilot project’s implementation, SBI spokesperson Angie Grube said in early April. After The N&O checked in last week, Grube said the agency had nothing to announce.

As of Thursday, NCDOT has yet to receive any requests to install the devices, according to spokesperson Aaron Moody.