u/Global_Honey7289

Two things happened this week in the two school districts that get the least coverage around here, and both land before Monday.

In Burgaw, Pender County Schools found mold-like growth in multiple classrooms at C.F. Pope Elementary. The district announced closures Aug. 17. It says the growth appeared while the school's HVAC system was shut down for planned maintenance. Carpets were pulled and cleaned, rooms were hand-cleaned, and the rest of the campus was inspected with nothing similar found. Initial air testing finished Aug. 19 - the district said "many of the results were encouraging" but ordered more. Additional testing is set for Aug. 21 with results expected Aug. 22. Tonight's open house goes ahead; teachers from the affected rooms are meeting families in the gym instead. Those classrooms stay closed Monday until testing clears them.

In Brunswick County, the school district is not renewing its contract with the YMCA of Southeastern North Carolina for after-school programming, summer camp and full-day camp on school property. BCS cited concerns about student supervision and safety, said it has "a responsibility to carefully review those concerns," and that "a change in direction is appropriate." The YMCA called the concerns "serious," said child safety "is one of our highest priorities," and said it is reinforcing its procedures and hopes to partner again. Neither side described any specific incident, citing student and personnel privacy. Not published: how many students or schools are affected, or what replaces the programming.

All three districts - New Hanover, Brunswick and Pender - start Monday, Aug. 24. Pender's board moved that date back two weeks from Aug. 10 after parent feedback, which is the only reason Pope had a maintenance window to have a problem in.

Two districts, two very different disclosure postures in the same week. Pender put out dates, a cause and a testing schedule. Brunswick named a reason and stopped.

Brunswick says it can't discuss specifics because students and personnel are involved. Where is the line between protecting a child's privacy and telling a parent
enough to judge whether their own kid was safe?

More broadly: when a district cancels a service families depend on four days before school, does it owe the public a reason it can prove, or is "we reviewed it and made a change" good enough?

Credit first — and we mean it. Under public pressure, a week before the County Commission meets, Sheriff McMahon announced real changes: data retention cut from 90 days to 30, a monthly audit (up from annual), and a public transparency portal. Those are wins, and they happened because people spoke up. Genuine thanks to the Sheriff. Then we held it to his own standard: "Technology should never operate without accountability." His own portal, by the numbers:

36 total cameras — but only 19 are license plate readers. That leaves 17 unexplained — the live-video Condor cameras he still calls "just a plate reader." (We've located and mapped 5 of the 8 Condors, plus an integrated Axis camera.)

774,174 vehicles logged in 30 days; 815 searches — but that's only the Sheriff's Office's own searches.

Camera locations are still secret.

The three questions his portal doesn't answer: what the cameras are, where they are, and who is searching them.

That last one is the big one. The monthly audit only covers the Sheriff's ~800 searches — it can't touch the outside agencies that drive most of the traffic. From five other NC agencies' unredacted records, about 90% of searches come from outside North Carolina, with Houston TX PD the single biggest searcher. New Hanover still redacts who's searched us — that record is now in pre-litigation mediation.

The audit paradox: the office has already asked the public to discount its own audit labels — calling barred "traffic infraction" searches "mislabeled." You can't hold the audit up as the safeguard and wave off its contents in the same month.

And you can't even archive it: the portal is walled behind Cloudflare — both the Wayback Machine and archive.today get a 403. A transparency page the public can't keep a copy of.

He read a statement and took no questions. The public still hasn't had a say. That's what Aug 17 is for. New Hanover County Commission — Monday, Aug 17, 4:00 PM, Historic Courthouse, Room 301, Wilmington. Public comment is at the end; sign up in person by 3:30.

Read / sources:

WECT has a follow-up on the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office and its Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras.

The short version — after months of public questions, and three county commissioners raising concerns, Sheriff McMahon read a prepared statement announcing: data retention cut from 90 days to 30 a monthly internal audit (previously annual) a new public "transparency portal"

Per WECT, he answered one question and then declined to take others. A few things stood out from the county's own public portal: It lists 36 total cameras, but only 19 as license plate readers — with no explanation of what the other 17 are. The camera locations still aren't disclosed. The "searches" figure on the portal reflects the Sheriff's Office's own searches. WECT notes a separate records request — how many times other agencies have searched the New Hanover system — is still pending. For context, Flock networks are typically shared, so agencies in other states can search a local network. That's been a recurring concern nationally.

Curious what people here think: is this the right level of transparency for a government surveillance system, or should the camera locations and the list of agencies that can search the data be public?

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With two North Carolina officers charged in the past couple weeks for misusing the Flock license-plate camera system — a Mooresville officer accused of running it 31 times to track her ex's new partner, and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer in a separate case — the conversation has shifted from "does this get abused" to "what do we do about it."

WBTV ran a piece where a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer of about 30 years, now a consultant, predicted the state will step in with "additional measures" — audit trails, more supervision, tighter access controls. So even the law-enforcement side is basically conceding that the current safeguard (an after-the-fact audit) isn't enough on its own.

I've been reading up on what "regulation" would actually accomplish, and a few things nag at me:

The audits are run by the agency on itself, after the searches already happened. And in NC, the results are usually a confidential personnel record — so even when an audit catches misuse, the public generally can't see it unless it turns into a criminal charge. The two arrests are visible; the ten other Mooresville officers reportedly under investigation are not.

The data doesn't stay in North Carolina. Public records people have pulled show that most searches hitting NC cameras come from out-of-state agencies — Houston PD, others in Texas/Georgia/Florida, even the FBI. NC can't audit or bind those agencies. A retention cap or audit rule passed here doesn't reach what happens once the data is queried from another state.

And that's not hypothetical: California passed the "model" law years ago banning out-of-state sharing, and it's been widely reported (CalMatters, EFF, and the state's own AG) that agencies broke it anyway and shared with ICE and other states. If the strictest state can't make its own departments follow the rule, what does a weaker NC version do?

The reason an officer types in for each search is also self-entered — one NC sheriff's office already had to admit some of its "traffic infraction" labels were "mislabeled." And the courts haven't even settled whether this kind of suspicionless mass collection is constitutional; there's a Virginia case on appeal in the Fourth Circuit, which covers us.

So I keep landing on two questions. Is this something you regulate, or something a community just decides it doesn't want? And either way — did any of us actually get asked before it went up across the state?

Curious what other North Carolinians think, especially anyone in a town that already has these.

Disclosure up front: I volunteer with DeFlockILM, a nonpartisan local group that files public-records requests on license-plate cameras and surveillance in the Cape Fear region. Not selling anything, no donations. Everything below is from Pender County's own documents, which we've published in full so you can check me.

The Pender County Sheriff's Office put out a statement today (covered by WWAY and WECT) responding to questions about its Flock cameras. We'd already requested the underlying records, so here's what they actually show:

Unlike New Hanover, Pender's elected Board actually voted for this — which makes them accountable for it. Over in New Hanover County, where this same fight is happening, the Sheriff put a ~3-million-search Flock network on the county using a contract the elected commissioners never voted on. Pender is the opposite: its Board of Commissioners did approve the program, on the record — Brad George, Jerry Groves, Chairman Randy Burton, Brent Springer, and Ken Smith. That's the accountable way to do it… except they approved the $70,600 system as consent-agenda item 8.6 on Jan. 21, 2025 — one block vote alongside a turf planer, a vaccine order, and mosquito-spray chemicals, with no discussion and no public comment (people spoke about ballfield lighting instead). So Pender voters, unlike New Hanover's, know exactly which elected officials signed off — they just didn't get much of a chance to weigh in first. (It was first authorized Dec. 19, 2024, the night newly elected commissioners were sworn in.)

What the Board was told vs. what the records show. The slide deck the Sheriff presented had a "Privacy Commitment" slide promising, word for word, that Flock "never shares or sells data with third parties." But Pender's own search audit shows a single search reaching 6,234 outside camera networks, with agencies in other states — plus the FBI — searching Pender's cameras. Flock's defense is that cop-to-cop sharing isn't "third party." Maybe. But that's not what a commissioner hears in "we never share your data."

It's not just cameras — it's a software platform. The invoices show the county licensed FlockOS Advanced (Flock's real-time crime-center software), plus the cameras and a radar-speed trailer.

Credit where it's due, because accuracy cuts both ways: the Sheriff is right that his cameras don't run facial recognition, and right that the state's NCDOT/SBI right-of-way pilot wasn't available to him when he bought in. We corrected our own writeup on that point once the MOU proved him right.

All of it — invoices, contract, the search audit, the minutes, the presentation slides — is here: [deflockilm.org/pender-sheriff-flock-statement]. Read them against the statement and judge for yourself.

Genuinely curious what Pender folks think — did you know your commissioners voted this through?

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