End Flock surveillance
in Surry County.

Driving to work, visiting family or picking up your children shouldn't leave a record for the county to search later. Flock cameras collect vehicle sightings, including trips by people who aren't suspected of a crime. We're asking Surry County to end its Flock program and remove county-operated cameras.

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What are license plate readers?

Automated license plate readers, often called ALPRs, photograph passing vehicles. The system reads the plate and saves the image with the date, time and camera location. Flock also identifies vehicle details such as make, model, color and distinguishing features. A car can be recorded whether or not its driver is suspected of doing anything wrong. How Flock describes its cameras

The records show when a vehicle passed a camera. Searching several sightings together lets a user look back at its movements. North Carolina law prohibits using ALPR data to enforce traffic violations. Read the state law

What do we know about Surry County?

The county's released order form lists eight Falcon readers, one Falcon Flex and $27,500 in annual recurring charges. The public records also include invoices, a use policy and audit exports. You can read those documents, the state law and the sources behind this explanation on the Evidence page.

See the county records

What can the software do?

Flock can search for a vehicle by its plate number or by details such as make, model, color, bumper stickers, visible damage, and whether the plate is missing or covered. A readable plate number isn’t always needed to find a vehicle. Flock’s vehicle-search description

Records from different places and times can be searched together. Repeated sightings can help someone work out where you live, work, worship or take your children to school. Shared camera records can extend those searches across agencies when access is authorized. Flock’s platform

Flock’s optional Enhanced LPR package adds Multi-Geo Search, which finds vehicles seen at selected places and times, and Convoy Search, which looks for vehicles traveling together. These tools can expose patterns and possible associations between vehicles. Enhanced search tools

Flock also holds a patent describing facial-recognition searches across a network of cameras. One example matches a person seen in store-camera footage with footage from home-security cameras. Flock currently says FreeForm does not use facial or biometric recognition. The patent documents a system design that reaches beyond license plates and raises serious questions about future expansion. Patent · Current product description

Why we're asking for removal

Ordinary people shouldn’t be tracked in the name of safety. Driving to work, visiting family or taking a child to school should not put your movements into a police-searchable database. We don’t accept routine surveillance as the price of living here. Surry County should end the Flock program and remove county-operated cameras.