Articles Tagged with Government Surveillance

Atkinson, a Pender County municipality, appears to have adopted North Carolina’s first Flock camera ban, with an ordinance prohibiting automated license plate reader cameras within its corporate limits. WECT reports that commissioners approved the ordinance October 1, 2026, with an October 2 effective date, and describes it as the first prohibition of its kind in the state. Even in small-town North Carolina, a “Flock ban” raises legal issues that go well beyond whether a local group of politicos wants or likes police surveillance, in whatever form it may take. Whether a town can prohibit a private property owner from installing an automated license plate reader on the owner’s own land is problematic at best.

Two legal issues deserve consideration before anyone draws a conclusion from the vote. The first separates a town controlling its own equipment from a town prohibiting private installations. The second concerns terminology. “Flock camera” has become a catch-all term for every ALPR and ordinary video system on the market, including equipment no government agency owns or maintains, and the label does not tell you what a particular camera does. If you own a restaurant, a store, or a parking lot, that difference may matter. A camera recording a cashier is not an automated license plate reader. A homeowners association system that uses software to read plates as vehicles enter and leave a neighborhood and the surrounding roads, an arrangement more common than most drivers realize, is exactly the kind of private installation the ordinance appears to reach, even if unintentionally so.

A town ordinance also has a geographic limit. Atkinson’s action clearly does not create a statewide prohibition on restaurant or retail security cameras. The question is what Atkinson can prohibit within its own jurisdiction, and whether its authority supports the prohibition it adopted. One might reasonably infer a general prohibition is subject to challenge as overbroad and void for vagueness. It reaches independently operated private equipment without exception, and it supplies no definition of the cameras it bans, leaving enforcement officials to decide what qualifies. Indeed, the ordinance does not specify a penalty for noncompliance. State law enacted by the General Assembly may also preempt a local ordinance of that scope.