While towns across the state argued about their own contracts, the General Assembly made the state’s highway plate reader program permanent, opened it to every law enforcement agency in North Carolina, and authorized fixed cameras across roughly 78% of the state’s roadways. It was not a bill anyone got to vote on separately. It was a section of the budget, signed July 7, 2026.
The program began as a limited SBI pilot. The budget turned it into permanent infrastructure. Four changes matter.
What was a time-limited trial of automated license plate readers in North Carolina Department of Transportation rights-of-way is now standing authority. There is no sunset to let lapse and no renewal vote to organise around.
The State Bureau of Investigation may enter agreements on behalf of local law enforcement agencies. A department that never went to its own council for approval can now reach cameras in state rights-of-way through the SBI instead. This is the same structural problem Apex found in its own records, moved up a level: the query does not require the camera.
Authorization covers all state-owned roads, which is roughly 78% of North Carolina roadways. Municipal streets are the remainder. That ratio is the single most important number on this page, and section 3 explains why.
Captured plate data may not be preserved more than 90 days from capture. A sworn preservation request can extend a specific plate, a specific camera and a specific window, potentially a year at a time.
For comparison, the Apex contract specifies 30 days, and Flock’s own announced default is now seven. The state standard is three times what Apex agreed to and roughly thirteen times the vendor’s current default.
The state program alone, while still a pilot, ran 140 camera locations and recorded more than 152 million plate reads in about eight months as of March 2026. That is the pilot. The budget removed the ceiling.
Set against that, the case made for the program is narrow. Raleigh Police reported 227 stolen vehicle alerts from three cameras in state rights-of-way between July 1, 2025 and January 31, 2026. That is the strongest public number supporters have offered, and it is worth taking seriously as an argument. It is also worth asking what share of 152 million reads it represents, and how many of those alerts were correct. The largest municipal audit of that question in the country, at LAPD, found a 32.3% false-alert rate on stolen vehicle hits. The audit and what a false hit costs a driver →
This is the part most local campaigns have not caught up to, and getting it wrong in front of a council will cost you the room.
A municipal ordinance governs the municipality. It can prohibit the Town from buying, installing or operating plate readers, prohibit Town departments and contractors from doing so, and prohibit Town police from querying outside ALPR networks. Those are real and they are enforceable.
It cannot remove a camera the State installs in an NCDOT right-of-way. State rights-of-way are not municipal property, and the SBI’s authority comes from state law, not from your town’s consent. A town that bans ALPR outright will still have state cameras on the state-maintained roads running through it.
Anyone who tells you a local ordinance ends plate surveillance in your town is overselling it, and the first person to point that out will be the vendor.
What a local ban does accomplish, precisely:
This is not an isolated fight and it is not a partisan one. A sheriff pulled his own proposal in Granville County.
Not exhaustive. Western North Carolina in particular has more activity than any single tracker has captured. If your town is fighting this and is not here, tell us and we will add it.
The provision was never debated as legislation on its own. That is the argument for taking it back out and making it stand or fall in daylight. Concretely, ask your House member and your Senator for three things:
Not a moratorium, not a stricter contract, not a better policy. A prohibition in the code, written to the capability rather than to the brand, and covering outside queries. The text is below and it is free to take.
This is the ordinance Apex residents are asking their own Council to adopt, written generically. Replace the bracketed terms. It is drafted from seven principles we arrived at after months of trying and failing to write a workable set of conditions instead.
The [Town/County] of [NAME] shall not procure, install, operate, maintain, fund or renew any automated license plate reader system, and no department, officer, employee, agent or contractor acting on behalf of the [Town/County] shall do so.
“Automated license plate reader system” means any device or system that automatically captures, reads, records or databases vehicle license plate characters, or that generates a searchable record of vehicle attributes sufficient to identify a specific vehicle, including make, model, colour, or other distinguishing features. This definition applies regardless of vendor or product name, and regardless of whether the device is fixed, mobile, trailer-mounted, vehicle-mounted, aircraft or drone-carried, or provided as a feature within a broader public safety software platform.
No department, officer, employee, agent or contractor of the [Town/County] shall access, query, request, or receive the results of a query of any automated license plate reader system operated by another government agency, another jurisdiction, or any private entity, whether directly, through a shared platform, or by requesting that another agency perform the query on its behalf.
Within [30] days of adoption, all automated license plate reader data previously collected by or on behalf of the [Town/County] shall be permanently and irreversibly destroyed, and the [Manager/Chief] shall certify the destruction in writing to the governing body and to the public. Allowing data to expire under a vendor retention setting does not satisfy this section.
The [Manager] shall certify compliance with this ordinance in writing to the governing body annually, in open session.
Any resident aggrieved by a violation of this ordinance may bring a civil action in North Carolina state court for injunctive relief and may recover reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs upon prevailing.
If any provision of this ordinance is held invalid, the remainder shall continue in effect. Nothing in this ordinance is intended to authorize or ratify the operation of any automated license plate reader system within [NAME] by the State of North Carolina or any other entity outside the [Town/County]’s jurisdiction.
We are one town. Several of these have been at it longer, cover more ground, or have resources we do not, and the statewide picture is better assembled from all of them than from any one.
Four North Carolina jurisdictions ended their contracts in five months, and none of them needed the legislature’s permission. Start with the meeting closest to you.
If you are in Apex, speak September 22 →DeFlock Apex is an independent resident-led project in Apex, North Carolina. This page is written for the whole state and is free to copy, quote or republish without asking. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in public: contact@deflockapex.org
deflockapex.org · Press kit · The industry · The audit log · Protect your own data · Speak September 22