Who has already said no: the North Carolina tracker

If someone tells Apex Council that another North Carolina town “banned ALPR,” ask which one, and then check whether they ended a contract or wrote a prohibition. In sixteen of the seventeen cases below the answer is a contract.

The distinction that decides this

These five categories are not pedantry. Apex is being asked to choose between them in about eight weeks, and they produce completely different outcomes.

Prohibition

An ordinance banning plate readers as a technology, whatever the vendor. Survives a rebrand and a replacement contract. One NC town.

Contract ended

The town stops using Flock. Nothing stops it buying the same capability from Axon, Motorola or Rekor next year. Eleven NC governments.

Governance

ALPR is permitted but regulated: warrants, retention caps, audits, use bans. Not a ban. One NC county.

Moratorium

A pause on expansion. The existing cameras keep running. One NC town.

Declined

Considered it and said no before buying. Easier than removing a working system. Three NC governments.

The seventeen

Jurisdiction	County	Date	What it was	What was decided	Vote	Confidence
Atkinson	Pender	Oct 1, 2026	Prohibition	Ordinance: “No automated license plate reader cameras shall be installed and located within the corporate limits.” No carve-outs. Grounded in G.S. 160A-174 and Art. I §19.	Not reported	REPORTED
Rockingham County	—	Sep 8, 2026	Governance	Governance ordinance. Bars county spending on ALPR without a public report, 14 days’ notice and a hearing. Requires a judge-signed warrant for every search. Bars traffic-enforcement use. Caps any future program at 18 mobile units. The county owns no cameras.	Unanimous	CONFIRMED
Hillsborough	Orange	Oct 2025	Contract ended	Terminated a two-year, ~$81,500 contract for 10 cameras after closed session. The driver was contract language letting Flock disclose data to “any government entity or third party” on a “good faith belief.” Removal completed Dec 3, 2025.	Not stated	CONFIRMED
Chatham County	—	Apr 20, 2026	Contract ended	Terminated the Sheriff’s contract, $66,700, after debate on retention, third-party access and private-property installs. First Triangle county to act.	Not established	CONFIRMED
Pittsboro	Chatham	May 11, 2026	Contract ended	Terminated outright and barred FY2026–27 funds from continuing it. Nine cameras out by July 1. A motion to keep the system with guardrails attached failed first.	4–1	CONFIRMED
Macon County	—	Mid-July 2026	Contract ended	Ended the ~$47,000 appropriation, let the contract lapse, then voted again to remove. 12 county cameras down early, over the Sheriff’s objection. Cameras at schools stayed.	5–0	CONFIRMED
Davidson County	—	Aug 24, 2026	Contract ended	Terminated the Sheriff’s 25-camera program. All deactivated and removed within 30 days. Year one was $90,750 on federal forfeiture funds.	Unanimous	CONFIRMED
Asheville	Buncombe	Aug 25, 2026	Contract ended	Authorised termination, removal of all 11 cameras, suspension of all city access, searching and sharing, and a surveillance policy review. Kept 162 Axon in-car plate readers.	5–2	CONFIRMED
Dare County	—	Sep 1, 2026	Contract ended	Voted to remove all 14 Sheriff’s Office cameras at 7 locations in unincorporated Dare County, after about two hours of public comment.	Unanimous	CONFIRMED
New Hanover County	—	Sep 8, 2026	Contract ended	Terminated the Sheriff’s $219,000 contract after closed session, moving earlier than planned. Covered the 20 plate readers only; eight Condor PTZ cameras in county parks were excluded and remain active.	4–0	CONFIRMED
Greenville	Pitt	Aug 28, 2026	Declined	Police dropped a planned 10-camera rollout after a packed council meeting. None were installed. An administrative decision following council feedback, not a vote.	No vote	CONFIRMED
Brevard	Transylvania	Sep 2026	Declined	The police chief withdrew her own request for three Axon ALPR cameras after community pushback.	Withdrawn	CONFIRMED
Catawba (town)	Catawba	Sep 2026	Declined	After a 60-day trial, council denied the police funding request, including $3,000 for a single camera, against the chief’s wishes.	Denied	REPORTED
Reidsville	Rockingham	Sep 10, 2026	Contract ended	The Police Department ceased use of its cameras and will not renew. A departmental decision, not a council vote.	No vote	REPORTED
Kitty Hawk	Dare	Aug–Sep 2026	Contract ended	Police wound down the program; the last camera went off in August and the chief is not restarting it. A departmental decision.	No vote	REPORTED
Boone	Watauga	2025–Jul 2026	Moratorium	Council paused all expansion, required a public transparency portal, ended out-of-state sharing except a few Tennessee agencies, and formalised quarterly audits. The cameras stay.	Not reported	REPORTED
UNC Chapel Hill	Orange	Oct–Nov 2023	Contract ended	Terminated a signed contract for 22 cameras, ~$80,000, because Flock was unlicensed under the NC Alarm Systems Licensing Board. Said it remained committed to finding another ALPR vendor. A licensing matter, not privacy.	N/A	CONFIRMED

CONFIRMED means a primary source, the government’s own release or minutes, or strong local news reporting. REPORTED means a single secondary source, in several cases an advocacy tracker, which we name rather than hide. Vote tallies marked “not established” are ones we could not pin down. Full sources at the bottom.

The two facts that matter more than the count

Fact one · a termination is not a ban

Asheville voted out 11 Flock cameras and kept 162 Axon plate readers.

On August 25 Asheville City Council voted 5 to 2 to terminate its Flock contract, remove all 11 cameras and suspend all city access, searching and sharing. It was reported nationally as a city rejecting plate readers.

Three months earlier the same Council had approved a roughly $73,000 contract for 162 Axon in-car automated plate readers, which are still running. The city is also building a $1.1 million Fusus real-time intelligence centre. Carolina Public Press put it plainly: voting out the Flock contract “wouldn’t be likely to rid the city fully of ALPRs.”

This is the single best argument for writing a prohibition rather than cancelling a contract, and it is not ours. It is Asheville’s own record.

Fact two · the middle ground has already been tested

Pittsboro was offered the compromise Apex is now reaching for, and voted it down.

Mayor Jacques Gilbert has said the Apex committee is looking for a middle ground between safety and privacy. A town forty minutes away was offered precisely that, first, as the preferred option.

On May 11 Mayor Kyle Shipp moved to keep Pittsboro’s system running through the contract period with conditions: no additional cameras without board approval, continued bans on use for traffic enforcement, immigration enforcement, reproductive care investigations, facial recognition and monitoring gatherings, 30-day data retention, monthly internal audits, public reporting, and a board review before the contract ended.

That motion failed. Commissioner Candace Hunziker then moved to terminate outright and to bar town funds from continuing it, and the board passed it 4 to 1.

Read that list of conditions again and compare it to what Apex already has. Apex is already at 30-day retention. Pittsboro’s board was handed a stronger policy than Apex operates under today, and concluded it was not enough.

What this means for the Apex ask

Three things follow, and we would rather state them against our own interest than have them put to us at a meeting.

We cannot tell Council that North Carolina towns are banning ALPR. They are cancelling Flock. One town, Atkinson, has written an actual prohibition, it is days old, and we have it from one advocacy source rather than the signed ordinance. We are chasing the certified text and will say so when we have it.
Ending the Apex contract on its own would not clear Apex of plate readers. Three Falcon Flex units are undeployed, the Axon amendment on the same October 1 agenda adds a drone program, and the state has authorised SBI cameras across roughly 78% of North Carolina roadways. A contract decision does not reach any of that.
The queries are the hole. Durham and Cary both operate no cameras of their own and access plate reader data anyway. An ordinance that only bans installation leaves an Apex officer free to ask a neighbouring agency to run the search. That is why the model ordinance has a separate section on outside queries, and why the fallback below is written around the query rather than the camera.

If Council will not prohibit, this is the floor

One North Carolina county has already done it, unanimously, and a federal court has just said something close to it is constitutionally required. Rockingham County’s September 8 ordinance requires a judge-signed warrant for every search of plate reader data. It passed 5 to 0, in a county that owns no cameras, so it is a preventive measure rather than a removal.

On October 1 a federal judge suppressed all the evidence in a drug prosecution because a deputy ran a plate without a warrant and pulled a month of location history. That ruling and the warrant provision we are asking Apex to adopt are the same argument from two directions. It is the narrowest version of our ask and the hardest one to vote against.

What we could not verify

Atkinson’s ordinance text. One advocacy source, which itself notes it had only the copy the board voted on rather than the signed version. This is the most important row in the table and the least verified.
Carrboro. Nothing either way. The Axios Raleigh survey of the Triangle covered Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, Apex, Pittsboro and Hillsborough and did not include it.
Granville County. Often listed as a rejection. It was not. The Sheriff’s 10-camera request was removed from the July 6 agenda for further consideration, and he later said that if implemented he would not opt into national sharing. That is a deferral, and we previously described it loosely ourselves. Corrected.
Vote tallies. Pittsboro was reported 4 to 1 by the Chatham Journal citing the town’s release, and 4 to 2 by WRAL. Macon County’s date is given as July 14 by Carolina Public Press and July 15 by Smoky Mountain News, whose reporter was in the room.

Sources

Primary: Town of Hillsborough · Dare County.
Local news: Carolina Public Press on the western NC backlash and on Asheville’s remaining readers · Mountain Xpress · Chatham Journal on the failed guardrails motion and the 4–1 vote · WUNC · Port City Daily and its follow-up on the Condor cameras · ABC45 on the Rockingham ordinance · WITN · Smoky Mountain News · Axios Raleigh on Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill.
Advocacy trackers, named as such: DeFlockILM’s NC tracker is the only source for Atkinson, Reidsville and Kitty Hawk. We rate those REPORTED for that reason.
Statute: N.C.G.S. Chapter 20, Article 3D, §§ 20-183.30 to 20-183.33. We read it in full. It sets a floor on agency conduct and contains no preemption clause, which is why a local prohibition appears available. That is our reading and one town attorney’s; it is untested in North Carolina and no Attorney General opinion or School of Government guidance addresses it.
If a row here is wrong, or your town belongs on it, tell us: contact@deflockapex.org. We would rather be corrected than cited.

Before December 3

Ask for the prohibition, and the warrant floor

Seventeen governments have acted. Apex can be the second to do it properly.

The model ordinance →