Former Macon County sheriff’s deputy Jonathan Bean searched the county’s Flock network more than 3,500 times during the two years that the county had a contract with the technology company, according to records obtained by Carolina Public Press. Bean was fired last month for misuse of the automatic license plate reader, or ALPR, software and is currently under investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
The county Sheriff’s Office published its network audit log on its website on Nov. 9. A number of individuals had requested the data, Jonathan Phillips, a part-time deputy in the office, told CPP, which is why the sheriff’s office decided to post it.
CPP had filed a request on Oct. 22 for the audit logs, which track how law enforcement agencies search their Flock system’s different networks. Digital publication of a public records request satisfies state public records law under Chapter 132 of the North Carolina General Statutes.
Flock technologies are typically leased, and not owned. When Macon County terminated its contract with the technology company by a unanimous vote of its county commissioners on July 14, it had three months left on its contract. The county ended the contract and removed all cameras, except the ones operated by Macon County Schools, according to records obtained by CPP.
In a letter to Flock’s legal department dated July 21, Macon County Manager Warren Cabe gave the company notice that the county would be terminating all contracts and service agreements. It also said that the county did not plan to renew it. The county sheriff and finance director copied on the message. The county first signed its contract with Flock in Nov. 2023, which cost $31,950 for the first two years.
Tracking two years of searches
Macon is a mostly rural mountain county in the far southwestern portion of North Carolina, on the Georgia state line and just touching the northwest corner of South Carolina. It has about 39,000 residents, according to recent Census estimates, though the seasonal population, especially in the resort town of Highlands, can push this a bit higher at times.
The Flock audit logs published by the sheriff’s office show 13,698 network searches from Jan. 1, 2024, to Oct. 13, 2026. A mobile lookup around midnight on July 15, just hours after the contract was cancelled, is the recorded last search on the logs.
According to the recently released Flock audit log for Macon County, Bean performed 28% of all system searches during the two years that the county Flock contract was in use.
Aside from the audit, records directly related to Bean’s termination were not released due to the ongoing nature of the investigation into him. Bean also declined a request for comment from CPP.
The logs record each time that a law enforcement professional accesses the automatic license plate reader, or ALPR, system’s network searching for a vehicle’s description, or a license plate number. Flock internal communications call this a “vehicle fingerprint.”
For example, law enforcement can search for a vehicle’s make, model, color or other distinctive characteristics across the shared Flock network at any point in time. Searches can reach Flock systems in other jurisdictions and states, depending on what sharing agreements that a law enforcement agency has.
In the released 159-page log from Macon County, sheriff’s deputies must input their name, the reason for their search, the total number of other networks searched and the time frame of the search. At one point, select searches spanned 6,688 other networks. Other searches were smaller, some limited to just Macon’s own network.
The reasons that the logs give for searches include “narcotics/drugs,” “welfare check,” “missing/endangered person,” “traffic infraction” and simply “investigation” or “case,” just to name a few. Some reasons have been redacted from the published log. Some do not have a name at all.
Over the two years that Macon County maintained its Flock contract, naming conventions differed greatly for searches of the same kind. In 2024, most searches were generically labelled as “investigations,” whereas by 2026 most searches were labelled with more specific categories. In 2026, only five searches’ reasons were entered as “investigation.”
Months of backlash over Flock use
Over the past several months, several communities across North Carolina have decided to end their contracts with Flock Safety. It’s an issue that’s neither regional nor partisan. More than 120,000 Flock cameras are in operation in the country across 49 states, according to the company.
Privacy advocates say the technology violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches by the government. Some law enforcement officers, including Macon County Sheriff Brent Holbrooks, prior to the county’s cancellation decision, have defended it as a necessary tool for investigating and solving major crimes.
Flock products have been used to locate suspects in major crimes nationwide. CNN reported that Flock cameras were used to locate the suspect in the Brown University shooting that occurred on Dec. 18, 2025, for instance. The company claims that its services located more than 10,000 missing persons in 2025, and their website hosts a tool called the “Solved Stories Hub,” where users can search for cases in their area that were assisted by Flock technologies.
No Macon County ZIP codes yielded results for those solved stories, but there were some regionally. Western North Carolina results included the capture of a bank robbery suspect in 2023 and a 2025 car break-in suspect in Black Mountain, as well as the location of a Henderson County resident suspected of felony child abuse in 2026.
An Oklahoma federal district judge ruled on Oct. 1 in the criminal case United States v. Kyle, that an officer’s decision to search a month’s worth of historical ALPR data violated the terms of a reasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. This case is just one that reflects the broader constitutional concerns surrounding use of electronic surveillance. In United States v. Jones and Carpenter v. United States, the US Supreme Court recognized Fourth Amendment protections against certain forms of prolonged GPS monitoring and historical cell-site location information.
According to a recent analysis from Pew Research Center, about 80% of all Flock cameras are situated in urban areas, and five large-population states — California, Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio — hold about half of all Flock cameras in the country. The analysis also found that agencies that publicly release their Flock data in a transparency portal differ in the data they release. When Macon County’s contract was active, it did not maintain a portal of this kind.
Flock, and in turn law enforcement agencies across the country, have faced a backlash for instances of misuse of the technology. Some officers have used the Flock system to track current and former romantic partners. In August, The Washington Post reported that at least 50 officers nationwide had been charged with misusing Flock or other systems.
CPP previously reported that in North Carolina, a deputy in Brunswick County was charged in October with felony counts of misuse of the technology. An officer was charged in Charlotte in late July for accessing the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s Flock system for “non-law enforcement purposes.”
In Macon County, little information has been forthcoming about former deputy Bean, other than his alleged misuse of the technology, which was brought to the attention of Sheriff Holbrooks on Oct. 16 from an outside agency. His termination was announced in a press release four days later.
NC Public Records Law and ALPR data
The Macon County Sheriff’s Office released its ALPR policy, dated to December 2025, to CPP on Nov. 10. They returned additional records, including their contract with Flock, the termination letter sent to the company and memorandums of understanding with the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the NCSBI on Nov. 12.
The MOU with NCDOT concerned the implementation of Flock cameras on the interchange of US 64 and US 23 in the town of Franklin. The memorandum with SBI is dated on Feb. 24, 2025, and establishes Chief Deputy Dereck Jones as the point of contact for matters about the technology and establishes guidelines between the county and the state.
License plate data captured by ALPRs are considered confidential under North Carolina general statutes, and thus not considered a public record, as defined by General Statute 132-1. North Carolina additionally adopted a statute on the use of ALPRs like Flock in the passage of this year’s state budget that requires law enforcement agencies using the technology to adopt a policy governing its use.
The MOU between Macon County and the SBI says that in the event of a public records request for data shared between the parties, law enforcement agencies should notify the NCSBI ALPR coordinator.
A number of individuals, including a local independent news publication called Macon Media, were met with a cost estimate of $4,015 to $4,265 for producing hefty public records requests with all Flock contracts and correspondence with the company. On Oct. 9, Eric Ridenhour, the county attorney, wrote to requesters with the cost estimate and added that the Chief Deputy would be meeting with the county’s IT director to see if digital production of the records was possible.
The audit log was published a month later, but the contract and other materials have not yet been publicly released. While plate data is not a public record under North Carolina law, audit logs and contracts constitute public records, assuming that they don’t pertain to an active investigation.
Websites like ‘Have I Been Flocked’ and local DeFlock organizations have compiled databases and audit logs from law enforcement agencies across the country. These are a combination of data from citizen public records requests and municipalities that use transparency portals to publicly release their Flock data, said Mark Spencer Williams, an attorney who started a petition to remove Flock cameras from Wilmington.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 