Police Ask Us to Trust Them With Flock, but It Seems We Really Can’t
A Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer’s arrest for allegedly using Flock Safety data without a law-enforcement purpose adds North Carolina to a growing list of Southern states confronting misuse of automated license plate reader systems.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said officer Seth Elliott was taken into custody July 29 after investigators found he allegedly ran an unauthorized query of a North Carolina license plate registration through Flock and CJLEADS. WCNC identifies the officer as Seth Elliott, 25, and reports that he faces one count of illegally accessing a government computer.
Under North Carolina law, willfully accessing a government computer without authorization is a Class H felony under the applicable provision. CJLEADS is a secure state portal that gives criminal-justice professionals access to offender information.
WCNC reports that the SBI notified CMPD of the alleged access June 18. The department placed Elliott on administrative leave four days later. Neither investigators nor available court records have disclosed why the plate was searched. His bond was set at $15,000.
CMPD says it does not own Flock cameras, but its officers can search Flock data collected by other agencies through information-sharing agreements.
31 JULY 2026 UPDATE
WSOCTV9 reports that the CMPD officer allegedly used the Flock system to obtain the license plate number of an undercover officer investigating a drug dealer, then passed that information to the dealer.
Seth Elliott's mugshot (Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office)
(Below) WCNC reports on the arrest of CMPD Officer Seth Elliott, who is accused of accessing Flock surveillance data for purposes unrelated to his police work. Elliott is currently on unpaid leave.
Flock Camera Misuse Spreads Across the Southeast
Similar cases are surfacing across parts of the South. In Georgia, the GBI arrested five former Albany officers this month after an internal audit found they had allegedly used retained plate data for non-law-enforcement purposes. A former Braselton police chief was separately charged with using license plate readers to stalk and harass people.
In South Carolina, Greer fired two officers after an audit confirmed policy violations. Records showed one searched for an officer with whom he had a relationship, while another allegedly used false justifications to search for several residents. The Greenville County Sheriff’s Office also fired two employees after finding misuse in an internal audit.
Flock Camera Misuse Breaks Public Trust
Police officials continue to defend the technology. Greenville County officials called Flock an investigative “force multiplier” used to find suspects, stolen vehicles, missing children and vulnerable seniors. The agency said most of its 18,000 searches this year were connected to legitimate cases. That defense asks the public to trust officers with a searchable record of where people travel.
That trust is not a minor part of the bargain. It is the bargain. Every alleged personal search turns a public-safety tool into a means of watching someone who is not suspected of a crime. An audit may expose the misuse later, but it cannot undo the intrusion or restore confidence by itself.
Police agencies cannot ask the public for access beyond constitutional limits and then treat broken trust as an isolated personnel problem. Flock Safety has crossed the line from a crime-solving tool into a system that gives officers extraordinary power to search people’s movements. Internal safeguards have failed. Police asked the public to trust them with Flock, an unconstitutional surveillance program. Repeated misuse without meaningful Fourth Amendment safeguards is evidence that systems like this have no place in our communities.
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