Records pulled from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte show that a police department 1,500 miles away leaned on the campus camera network more than any local agency. Houston Police ran searches touching the UNC Charlotte system more than 183,000 times between March and May 2026.
Who searched what
UNC Charlotte Police logged 229 searches of its own network across the same three months, ranking 1,491st among the agencies hitting the system. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police placed 30th.
The numbers come from public-records requests reported by WBTV, and they point to a structural feature rather than a campus problem. Each Flock camera reads a plate and feeds a national pool. Searches are nominally limited to law enforcement, but the pool also draws on cameras owned by private companies and homeowners associations.
The multiplier behind the total
When Houston officers looked up a plate, the records show they frequently queried more than 6,000 networks across the country in a single action. Most other departments kept their queries to a smaller set.
That difference explains how one agency can dominate another state’s search log. A single lookup fans out across a nationwide mesh, and every network answers.
Students approached on campus could not name which departments had searched the system that watches their parking lots.
The custody question
The same week, a Houston Chronicle report found Harris County civilian staff had searched Flock more than a dozen times in 2025, prompting access concerns. Members of the Texas university community now have a concrete number to press, because the log no longer hides who is looking and how far a single click travels.
