Horry County Police Flock Cameras: Here’s What to Look For.

Posted Tuesday, November 10, 2026 1:08 pm

David Hucks (via MyrtleBeachSC)

HCPD says a public transparency portal will show how its license plate readers are used. It arrives amid a local petition, a state attorney general inquiry and a run of misuse cases across South Carolina.

Nov 10, 2026 · @ https://x.com/myrtlebeachnews

If you drive anywhere in the Grand Strand, there’s a good chance a Flock Safety camera has logged your license plate. The solar-powered readers are used by Horry County Police Flock Cameras and by several municipal departments here, including Surfside Beach, which reported nine of them as far back as 2024, and Loris, which reported four last year [Atlas of Surveillance, 2025].

Now Horry County Police says it wants residents to see how that system is run. Chief Kris Leonhardt told the county’s Public Safety Committee that the department would roll out a Flock Safety Transparency Portal giving the public an overview of the camera system and HCPD’s policies, noting that many agencies have already adopted similar portals. HCPD spokesperson Ashley Boles said residents will be able to find it by searching “Horry County” on Flock Safety’s website.

It is a real step toward accountability. But a transparency portal is a window built by the camera vendor, and how much it reveals depends on what the department chooses to put in it. Below: what HCPD has promised, why this is happening now, the question most residents haven’t thought to ask, and what to watch for next.

Understanding Horry County Police Flock Cameras

What the Portal Promises

According to Leonhardt’s presentation to council, the portal will lay out what the system is, HCPD’s data retention policies, and running counts of activity: how many searches officers run and how often the cameras trigger “hot list” alerts for wanted or stolen vehicles. The chief said it will also show how many cameras the department operates and spell out what the technology does and doesn’t do. In his telling, the cameras capture a still image of a vehicle and its plate, and they don’t use facial recognition. HCPD added that the data updates continuously, including a count of how many vehicles the cameras read.

The chief was also clear about where the window closes. He told council the department has “a duty to protect active investigations” and won’t publish sensitive operational details.

Flock describes these portals as a public-facing page that pulls live data straight from its system and can include an agency’s policy, usage statistics and data-sharing details [Flock Safety, 2026]. The key word is can. Agencies choose how much to show. In the Charlotte region, for example, every department with a portal publishes the basic scan and alert numbers, but only some go further and post downloadable audit logs showing individual searches.

That difference is the first test for HCPD’s portal. Aggregate numbers tell you how busy the system is. An audit log tells you what officers were actually looking for, and why.

Why Now: Pressure From Conway to Columbia

The portal didn’t come out of nowhere. Here at home, a Conway resident launched a petition asking the county to stop using Flock cameras altogether, and it had gathered more than 250 signatures by October. Back in August, HCPD joined North Myrtle Beach, Conway and Surfside Beach police in a joint video responding to residents’ concerns, describing Flock as a targeted tool for investigations such as recovering stolen cars.

Statewide, the controversy has been driven by misuse cases. In Colleton County, the sheriff fired a lieutenant after an internal audit turned up unauthorized searches and asked SLED to investigate possible criminal conduct [ABC News 4, 2026]. Upstate, officers in Greer and Mauldin have been accused of using the system to look up former romantic partners, a subordinate and private citizens, and Oconee County Council has advanced what may be the state’s first county-level ordinance to defund Flock-style surveillance.

Columbia has noticed. In an Oct. 2 letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, Attorney General Alan Wilson asked how the company uses artificial intelligence, who can access its data and how long it keeps it [WRDW, 2026]. Wilson’s office said he isn’t challenging whether the cameras are legal; he wants to know whether Flock’s storage and sharing practices comply with the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act [WBTV, 2026]. The letter gave Flock 30 days to respond, and Wilson, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, framed it as a balance between public safety and privacy [Spectrum News, 2026]. Gov. Henry McMaster, by contrast, has defended police use of the cameras while calling for accountability when they’re misused, and lawmakers are expected to take up license plate reader rules again in January.

There’s one more factor residents should know about: Flock itself has been pushing agencies to do exactly this. In an August announcement, Langley said more than 1,500 agencies had published transparency portals and urged the rest to turn theirs on [Flock Safety, 2026]. The same announcement cut the company’s recommended data retention period from 30 days to seven and said all law enforcement customers must turn on its “Audit Assistance” misuse-flagging tool by the end of 2026, though existing customers may keep their current retention periods [Flock Safety, 2026].

In other words, HCPD’s portal is both a local response to local pressure and part of a company-wide campaign to rebuild public trust in its product. Both things can be true, and readers can judge the portal on its contents either way.

The Question Few People Are Asking: Who Else Sees Our Data?

Most of the local debate has centered on whether police should have the cameras at all. A less discussed issue is where the data goes once it’s collected.

Flock’s network lets agencies share access with one another, and Horry County police are part of that web. “Horry County SC PD” appears in the partner-agency lists posted on other departments’ portals, from Tabor City, N.C., to Claflin University’s police department in Orangeburg [Flock Safety Transparency Portals, 2026]. Separately, HCPD participates in a statewide license plate reader program run by SLED [Atlas of Surveillance, 2025].

Sharing has become one of the sharpest points of national criticism. Flock now lets communities limit which outside agencies may search their cameras and for which kinds of offenses, so a county could, for example, block searches tied to immigration enforcement [Stateline, 2026]. The ACLU called the shorter seven-day retention period a possible improvement but argued for 48 hours, and warned that new tools for preserving records in active cases could keep location data around longer than the headline number suggests [Stateline, 2026].

For Horry County residents, that makes the sharing list on HCPD’s portal arguably more important than the search count. It’s the one place you can see which agencies, near and far, can query cameras on Horry County roads.

What a Dashboard Can and Can’t Tell You

Portals have real limits, and other communities have already run into them. Rhode Island’s ACLU found that many local portals were hard to find through ordinary web searches, that several didn’t list sharing partners at all, and that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine had no copies of the pages, so there’s no public record of how they change over time [ACLU of Rhode Island, 2026]. Independent tools that let you check whether your plate was searched carry their own caveats, since missing audit logs, slow records requests and heavy redactions mean a clean result doesn’t prove your car was never looked up.

The cameras do produce results that matter to people here. A Horry County woman said Flock helped Conway police identify the driver who sideswiped her car and left the scene in September [WMBF, 2026]. Nationally, Flock says its system flagged more than 20,000 stolen vehicles and over 1,000 missing people in July 2026 alone, though those are the company’s own figures [Police1, 2026].

But a dashboard measures volume, not judgment. A count of 400 searches in a month says nothing about whether each one was justified. The Colleton County case came to light because someone audited individual searches, not because a total looked unusual. That’s why the most meaningful parts of HCPD’s portal won’t be the big numbers. They’ll be whether the department publishes audit results, explains what happens when Audit Assistance flags an officer, and says how often that has happened.

What’s Next

The portal’s launch is only the opening move. Here’s what Horry County residents can watch for and ask about:

Whether it’s live, and how complete it is. HCPD originally said the portal would arrive within weeks of the committee meeting. Once it’s up, check whether it lists a camera count, a retention period, sharing partners and an audit log, or just top-line totals.
The retention period. Does HCPD keep plate data for 30 days, seven, or something else, and will it adopt Flock’s new seven-day recommendation?
Audit Assistance. Flock requires the misuse-flagging tool by year’s end [Flock Safety, 2026]. Has HCPD turned it on, who reviews the flags, and will results be made public?
The attorney general’s inquiry. Flock’s 30-day response window from Wilson’s Oct. 2 letter has closed. Whether its answers are released publicly, and what they say about data sharing in South Carolina, could shape what happens next.
The General Assembly. Lawmakers are expected to revisit license plate reader rules in January [WRDW, 2026]. Any statewide limits on retention or sharing would apply to HCPD regardless of what its portal shows.
County Council. The petition asking the county to drop Flock is a question for elected officials, not just police. Watch the Public Safety Committee agenda for follow-up.

Tip for readers: because these pages aren’t archived, take a screenshot of HCPD’s portal when it goes live and again every month. If the numbers or the sharing list change, you’ll have a record.

We’ll keep covering this. If you have questions about how Flock cameras are used in Horry or Georgetown County, send them our way.