Get the Flock Out
ALPR Networks in Schmidt v. Norfolk post-Chatrie
Flock cameras are an invasion of privacy. The cameras, spreading like a virus across America, are sparking outrage from the political Right and Left. They are torn down by vigilantes, targeted by politicians, and now compiled in databases for citizens to track. Legal conservatives must share the outrage. Flock’s networked automated license-plate readers (ALPRs) create a massive, retroactive, and warrantless surveillance regime irreconcilable with a faithful reading of the Fourth Amendment.
ALPR use has largely been upheld in court, but a recent case from the Supreme Court should call those rulings into question. Take, for example, a leading case against Flock ALPRs: Schmidt v. City of Norfolk. Norfolk has blanketed the city with 176 Flock cameras grouped into 75 clusters, placed so that it is “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance” without being photographed. The system uses AI to create a “Vehicle Fingerprint” of each car, storing the images in a searchable database for 21 days. The case asks whether this system constitutes the kind of “dragnet-type law enforcement practices” that the Court in United States v. Knotts (1983), reserved for future consideration while upholding limited tracking of a single vehicle. The case is on its way to the Fourth Circuit.
The Fourth Circuit should hold in Schmidt that to use networked ALPRs, law enforcement must obtain a warrant. A query made to a networked ALPR archive when reconstructing a vehicle’s movements is a Fourth Amendment search. A license plate is not an invitation for the government to warrantlessly reconstruct someone’s lifestyle in a massive, retroactive, and searchable archive. The Fourth Amendment’s history and tradition demand nothing less, and Supreme Court precedent may now require it.
Predictions for how the Supreme Court would rule on ALPRs have changed following its recent decision in Chatrie v. United States (2026). In Chatrie, the Court clarified that the decision in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that the government conducts a search when it obtains historical cell-site location information (CSLI) covering an extended period of time. The Court described the cell phone-sourced record in Carpenter as “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled.” Chatrie applied the same logic to Google location data obtained via a geofence warrant, holding that individuals retain a reasonable expectation of privacy even when the data spans a shorter period and comes from a third party. The Court called the use of location data a “newfound tracking capacity” that “runs against everyone” and “travels back in time.” That description fits the networked ALPR systems at issue in Schmidt.
Chatrie cuts the constitutional legs out from under Flock advocates. The Court rejected the idea that only prolonged surveillance triggers the Fourth Amendment and limited its ruling in Knotts to rudimentary tracking methods. As professor Orin Kerr notes in his definitive new law article, the Court “reasoned that there was no real distinction, from a privacy perspective, between long-term and short-term monitoring.” Modern “sweeping” technologies capable of large-scale, retrospective reconstruction of movements fall outside Knotts and are fair game for Fourth Amendment skepticism.
Under the modern plain-view doctrine, the mere observation of a license plate on public roads is not a Fourth Amendment search. On the road, your license plate is displayed to every passerby, whether it be another motorist, the cop on the beat, or a flock of cameras. Courts routinely apply this to ALPR challenges, yet the doctrine is questionable under an originalist analysis. The contemporary “reasonable expectation of privacy” test underpinning the doctrine is a mid-twentieth-century judicial construct, long criticized by originalists. Accepting for the scope of this article that the doctrine is defensible, though, the facts of Schmidt are distinguishable. When a police officer sees your license plate as you drive by, the officer has not conducted a Fourth Amendment search. A government that can recall hundreds of hours of a citizen’s movements from a vast and searchable network of ALPRs has done something that is categorically different. Norfolk’s Flock network warrantlessly creates a “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled” narrative about where a vehicle has moved. The courts that created the plain view doctrine never anticipated this system, and applying it to the Norfolk ALPRs stretches the doctrine too far.
Setting aside the Supreme Court’s precedents for a moment, consider the Fourth Amendment’s history and tradition. A search at the Founding, Justice Thomas reminds us, was not “a term of art.” Rather, they were a straightforward concept that precedent has overcomplicated. The Founding generation’s signature complaint against unreasonable searches was the British writs of assistance, general warrants issued without judicial approval. James Otis’s famous 1761 argument against the writs, together with the landmark English judgments in Wilkes v. Wood (1763) and Entick v. Carrington (1765), condemned them as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power.” The problem with the writs was the royal authority’s effort to invade security expectations owners set around their property. The Fourth Amendment does not protect a broad right to privacy left to the judicial imagination, but what Justice Thomas has called “the notion of security in property.”
That notion requires more of the government than the use of ALPR networks allows. As the Schmidt appeal notes, tracking down a suspect was understood as a “search” at the time of the Founding. Tracking dangerous criminals is the copy-paste justification Flock provides for its technology, an admission that thereby triggers the Fourth Amendment. Shifting from the privacy lens to a property perspective further weakens the ALPR argument. While asserting a right to privacy in public strikes any reasonable person as counterintuitive, property rights do not change based on one’s temporary location. Private property transported in public (a vehicle, for example) remains just that – private property. Searching that property requires a warrant, and using large ALPR networks to log the movements of that property must too.
Reframing the constitutional question with this history may not de-Flock America. Technology evolves rapidly enough for ALPR use to adopt a form the Fourth Amendment may allow. But for Mr. Schmidt and thousands more across America, the use of Flock cameras violates fundamental constitutional rights as originally understood by the Founding generation. If Supreme Court precedent cannot fully support this conclusion, then Supreme Court precedent must change, as it did in Chatrie. Those who would sacrifice their liberty to a mass surveillance state’s promises of safety deserve neither that liberty nor the promised safety, and must reckon with the Fourth Amendment.
A. Cooper Haggard is a political science student at Ashland University, with interests in law and public policy. He is in leadership with the Ashland Student Senate and College Republicans, and is the president of the Ashland American Conservative Youth Union. He has also interned for the Ashland County Prosecutor’s Office.
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