The big picture: A federal judge’s finding that an Oklahoma police officer’s Flock database search was unconstitutional doesn’t change the case law, but it does signal a shift in the way the law views networked surveillance cameras. As communities across the U.S. turn against the AI-powered devices, lawmakers are calling for new restrictions and, in some cases, a federal ban.
Oklahoma federal judge Sara Hill described automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as a form of indiscriminate mass surveillance and compared them to dragnet-style searches. Their ruling suggests that connected cameras like those sold by Flock and Axon are fundamentally different from other police surveillance tools, with implications for the law and for citizens’ expectations of privacy.
In May, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Deputy Freddie Alaniz saw a vehicle with a California license plate parked on the side of the road and followed it only because it had foreign license plates. After checking the license plate number in Flock’s AI-powered nationwide database, he stopped the car, ostensibly to change lanes without signaling.
While interviewing driver Melisa Kyle, Alaniz reviewed more than 50 instances in which Flock’s cameras had spotted her vehicle driving across the country and searched it on suspicion of drug trafficking. Despite finding approximately 91 pounds of meth in Kyle’s SUV, the court threw out the evidence and ruled that there was no probable cause and no warrant for the flock search.
Perhaps the most important detail is that Hill declared the search a violation of the Fourth Amendment, violating previous rulings involving ALPRs.
Other judges compared flock cameras to other police surveillance methods and found that drivers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy on public roads. But Hill noted that Flock’s nationwide database puts it in a different category, giving officers a vast trove of data to search without a warrant on, theoretically, anyone traveling across state lines.
ALPRs, which use AI to automatically sort license plates of passing vehicles into a searchable database (sometimes inaccurately), have drawn fierce opposition across the country. As officials question their impact on privacy and dozens of officers are caught using them for stalking, many communities are trying to remove flock cameras, but they don’t always succeed.
As surveillance companies consider expanding to mobile drones, lawmakers are fighting back. Late last month, Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida introduced a bill requiring no-knock warrants for the use of ALPRs.
Meanwhile, Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently introduced the Ban Flock Act, which would ban federal agencies from using ALPRs and cut federal funding for them.
