Federal judge rules warrantless Flock license-plate searches violate the Fourth Amendment

A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff's deputy's warrantless search of Flock Safety's nationwide license-plate database violated the Fourth Amendment, suppressing the evidence behind a 91-pound methamphetamine seizure and delivering one of the first rulings to call the company's surveillance network unconstitutional when used without a warrant.

In a 38-page opinion and order filed October 1 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, Judge Sara E. Hill granted a motion to suppress filed by Melisa Susan Kyle, who was stopped on a Tulsa County highway in May after a deputy flagged her California-plated Mazda SUV using Flock's automated license-plate-reader, or ALPR, system. Officers ultimately found 91 pounds of methamphetamine and $7,000 in cash inside the vehicle.

What the deputy did

According to the order, Deputy Freddie Alaniz of the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office — a DEA task force officer and certified narcotics K-9 handler — was parked along the highway when his patrol car's own plate-reading camera picked up Kyle's out-of-state plate. He followed the Mazda "for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate," the court found, then ran the plate through both Flock and a second system, logging the query under the reasons "traffic violation" and "investigation" even though, in the court's words, "all Alaniz knew was that the vehicle had a California license plate." That search returned a month of the vehicle's movements drawn from more than 50 individual location sightings gathered across multiple states.

The numbers behind the ruling

• 30 days of vehicle-location history were available to the deputy through the ALPR systems at the time of the search
• More than 50 separate sightings of Kyle's car were logged across several states
• 91 pounds of methamphetamine and $7,000 in cash were seized and are now suppressed as evidence
• The case is No. 26-CR-00189-SEH; the suppression order is the court's 62nd docket entry

Judge Hill's reasoning leaned heavily on two Supreme Court precedents governing digital location data: Carpenter v. United States (2018), which required a warrant for historical cell-site records, and Chatrie v. United States, decided earlier this year, which extended similar protection to geofence location data. "This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," Hill wrote. "It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand."

"It becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."

A company already under pressure

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based public-safety technology company whose camera networks automatically photograph and log passing vehicles for law enforcement, and it has become one of the most widely deployed surveillance tools among American police departments. The ruling lands amid a broader reckoning for the company: Florida and Texas moved last month to restrict Flock cameras on state roads, and on October 2 Senator Bernie Sanders introduced what his office calls the Block Flock Act, which would bar federal agencies from using the company's systems. Days earlier, Representative Greg Steube introduced a parallel measure in the House, called the FLAFO Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from buying, leasing, operating or accessing networked license-plate-reader data without a judicial warrant.

Flock's chief executive, Garrett Langley, has pushed back on the broader criticism of the company's technology. "We don't get to pick what's a constitutional violation and what's not," Langley said in comments reported by The Drive, arguing that courts, not the company, determine the technology's legal limits.

What happens next

Prosecutors could appeal Judge Hill's suppression order to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, or the government could proceed with whatever remains of its case against Kyle without the suppressed evidence. More broadly, as 404 Media was first to report in detail, defense attorneys in other jurisdictions are likely to cite the Oklahoma opinion in their own motions to suppress Flock-derived evidence. In Congress, both the Sanders and Steube bills remain in committee, and neither has a scheduled vote. For now, the ruling stands as one federal judge's determination — not binding precedent beyond her own court — that a technology deployed by thousands of American police agencies crossed a constitutional line.