The Supreme Court Just Handed Flock's Camera Network a Constitutional Problem

Six weeks ago, while most of the country was watching other headlines, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly reshaped the legal ground under every license plate camera network in America — including the roughly 6,000 Flock Safety deployments WECU News has spent the past week examining.

The case was Chatrie v. United States, and on its face it has nothing to do with license plates. It’s about a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, and a “geofence warrant” that let police ask Google which of its users had been near the crime scene. But the constitutional reasoning the Court used to decide it has already started reshaping a separate, pending case over Flock cameras specifically — and Louisiana, which currently regulates ALPR technology not at all, has a direct stake in how that plays out.

What the Court actually decided

On June 29, 2026, in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment “search” when they obtained two hours of Okello Chatrie’s Google Location History without adequately particularized probable cause. The government had argued the data wasn’t protected because Chatrie voluntarily shared his location with a third party — Google — rather than keeping it private himself.

The Court rejected that argument. Location History, Kagan wrote, functions like a personal journal of a user’s movements — the kind of record a person reasonably views as their own and expects to be “shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’” of the government, even when a tech company happens to be the one storing it. Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurring separately, went further still, describing location data as a person’s “personal property” — no different, in his view, from the physical “effects” the Fourth Amendment has always explicitly protected.

It’s the first major Supreme Court ruling on digital surveillance since Carpenter v. United States in 2018, which held that police needed a warrant to obtain historical cell-tower records revealing a suspect’s movements over 127 days. Chatrie extends that same logic to a different kind of data, collected a different way — and, critically for this story, opens the door for lower courts to extend it further still.

Where Flock comes in: Schmidt v. City of Norfolk

Norfolk, Virginia residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington sued their city in October 2024, represented by the libertarian Institute for Justice, after discovering Norfolk’s network of roughly 176 Flock Safety cameras had captured their vehicles 475 and 325 times respectively over four months. Their argument: a citywide camera dragnet that can reconstruct a person’s daily movements amounts to a warrantless search, the same as the cell-tower tracking the Supreme Court barred in Carpenter.

In January 2026, a federal judge — a George W. Bush appointee — disagreed, granting summary judgment for the city. His reasoning: Norfolk’s cameras are stationary, retain data for only 21 days, and don’t track “the whole” of a person’s movements the way exhaustive, continuous cell-phone tracking does. Schmidt and Arrington appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case now sits, backed by amicus briefs from the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

That appeal was already pending when Chatrie came down — and legal observers say the timing is no small thing. As one recent analysis put it, the Supreme Court’s new ruling on geofence warrants is already shaking up cases involving Flock license plate readers. Cato’s brief in Schmidt argues that Norfolk’s cameras use artificial intelligence to log not just plates but a vehicle’s make, color and distinguishing features — what Flock itself calls a “Vehicle Fingerprint” — letting officers chart a person’s movements across the city with, in Cato’s words, almost no restriction or oversight.

The legal argument, in plain terms

The fight over ALPR networks has always turned on one question: does the Fourth Amendment care about a single plate scan, or about the pattern that thousands of scans create over time?

Courts have split. Massachusetts’s highest court ruled in Commonwealth v. McCarthy (2020) that dense-enough camera networks can cross into Fourth Amendment territory — a state-level ruling, not binding nationally. Federal courts have mostly gone the other way: a Virginia judge in United States v. Martin (2024) rejected the same argument for a 188-camera network, reasoning that automated cameras just “augment the same inherent sensory faculties of law enforcement that have existed since the Founding.” The Norfolk district court used nearly identical logic in Schmidt.

Chatrie doesn’t resolve that split by itself — it’s about phone location data obtained from a company, not camera footage captured on public roads, and the Court didn’t address ALPR networks at all. But the reasoning underneath it cuts directly against the “it’s just public roads” argument that has won every ALPR case so far: the Court just held, again, that aggregated, searchable location data can be constitutionally protected regardless of whether any single data point was itself private. Schmidt’s attorneys have already leaned on that exact logic in their briefing, citing Carpenter’s language that the constitutional question is whether data is “capable of revealing intimate, private details about a person’s life” — not whether police needed extra legwork to extract them.

Note on dissenting Logic:

Chatrie’s dissenting justices — Alito, Thomas and, in part, Barrett — warned explicitly that this logic “could eventually reach search histories, purchase records, and payment apps,” a warning meant to caution against extending it, but one that defense attorneys and civil liberties groups are already citing as proof of exactly how far the reasoning could travel.

What it means for Louisiana

The Fourth Circuit’s eventual ruling in Schmidt won’t bind Louisiana directly — Louisiana sits in the Fifth Circuit, a separate federal appellate court. But a Fourth Circuit decision applying Chatrie to strike down an ALPR network would immediately become the most significant appellate precedent on this exact question in the country, and it would land squarely in the middle of the debate already underway in Baton Rouge, where Flock cameras are deeply embedded in day-to-day policing, and in the Louisiana Legislature, where state Rep. Danny McCormick is preparing a bill to ban the technology outright when lawmakers convene next spring.

McCormick’s bill wouldn’t need to wait on any of this — a state legislature can ban ALPR use by statute regardless of what the courts eventually decide the Constitution requires. But a favorable Schmidt ruling would hand him something he doesn’t currently have: a federal appellate court agreeing, post-Chatrie, that networks like Flock’s cross a constitutional line — not just a policy one.

No date has been set for the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Schmidt. WECU News will follow the case.

Sources:

Justia, Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. ___ (2026) — supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/609/25-112

SCOTUSblog, Chatrie v. United States case page — scotusblog.com/cases/chatrie-v-united-states

EFF, “Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data” — eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/victory-supreme-court-says-constitution-protects-peoples-location-data

Yahoo News, “The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock’s License Plate Camera Empire” — yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/supreme-court-just-lit-fuse-130900307.html

Cato Institute, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk amicus brief — cato.org/legal-briefs/schmidt-v-city-norfolk

ACLU, Schmidt v. Norfolk case page — aclu.org/cases/schmidt-v-norfolk

Courthouse News Service, “Judge holds Norfolk’s license plate reader use constitutional” — courthousenews.com/judge-holds-norfolks-license-plate-reader-use-constitutional

RecordingLaw.com, “Federal Appeals Court Weighs Whether Norfolk’s Flock License Plate Camera Network Violates the Fourth Amendment” — recordinglaw.com/news/norfolk-flock-license-plate-cameras-fourth-amendment-appeal