The Supreme Court Strengthened the Case Against Flock

What the Court decided

On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States. By a 6–3 vote, the Court held that when police obtain a person’s cell-phone location through a “geofence” request — asking a company like Google for every device near a place at a given time — that is a Fourth Amendment search. It presumptively requires a warrant backed by probable cause. The ruling extends Carpenter v. United States (2018), where the Court first held that a detailed record of your movements is constitutionally protected even though a third party holds it.

Let’s be precise, because precision is the point. Chatrie is about phones, not license plates. It does not hold that Flock cameras require a warrant, and it does not ban anything. The Court sent the case back to the lower court to work out the details, and a longstanding “good-faith” exception means some evidence already gathered may still be used. Chatrie sets a floor, not a ceiling. But the principle underneath it is the same ground DeFlockILM has stood on from day one.

A note on framing. When we say “Flock” here, we mean Flock or any other automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) network — Genetec, Motorola, Rekor, or whoever sells the next one. The constitutional principle doesn’t turn on the brand on the camera; it turns on the systematic tracking of where people go. Swapping one vendor for another doesn’t swap away the problem, and nothing in this decision is limited to a single company.

1. “A company holds it” is not a free pass

Police and Flock lean hard on one idea: the data sits with a private vendor, so obtaining it isn’t really a search. The Court rejected that logic for phones. Writing for the majority, Justice Kagan explained that a person “is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties — which then can be freely passed on to the government — just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do.”

Read that again with a car in mind. You don’t surrender your privacy just by doing the ordinary thing drivers do — driving down a public road, past a camera you never agreed to. The “Flock holds the records, not the county” answer that agencies give is exactly the kind of third-party hand-wave the Court refused to accept.

2. “It was only a quick lookup” doesn’t save it

A common defense of ALPR is that any single search is brief and narrow. The Court was unmoved by that argument in Chatrie: the limited time window of the request did not change the analysis — the acquisition was still a search. That matters because Flock’s network does the opposite of brief. It captures and stores everyone’s movements continuously, then lets an officer reconstruct months of them in seconds.

3. The law is moving toward protecting location data, not away from it

Chatrie is the third major Supreme Court decision in a line — after United States v. Jones (2012) and Carpenter (2018) — recognizing that assembling a detailed map of where a person goes is different from catching them in a single public moment. Each decision pushes the same direction: the more completely the government can reconstruct your movements, the more the Fourth Amendment has to say about it. A county-wide ALPR grid that logs every car, all the time, sits squarely in the path that trajectory is heading.

One camera is a snapshot. A network is a tracker.

Here is the distinction that may matter most. A single camera catching your car in one public moment is, by itself, a weak claim — courts have long said there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a single glimpse on a public road. But that is not what Flock is. Flock is a network that collects those moments systematically and continuously, then stitches them into one searchable record of everywhere your car has been. That aggregation is the entire point of Jones, Carpenter, and now Chatrie: a GPS tracker on a bumper, months of cell-site location, a geofence sweep of Google’s data — each one takes scattered, individually-public data points and assembles them into a detailed portrait of a person’s life. The Supreme Court has treated that assembly — not any single data point — as what may cross the constitutional line. By that logic, the more systematically an ALPR network records and aggregates where you go, the stronger the argument that it may infringe the Fourth Amendment — no different in kind from a GPS tracker on your car or your Google location history. A one-camera, one-shot glimpse is a snapshot. A county blanketed in linked cameras is a tracker.

That argument is now in court. Days after Chatrie, a Kansas driver sued the City of Wichita over its warrantless Flock network, arguing that an ALPR turns a license plate into the “functional equivalent” of a GPS tracker — the first lawsuit to point the Chatrie theory straight at a plate-reader system. It joins the appeal in Schmidt v. Norfolk — where the district court sided with the city — as a live test of exactly this question. (Reason)

What this changes here in North Carolina

Today, North Carolina does not require a warrant for police to search ALPR data. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.32 makes the data confidential, but it doesn’t demand a judge’s sign-off. Meanwhile, a provision in House Bill 206 that would have made the state’s warrantless highway-camera program permanent was removed in June 2026, while a competing measure, Senate Bill 623, would require a warrant and cap how long data is kept. Chatrie doesn’t settle that choice — but it tells our lawmakers which way the constitutional wind is blowing. A state that builds a permanent, warrantless tracking grid is building it against the current, and inviting the litigation that comes with it.

Our position goes one step further than the Court’s. Chatrie establishes a warrant as the constitutional floor for grabbing location data. We think the right answer for a community is higher: no suspicionless tracking of innocent people — a warrant, a public audit, and a public vote at a minimum, or no cameras at all. The Constitution is catching up. Our local leaders don’t have to wait for a court to tell them what’s right.

You don’t give up your privacy just by doing the ordinary thing drivers do.

What you can do

• Bring this to the County Commission. The commissioners who fund the Flock contract meet Aug 17 & Sep 21 — here’s how to speak.
• Tell your legislators to reject statewide warrantless plate-reader expansion and pass real safeguards instead — what happened with House Bill 206.
• Sign and share the petition — these questions deserve answers on the record.

Sources

• Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 (U.S. June 29, 2026) (Kagan, J.), vacating and remanding United States v. Chatrie, 136 F.4th 100 (4th Cir. 2025) (en banc).
• Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018); United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012).
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.32 — NC General Assembly
• DeFlockILM — Do Wilmington Drivers Have a Legal Claim?

This article discusses a court decision for public education. It is not legal advice, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and does not assert that any ALPR program is unlawful. Chatrie is on remand and the law continues to develop — consult a licensed North Carolina attorney about your own situation.