Fly the Camera, Pay $5,000. Bolt It to a Pole, Pay Nothing.

Put a camera on a drone and fly it over a fenced back yard without consent, and North Carolina hands the homeowner a statute: N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-300.1. Subsection (b)(1) prohibits surveillance of “a person or a dwelling occupied by a person and that dwelling’s curtilage without the person’s consent,” by any person, entity, or State agency. Subsection (e) gives the homeowner a civil cause of action against the agency, actual damages or $5,000 for each published image, reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees, and an injunction.

Bolt the same camera to a pole across the street and point it at the same yard, and the homeowner gets nothing. No cause of action, no damages, no fees. Not even a criminal penalty: the Class 1 misdemeanor in § 20-183.33 lives inside the plate-reader article, punishes misuse of plate data, and has nothing to say about a video camera aimed at a house. She is left with the common-law privacy torts and a constitutional theory no court has yet accepted.

Same camera. Same yard. Same officer. Same image. The difference is whether it is flying.

That is not a policy judgment the General Assembly made. It is an artifact of when it was drafted — the drone statute is from 2014, and the legislature was thinking about aircraft. But it is the law, and it is the clearest way to understand why litigating against these cameras is harder than most people assume, and where it is not.

Section 1983, and the loop inside it

When a government officer violates your constitutional rights, the statute is 42 U.S.C. § 1983. It is the vehicle for nearly every civil-rights damages case in the country. It is the first thing anyone thinks of here: an officer ran my plate; make him pay for it.

On the plate-reader theory, that is unlikely to work, and the reason is worth stating plainly because it is not a gap in the caselaw. It is a loop.

Qualified immunity protects an officer unless existing precedent placed the constitutional question “beyond debate.” We have identified no appellate decision holding that an ALPR database search violates the Fourth Amendment. So no officer can be on notice that it does. So the damages claim fails on the second prong — which means no court reaches the first prong — which means the law never becomes clearly established, and the next officer is not on notice either.

That loop is not accidental. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 236-37 (2009), let courts skip the constitutional question entirely and go straight to notice. It was built on purpose, for reasons that made sense to the Court, and it means a plate-reader damages claim against an individual officer is a poor bet today and probably for years.

Two courts have already denied immunity in ALPR cases

The line you will hear — including from us, in an earlier draft of our own memo — is that no court has ever denied qualified immunity in an ALPR case. That is not right, and the correction matters.

In Green v. City & County of San Francisco, 751 F.3d 1039 (9th Cir. 2014), a plate reader misread a plate by one digit. Officers pulled Denise Green from her car at gunpoint and handcuffed her. She had done nothing. The Ninth Circuit reversed summary judgment for the officers and held the sergeant was not entitled to immunity at that stage, writing that “an unconfirmed hit on the ALPR does not, alone, form the reasonable suspicion necessary to support an investigatory detention.”

Ten years later, in Chinaryan v. City of Los Angeles, 113 F.4th 888 (9th Cir. 2024), the same thing happened to a family in a minivan. The Ninth Circuit held it was clearly established — by Green and by Washington v. Lambert — “that officers can be held liable for conducting a high-risk vehicle stop based on nothing more than a reasonable suspicion that the vehicle was stolen.” The officers were not entitled to qualified immunity.

So the loop afflicts the theory that the database search is a Fourth Amendment search. It does not afflict the claim that an officer relied on a machine’s guess and seized the wrong person. That lane is open, and in the Ninth Circuit an appellate court has already said the law there is settled.

Two honest caveats. Both cases are Ninth Circuit; we have identified no Fourth Circuit equivalent, and North Carolina sits in the Fourth. And both are wrong-stop cases, not surveillance cases — the injury was the handcuffs, not the camera.

Three theories, in the reverse of the order people discuss them

Drones require nothing. No constitutional extension, no mosaic theory, no qualified-immunity argument — immunity is a § 1983 defense, and § 15A-300.1 is not a § 1983 claim. Where a law-enforcement drone has surveilled a home or its curtilage without consent and outside the statute’s narrow exceptions (one of which is simply getting a warrant), the statute is the case. Wilmington Police operate a growing drone fleet. We have asked for the program’s records.

PTZ cameras ask a court to apply a case, not to extend one. New Hanover’s contract buys eight Condor pan-tilt-zoom live-video cameras alongside its plate readers. One sits at Haven Place, off Castle Hayne Road, overlooking a new residential neighborhood. Here is the part we had not noticed until we read the definition: North Carolina’s ALPR statute does not cover them. § 20-183.30(1) defines an ALPR system as “automated high speed cameras used in combination with computer algorithms to convert images of license plates into computer readable data.” A Condor is a human aiming a zoom lens. It converts nothing.

Which cuts both ways, and we should say both. There is no 90-day retention cap on the Condor, no purpose limit, no policy mandate, and no traffic-enforcement bar — the only limit is a 30-day term in a contract the county negotiated. The most discretionary camera on the network is the least regulated. But it also means the county’s best answer on plate readers — the legislature authorized this and regulated it — is not available for live video. There is no statute to point to.

Plate readers are the hardest case, and they are the one everyone talks about. Three courts have now looked at ALPR networks specifically and found no search: Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, Scholl v. Illinois State Police, and United States v. Martin. Worse, the standing rule runs opposite the merits: a plaintiff has standing to challenge the collection that courts say is not a search, and generally lacks standing to challenge the query that might be one. What Chatrie changed in June helps — but Chatrie is about a phone, and no court has applied it to a plate.

The public records request is the case

Every one of those theories needs the same thing: proof that a particular person was queried, or that a particular camera was pointed at a particular home. Without it the complaint is abstract and gets dismissed as abstract.

That proof lives in audit logs, and North Carolina agencies withhold them. They cite § 20-183.32(e), which makes “captured plate data” confidential and not a public record. But Article 3D never defines that term. An audit log is not a record of a vehicle; it is a record of a government employee performing an official act — who searched, when, under what stated reason. That is the argument, and we make it every time. New Hanover redacted every organization and officer name from 2,980,082 rows. Carolina Beach redacted every identifying field and cited no statute at all.

For the PTZ cameras there is a second statute, and we want to be accurate about it because we got it wrong at first. § 132-1.4A makes law-enforcement recordings — including from “any other video or audio recording device” the agency operates — not public records, releasable only by court order. That reaches the Condor video. It does not, on its text, reach the movement logs, preset positions, operator identifiers, or zoom events: the statute covers a recording “captured by” a device, and a log of where an officer aimed the camera is not footage. Ask for the logs by name, separately from the video, or the agency will answer both with the statute that helps it.

Nobody has won one of these

We have identified no reported decision granting an injunction against an ALPR program. None. A judge is entitled to ask why, and “the precedent is young” is only part of an answer.

The rest of the answer is that most ALPR law has been made by criminal defendants moving to suppress — people with bad facts, no records, and every reason for a court to rule narrowly against them. The civil cases that exist are few, recent, and were filed before Chatrie. But the honest possibility remains that courts have considered this and disagree. Anyone filing should be able to say why their case is different.

We are not anyone’s counsel. We are a group of Wilmington citizens who want our government to respect the United States and North Carolina Constitutions and stop mass surveillance. We think the strongest thing we can hand a lawyer is not an argument. It is a record.

Both memos are working documents. If we have a holding wrong, we want to know — write to Mark@DeFlockILM.org and we will correct it and say what changed. We have already had to do that twice this month, once on this page.

This page is general information about North Carolina and federal law, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed North Carolina attorney.