Eyes on Every Corner: What Chatrie Means for Flock Cameras and Networked License Plate Readers

This is the third and final post in a series on Chatrie v. U.S., 609 U.S. ___ (2026), and what it means for Indiana criminal practice. Part 1 covered the decision itself and Google search history, and Part 2 covered AI chatbot logs. This post turns to a technology most Hoosiers now drive past every day without realizing it: networked automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera systems, the largest of which is operated by a company called Flock Safety.

The Scale of the Problem

Flock cameras photograph every vehicle that passes — make, model, color, plate number, sometimes bumper stickers or other distinguishing features — and store the images in a searchable database, typically for a matter of weeks. As of mid-2026, Flock’s network exceeds 100,000 cameras deployed across the country, at intersections, highway on-ramps, and residential neighborhoods, often shared across jurisdictions and searchable by multiple law enforcement agencies at once.

A single camera capturing a single plate on a public road is not, on its own, a novel constitutional problem — courts have long treated what’s visible to the public as outside Fourth Amendment protection. The harder question is what happens when hundreds or thousands of cameras are networked together, retained for weeks, and made retroactively searchable. At that point, the system doesn’t just record isolated public exposures; it reconstructs a person’s comings and goings across an entire city, on demand, after the fact. That’s precisely the aggregation problem Carpenter and Chatrie were built to address.

Where the Litigation Stands Right Now

This is not theoretical. It is actively being litigated, and the early results cut against the privacy argument, though the ground is shifting under those rulings in real time. In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, two Virginia residents sued in 2024, arguing that the city’s Flock network amounted to a warrantless Fourth Amendment search. A federal district court granted summary judgment for the city, reasoning that the short retention window (21 days) and the network’s limited scale (175 cameras) did not add up to the kind of exhaustive surveillance Carpenter was concerned about.

In State v. Simonson, a Washington appellate court likewise held in January 2026 that Flock ALPR image captured on a public roadway did not implicate constitutional privacy protections, expressly rejecting arguments that ALPR use should be treated like GPS or cellphone tracking.

Chatrie directly undercuts the reasoning the City of Norfolk won on. The district court’s theory was that a limited retention window and camera count keep an ALPR network below the threshold of constitutional concern. But Chatrie held that once a privacy interest is established, Fourth Amendment protection does not scale with the “quality or quantity” of information the government actually obtains — the same argument the government made and lost in Chatrie itself, where it argued that Chatrie’s two-hour window of location history data was too limited to matter. If duration and scope cannot save a geofence warrant, it is not obvious why they should save a networked camera system that, at sufficient scale, does exactly what geofencing does. In other words, the system reconstructs a person’s movements across the aggregate of the network’s cameras, retrospectively, without individualized suspicion.

Applying Chatrie to a Litchfield Analysis

As I discussed in the first two parts of this series, Indiana does not ask whether a search occurred using the federal reasonable-expectation-of-privacy framework. Rather, it applies the three-factor Litchfield balancing test: (1) the degree of suspicion; (2) the degree of intrusion; and (3) the extent of law enforcement needs.

For a case built on Flock-derived evidence, the following facts would be relevant: how many cameras, covering how much of the relevant area; how long the data is retained, and is it searchable retrospectively; whether the search is individualized; and whether the data is shared across jurisdictions or agencies.

Closing Thoughts

I am not aware of any published Indiana appellate decision addressing ALPR networks under either the Fourth Amendment or Article 1, Section 11 of the Indiana Constitution. Chatrie did not just decide a case about one company’s location-tracking feature. It gave courts a vocabulary for identifying when a technology has crossed from discrete, individually unremarkable data points into a tool capable of retrospective, aggregable surveillance of ordinary life. That vocabulary travels well beyond geofence warrants. Indiana’s framework under Litchfield does not automatically adopt it. But it gives Indiana practitioners the opening to argue it.