Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington just wanted to drive around Norfolk, Virginia, without a government contractor logging every trip. Instead, they became the named plaintiffs in one of the most consequential Fourth Amendment fights in the country, and a Supreme Court ruling that has nothing to do with license plates just walked into their case like an uninvited but extremely useful guest.
Back up to 2023, when Norfolk police partnered with Flock Safety to bolt roughly 175 automated license plate reader camera clusters around the city. These aren’t your grandfather’s speed cameras. Flock’s hardware pairs infrared imaging with onboard AI to log a plate number, timestamp, and location for every passing car, then builds what the company calls a Vehicle Fingerprint, cataloging color, make, body style, and even bumper stickers so investigators can search for a car even when they don’t have a plate number. Norfolk holds that data for 21 days, the maximum allowed under Virginia law, and officers can query it without a warrant.
Schmidt and Arrington sued in October 2024 with backing from the Institute for Justice, arguing that a city-wide camera dragnet capturing their daily movements amounts to a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. In January 2026, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia disagreed and granted summary judgment for the city. Flock published the court’s reasoning almost immediately: with a rolling 21-day window and roughly 175 camera clusters, the system didn’t track enough of a person’s life to count as the kind of exhaustive surveillance the Supreme Court worried about in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision on cell-site records. Schmidt and Arrington appealed to the Fourth Circuit, where the case now sits as Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 26-1227.
That appeal drew a genuine murderer’s row of amici. The ACLU, ACLU of Virginia, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a joint brief in April arguing Flock’s networked databases let agencies run retrospective searches across jurisdictional lines, sometimes years later. The Cato Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed separately, both hammering the same theme: a single camera snapping a single plate is constitutionally unremarkable, but a 175-camera grid feeding a searchable, multi-week archive is a different animal entirely. On the other side, South Carolina led fifteen other states and the District of Columbia in a brief filed in June defending Norfolk’s approach as consistent with decades of case law holding that nobody has a privacy interest in a license plate visible to any passerby.
Then came June 29, 2026, and a decision that has nothing to do with cameras on poles. Chatrie v. United States traces back to a 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where investigators couldn’t identify a suspect from witness accounts or surveillance footage. Detective Joshua Hylton instead sought a geofence warrant ordering Google to hand over Location History data for every phone within 150 meters of the credit union around the time of the heist, executed in three escalating steps that ultimately unmasked Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of the robbery. Chatrie argued the warrant amounted to an unconstitutional, suspicionless dragnet search of everyone who happened to be nearby, including, notably, churchgoers at an adjacent building.
The Supreme Court agreed, 6-3, with Justice Elena Kagan writing for the majority and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in dissent. The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie’s location data, because, as the opinion put it, “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government’s fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn’t matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database. That is a direct shot at the exact argument Norfolk used to win in district court.
Here’s where it gets awkward for the states defending Flock. Their amicus brief leaned on United States v. Chatrie, 107 F.4th 319, a 2024 Fourth Circuit panel opinion holding geofence data collection wasn’t a search at all. Problem is, that panel opinion was vacated when the full Fourth Circuit took the case en banc back in late 2024. The en banc ruling that replaced it was itself wiped out by the Supreme Court on June 29. In other words, the precedent Norfolk’s allies cited to prop up their case no longer exists in any form, and the doctrine that replaced it cuts against them.
None of this automatically kills Flock’s Norfolk win. Chatrie is a cell-phone case, and stationary roadside cameras are a different technology with a different legal pedigree going back to United States v. Knotts, the 1983 case holding that a person driving on public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements from one place to another. Norfolk’s defenders will keep leaning on that line. But the more interesting legal fight is over duration and aggregation. In Carpenter, the Court found that seven days of cell-site records was enough to trigger Fourth Amendment protection. In a 2021 Fourth Circuit case out of Baltimore, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, 45 days of aerial surveillance photography was enough too. Norfolk’s 21-day retention window sits uncomfortably between those two numbers, and the district court’s argument that 21 days and 175 cameras don’t add up to tracking the full sweep of someone’s movements gets harder to defend now that the Supreme Court has said the size of the data slice isn’t supposed to be the test in the first place.
Flock isn’t just fighting this in court, either. The company has spent the past several months publicly reassuring customers after reports surfaced that federal agencies accessed local ALPR data outside the terms local police departments had agreed to, a controversy that pushed dozens of cities to reconsider or cancel their contracts. Flock’s response has included rolling out search filters, an offense-type dropdown, restrictions on federal access permissions, and hiring a chief information security officer, all moves aimed at making the product look more defensible in court and in city council meetings alike. A ruling against Norfolk at the Fourth Circuit would land on top of that reputational pressure at the worst possible time for the company’s sales pipeline.
For everyday drivers, the practical stakes are bigger than one Virginia lawsuit. Automated plate readers are now standard-issue for police departments, HOAs, and even private toll operators, and the data they generate typically isn’t governed by the same warrant requirements as a phone tap or a home search. If the Fourth Circuit, and eventually the Supreme Court, extends Chatrie’s logic to camera networks, expect retention limits, warrant requirements, and interstate data-sharing restrictions to tighten considerably, the same way Carpenter reshaped how police request cell records after 2018. Until then, the law varies wildly by state: Virginia caps retention at 21 days and restricts sharing outside the state, while plenty of other jurisdictions using Flock hardware keep data far longer with far fewer strings attached.
Nothing about Chatrie forces Norfolk to shut off a single camera today. But the Fourth Circuit now has to grapple with a Supreme Court opinion that dismantled the exact legal scaffolding the states used to defend Flock’s cameras, while the residents suing over those cameras have a stack of fresh citations to hand the judges. Whichever way the Fourth Circuit rules, this is very likely headed back to the Supreme Court, and the next stop after that is every driveway in America with a Flock camera parked at the end of the street.