New Course: Flock Cameras and the Fourth Amendment

Is you license plate now a GPS tracking device?

September 12, 2026

1.0 hour of Oklahoma general CLE credit. Available on demand now.

On August 19, the Oklahoma City Council voted 5–3 to renew its contract with Flock Safety. The renewal came with terms the city did not have before: retention cut from thirty days to seven, automatic nationwide sharing switched off, and sole authority over federal data sharing moved from the vendor to the city. Three weeks earlier, the Oklahoma Senate approved an interim study, IS 2026-16, “Flock Cameras,” requested by Sen. Mary Boren and assigned to Public Safety, to examine whether Oklahoma should have statewide standards for retention, access, and sharing.

Everything protecting an Oklahoma driver from an automated license plate reader right now is contractual and revocable. None of it is statutory. In other words, governmental contracts are all that protect the people from abuse; not the law.

Our new 1.0-hour course, Flock Cameras and the Fourth Amendment, is now available on demand.

The doctrine moved this summer

Automated license plate readers have been litigated for a decade. For most of that decade, the answer has been the same. A license plate is a state-issued identifier that state law requires you to display in public. Photographing it is not a search. New York v. Class, 475 U.S. 106 (1986), and United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), have carried that argument, and they have carried it successfully in nearly every court that has heard it.

That is not the question anymore, and the course does not pretend otherwise. The question is what happens when a single unremarkable observation becomes tens of millions of them — timestamped, geotagged, machine-indexed, and searchable backward through months of a person’s movements across a network that reaches far past the jurisdiction that bought the cameras.

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, holding that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they acquire a person’s Google Location History — even two hours of it. The Court wrote that “[w]here the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies — regardless of ‘the quality or quantity of information’ the government obtains,” and that the government gets no credit for being able to pinpoint exactly which few hours it wants to review.

That matters here because of how courts had been deciding ALPR cases. They were counting. Three photographs in thirty days. Twenty-six photographs in six weeks. A two-hour search window. Chatrie removed the counting conundrum, and it did so after nearly every ALPR opinion on the books was written.

We also cover the asymmetry that makes ALPRs analytically different from the cases that produced this doctrine. Carpenter and Chatrie are both "third-party doctrine" cases: the question was whether a user waives protection by disclosing information to a third-party company. An ALPR has no user. A driver never contracts with the vendor, never opts in, cannot opt out, and cannot lawfully remove the plate. There is nothing to carve an exception out of, except that the driver publicly discloses his/her movements and license plate.

The Oklahoma segment

This is where the course earns its keep for an Oklahoma audience, because most practitioners have not seen the wrinkle.

The only ALPR program the Oklahoma Legislature has ever authorized is at 47 O.S. § 7-606.1, and it was built for one purpose: verifying compliance with the compulsory insurance law. Subsection (F) provides that ALPR data “shall not be used by any individual or agency for purposes other than enforcement of the Compulsory Insurance Law or as otherwise permitted by law.” That program was contracted out in 2017 and terminated by mutual agreement in August 2020. It is dead. Hundreds of cameras that the Legislature never authorized are not.

In December 2024, ODOT asked cities to pull cameras out of state highway rights-of-way, taking the position that use beyond insurance verification is not statutorily authorized. That is not a defense lawyer’s litigating position. That is a state agency’s.

And there is already an Oklahoma ruling — State v. Ifabiyi, McClain County, September 2024 — in which a district judge excluded ALPR-derived evidence as obtained in violation of Oklahoma law. While that trial-court order is not binding precedent (and the defendant still lost the motion because the officer claimed an independent basis for the search) it shows how Oklahoma's courts might lean.

The Current Status

This is a hot-topic course for practicing lawyers, and the adverse authority is in front of you before the answer to it is.

There is no circuit split. No federal court of appeals has held that ALPR use violates the Fourth Amendment. The Fifth Circuit held the other way in United States v. Porter (5th Cir. Mar. 17, 2026). The Virginia Court of Appeals held the other way in the published decision in Robinson v. Commonwealth (Apr. 7, 2026). The Eastern District of Virginia granted summary judgment to the city in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk in January 2026; the Fourth Circuit appeal is fully briefed and, as of this writing, undecided. Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 484 Mass. 493 (2020), is the most defense-friendly high-court decision in the country, and the defendant lost that one too.

Closer to home, State v. Velasquez, 2024 OK CR 29, holds that a violation of an Oklahoma statute does not trigger suppression where the statute supplies no remedy — and § 7-606.1 supplies none. Any Oklahoma prosecutor should be expected to lead with it. We spend real time on how to meet it, and on the good-faith problem under Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011), which is where most of these motions actually die.

Who it’s for

Criminal defense, obviously. But plate-reader data reaches a general practice: family law and protective orders, personal injury and accident reconstruction, municipal and HOA representation, employment and internal investigations, and open-records work. If your client’s movements are in a database, this is your issue too.

OkieCLE is an OKMCLE-approved sponsor (OKLACLE.COM, Inc., Sponsor No. 4712). The course is pre-recorded and on demand, so it counts in full toward your twelve hours — Oklahoma has had no cap on online, on-demand credit since 2019.

Enroll in Flock Cameras and the Fourth Amendment →

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