10/09/2026
A federal judge in Oklahoma threw out Flock license-plate-reader evidence, ruling a warrantless search of a month of a driver's movements unconstitutional — citing June's Supreme Court Chatrie decision.
The stop: a Tulsa County deputy pulled over Melisa Kyle mainly for a California plate, then used Flock's national network to pull 50 sightings of her car across a month. Judge Sara Hill called it "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a warrantless search — and suppressed the evidence. Why it's a big deal: for years, courts let police run plate-reader searches without a warrant, reasoning public roads carry no privacy. Hill broke from that — one of the first federal rulings that searching historic ALPR data can violate the Fourth Amendment, built directly on Chatrie.
Sidney Thaxter, senior litigator at NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center, on why it matters: "ALPR networks run against us all even if we have not committed a crime and allow police to retroactively track our whereabouts with the press of a few buttons." Thaxter: the ruling "correctly recognized that Chatrie holds that our location history is constitutionally protected and a warrant is required to track our physical movements." The parallels between cellphone and plate-reader records, he said, "practically leap off the page."
What's next: legal experts expect many more challenges like this across the country as Chatrie reshapes how courts treat digital location tracking. NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center — which helped litigate Chatrie — is at the center of that fight.
How a recent Supreme Court decision on geofencing influenced a federal judge to toss a sheriff's Flock camera evidence in a drug trafficking case.
