BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A lawsuit against a city that uses the same license plate-reading cameras that have blanketed the Peninsula is headed to trial.
Federal Judge Mark Davis ruled that Flock Safety’s cameras in Norfolk, Va., could violate the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches because the cameras track people’s movements over an extended period of time.
Supreme Court rulings
Davis cited a 2018 Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States that said FBI agents couldn’t use cell tower records to track someone’s location without a search warrant.
Another Supreme Court case from 2012, United States v. Antoine Jones, determined that FBI agents leaving a GPS tracking device on a car was also a search that needed a warrant.
The Supreme Court has “unequivocally acknowledged” that the right to privacy includes privacy of physical movements, even if those movements are in public, Davis said in his ruling.
Data from Flock’s cameras can provide an “intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations,” Davis said in his ruling on Feb. 5.
Before 2023, the only cities to use Flock cameras in the Mid-Peninsula were the wealthy towns of Los Altos Hills and Atherton. Both were hoping the cameras would reduce home burglaries.
Flock representatives made their rounds in 2023 and 2024 and signed contracts with every city from Sunnyvale to South San Francisco, and dozens more throughout the Bay Area.
The company won’t say how many cameras are up throughout the Bay Area.
The rapid expansion, initiated by police chiefs and approved by city councils, reflects Flock’s goal of bringing their technology to “every single city in America,” according to founder Garrett Langley.
Crime impact
Langley, a tech entrepreneur, founded Flock in 2017 after cars were broken into in his Atlanta neighborhood, he said on a podcast in April 2020.
The cameras have reduced property crimes by a “staggering” 60% in places that use them, Langley claimed.
The cameras register the color, make and model of a car, and a computer system compares it with a police database of stolen cars.
The data is shared with other police agencies and is usually deleted after 30 days, depending on each city’s policy.
Not long after the cameras went up in Palo Alto, officers pulled over a couple at gunpoint on Alma Street because a Flock alert told police the car was stolen in August 2023.
A man and woman were handcuffed for about three minutes until officers figured out their license plate was swapped with one from a stolen car, police said.
Norfolk lawsuit
Lee Schmidt, 42, and Crystal Arrington, 44, sued the city of Norfolk, Va., in October after the police chief bought 172 cameras from Flock Safety, with plans to add 65 more.
Arrington is a nursing assistant and mother of four who works in Norfolk, and Schmidt is a Navy veteran.
Schmidt said he has to drive by four Flock cameras outside his neighborhood every day, when he goes to his daughter’s school, the shooting range or the grocery store.
“Lee finds all of this deeply intrusive … Unlike a police officer posted at an intersection, the cameras never blink, they never sleep, and they see and remember everything,” the lawsuit said.
Their case (2:24-cv-00621-MSD-LRL) is scheduled for a settlement conference on July 11 and a trial on Oct. 7 in Norfolk, Va.
Schmidt and Arrington filed a motion on March 21 to compel the city of Norfolk to turn over all of its Flock Safety data.
The city only wants to provide data related to Schmidt and Arrington, they said in their motion.
I appreciate you covering this. I think Flock cameras are a huge invasion of our privacy.
Yes they are.
And who would want residential burglaries reduced in a safer Palo Alto?
No way.
Better to debate it as a law school class vs. live in reality.
If one is in public, driving about, one doesn’t have any reasonable expectation of personal privacy..The threat of individuals driving into a neighborhood with the intention of breaking into cars, or far worse, breaking into homes, or conducting criminal activity of other natures, is real enough that communities have a right to explore the use of current technologies that other countries have been using to lower their crime rates for decades.
If we lived in a totalitarian state where opposition to the state was happening, these cameras could be a tool of oppression. We don’t live in that kind of society, certainly not in the Bay Area at this moment, and the only persons who will be oppressed by these cameras are criminals and folks who have some kind of expectations of privacy in public that aren’t reasonable when living in community with others. Nearly no one has to fear this technology. On the contrary, as this technology lowers crime rates, it reduces by no small amount the small level of real danger we have from the serious violation of a home invasion, for example.
Cameras in public spaces are fine. If you have nothing to hide, you don’t need to worry.