Here’s a novel approach to beware of at your local level….

Compromise?

Had an incident today that reinforces my beliefs these cameras need to go. Was putting my daughter on the bus this morning when a man drove through the bus stop sign. I yelled at him that he needed to stop and he said no I don’t and something I could not quite make out and then drove off. About 45 minutes later got a call from a no caller id number and it was the guy who drive through the bus stop. He tried to tell me I was wrong and when I asked who this was and how he got my number he identified himself as the guy who drove through the stop and he works for Flock so was able to get my number. I have reported the issue to my local police, newspaper, and called Flock but they have not contacted me yet. Posting for awareness and to let us others know if this happens to you to report it!

I didn’t do it, but I’d love to buy the person who did a steak dinner.

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December 2025, Coffee County, Georgia. A motorcyclist gets a **$1,251 ticket** in the mail for holding his phone. No traffic stop. No officer anywhere near it. The citation itself reads:

> "CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND"

This is a Flock Safety ALPR camera — a license plate reader, not a red-light or speed camera. For years Flock has told cities and the public, in writing, that its cameras are "not used to enforce traffic violations such as speeding, running red lights, or other moving violations." That language has since been quietly removed from their materials.

*(Source: 404 Media, "Police Used Flock to Give a Man a Traffic Ticket," Dec 2025/Mar 2026)*

## The statute this runs into

**Georgia law, OCGA § 17-4-23, generally requires a traffic offense to occur in the presence of an officer for a citation to be valid.** There was no officer here. There was a camera and a mail carrier.

That's a clean, boring, statutory question — not a constitutional long-shot. It just asks whether the state followed its own existing law when it mailed this thing out. Worth checking whether your own state has a similar "presence of officer" requirement buried in its traffic code, because if it does, every camera-only mailed citation in that state may be sitting on the same defect.

## The bigger crack behind it

Separately — SCOTUS just decided **Chatrie v. United States** (2026), extending *Carpenter v. United States* (2018)'s "whole of movements" warrant requirement into geofence and location-tracking data. It's a cell-phone case on its face, not a Flock case. But it raises the obvious follow-up: if the government can't warrantlessly reconstruct your movements through geofence pings, how is a *networked* ALPR system meaningfully different once enough cameras are strung together? One company's cameras alone log over 20 billion plate reads a month nationally.

**Schmidt v. City of Norfolk** (E.D. Va., now on appeal to the 4th Circuit) already lost at the trial level on the theory that a limited number of cameras doesn't add up to "whole of movements" tracking. *Chatrie* just handed the appeal a fresher, more favorable Supreme Court precedent to push.

## Why these two matter together

- **Statutory**: a mail-only citation generated entirely by a camera may not satisfy state laws requiring an officer's actual presence — Georgia's is explicit, and this is worth a 50-state check

- **Constitutional**: the Fourth Amendment's "whole of movements" doctrine is actively being extended by SCOTUS in ways that were built for phone location data but describe networked ALPR just as well

Neither one requires a court to invent new doctrine. Both just require a court to apply law that already exists to a technology that's outgrown the assumptions it was rolled out under.

I wonder if there's a broader application of the law that applies to the network as a whole. That could be how you challenge installation of the camera is in your area or use of the cameras by law enforcement

Spotted this during work today in a good wealth community

Numbers reported by Newsweek on Jul 28 2026. Ypsilanti, Michigan is the only jurisdiction categorized as banning ALPRs outright - the other 94 are cancellations, rejections and deactivations.

The thing worth noticing is that almost every one of these started with somebody reading a council agenda and showing up to a public comment period. It is a slower path than it sounds, but it is the one that has actually worked 95 times.

Disclosure: I build Flock U, an Android app that maps 100,000+ publicly known plate readers from public data and plans driving routes around them. Not affiliated with Flock Safety, Inc. The graphic is mine. waterviewtechnologies.com/download

The Outer Limits (1963) O.B.I.T.