Purpose A practical alternative to storing the movements of every driver

Recommendation

North Carolina can preserve the strongest public-safety benefits of automated license plate readers while greatly reducing their constitutional risk. The recommended system would operate in a Targeted Alert Mode. A camera would compare a passing vehicle against an exact license plate or a narrowly defined description supplied for a legitimate law-enforcement purpose. Information about every nonmatching vehicle would be deleted immediately inside the camera and would never be transmitted, stored, shared, or made searchable.

The Direct Flock Camera Case

In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, a federal district court considered Norfolk, Virginia's network of 176 Flock cameras. The cameras photographed nearly every passing vehicle and uploaded the images and identifying details into a database that officers could later search. On January 27, 2026, the court held that Norfolk's existing system did not violate the Fourth Amendment because the cameras did not capture enough information to reveal the whole of a person's movements.

The ruling did not give license plate camera systems unlimited constitutional approval. The court acknowledged that an ALPR network could become extensive enough to cross the constitutional line. The plaintiffs appealed, and the case remains pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit as Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 26-1227. The governing rule is therefore still developing.

The Supreme Court Location Data Ruling

The Supreme Court addressed related location surveillance in Chatrie v. United States on June 29, 2026. Police had obtained Google location records for cell phones near a bank robbery. The Court held that acquiring Chatrie's location information was a Fourth Amendment search because people retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell-phone location data. It sent the case back to determine whether the warrant satisfied probable-cause and particularity requirements.

Chatrie did not decide the constitutionality of license plate readers. It nevertheless confirms that digital location information can receive Fourth Amendment protection even when the government obtains only a limited period of data from a private company. Schmidt and Chatrie show why the safest policy is to prevent a database of the general public's movements from being created.

The Proposed Targeted Alert System

The camera would momentarily process each passing vehicle locally. If it did not match an authorized target, the image, plate number, description, time, location, and any digital identifier would be irreversibly deleted within seconds. Nothing about a nonmatch would reach the police department, Flock, or a cloud database. Only a match would produce an alert and case record.

An exact plate could be entered for a stolen vehicle, an Amber or Silver Alert, a wanted person, or a vehicle reasonably connected to a reported crime. If the plate is unknown, the description must be narrow. Officers might enter a white Ford pickup near Halton Street in Williamston during a defined 30-minute period, adding an approximate year, direction of travel, partial plate, damage, decal, or another distinguishing feature when available. A request for every white Ford in a town or county would not qualify.

A description-only alert would be an investigative lead, not automatic authority to stop, search, or arrest. An officer would have to confirm the vehicle and establish the legal justification for further action.

Required Legal Safeguards

Every target entry must identify the officer, case number, reason, geographic area, duration, and approving supervisor.
Targets must expire automatically. Continued monitoring or tracking across numerous cameras should require a warrant unless an immediate threat to life creates a recognized emergency exception.
The vendor must be technically unable to retain, reconstruct, sell, analyze, or share information about nonmatching vehicles.
Every entry and every match must be permanently audited, with penalties for personal, political, discriminatory, or unauthorized use.
Independent inspectors must test the cameras and software to verify that nonmatching information is actually deleted before transmission.

Conclusion

This approach would replace indiscriminate recording with a search for vehicles already connected to a specific public-safety need. It would sacrifice retrospective searches for an unknown suspect, but preserve real-time alerts for stolen vehicles, missing people, wanted suspects, and narrowly identified vehicles. Refusing to build a searchable travel history of ordinary citizens would substantially reduce the Fourth Amendment problem while retaining a useful law-enforcement tool.

Legal Authorities

Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 2:24-cv-00621-MSD-RJK, Document 191 (E.D. Va. Jan. 27, 2026), appeal pending, No. 26-1227 (4th Cir.). District court opinion

Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. ___, No. 25-112 (June 29, 2026). Supreme Court opinion

This brief presents a policy recommendation and general constitutional analysis. It is not legal advice and should be reviewed by legislative counsel before enactment.