A group filed a federal lawsuit Monday suing Norfolk for the city’s use of Flock cameras — automatic license plate readers that can track a vehicle’s movements through the city and beyond.
Norfolk installed 172 of the cameras last year, and the devices have proliferated throughout Hampton Roads, with over 450 of them in the region. Police and prosecutors laud the advanced ability to track vehicles associated with crimes or missing people, but the cameras raise privacy concerns.
The lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice representing two local plaintiffs, argues Norfolk’s use of Flock cameras violates Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
“Norfolk has created a dragnet that allows the government to monitor everyone’s day-to-day movements without a warrant or probable cause,” Michael Soyfer, an attorney representing the case, said in a news release.
The lawsuit names the City of Norfolk, the Norfolk Police Department and Police Chief Mark Talbot as defendants.
Plaintiffs Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington are concerned about government surveillance, according to the suit.
Schmidt, a Navy veteran who lives in Norfolk, doesn’t want the city documenting his trips to his daughters’ schools or to the shooting range.
Arrington lives in Portsmouth and visits patients in Norfolk as a home health care worker, and is worried for her patients’ privacy as well.
They both cited potential data breaches as another cause for concern. The suit also listed an example of abuse of the system, when a Kansas police chief used Flock to track his ex-girlfriend.
The case could potentially make it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that a similar surveillance system in Baltimore was an unconstitutional search, said Robert Frommer, the senior attorney representing the plaintiffs.
Various courts have upheld the legality of automatic license plate readers on the basis that license plates are public information and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on public roads.
Flock representative Holly Beilin said courts have ruled the cameras do not violate Fourth Amendment protections because they are stationary and cannot track the whole of a person's movements.
Flock camera capabilities go beyond the documentation of license plates. They photograph every vehicle that passes and upload the images into a database where they are stored for 30 days. The machine-learning in the system does not necessarily need a license plate to track a vehicle: the make, model, color and other distinguishing features, like damage or a bike rack, are also documented.
The density of the cameras in Norfolk — nearly two per square mile — is akin to placing a GPS tracker on a citizen’s vehicle, circuit court Judge Jamilah LeCruise wrote in a ruling earlier this year, granting a defendant's motion to suppress evidence collected without a warrant by the city’s Flock cameras.
The Flock database also allows subscribers to share and access data, potentially nationwide. Local police share data across jurisdictions: Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Isle of Wight and Franklin also use Flock cameras.
Virginia Beach Police Chief Paul Neudigate recently said the cameras were responsible for the city’s increased rate of recovering stolen vehicles and allowed departments to collaborate to catch criminals that move from one city to another.
The city of Virginia Beach has about 21 of the cameras and plans to install four more.
The data the cameras collect are encrypted from the time of capture to deletion 30 days later, Beilin said. Flock also stores a perpetual log of searches of a database, including who initiated the search, why and what they were looking for. That helps police departments create a use policy and audit how officers are using the system to prevent instances of abuse.
The Norfolk Police Department did not respond to questions about their policy for use of the Flock cameras, nor how the cameras have changed the department’s crime-fighting ability in the year and a half they have been in operation.
The cameras and subscription to the Flock database cost on average $3,000 each per year, Beilin said.
Norfolk’s cameras cost the city around $516,000 per year, and will cost over $2.5 million over five years.
