Federal Judge in Oklahoma Rules Warrantless ALPR Searches May be Unconstitutional
day of the dalek writes:
As per an article from The Hill, a federal judge in Tulsa County, Oklahoma ruled that an officer's warrantless search of ALPR data may violate the Fourth Amendment because it was done without probable cause:
The ruling concerned ALPRs' role in a Tulsa County deputy sheriff's traffic stop that resulted in a drug arrest. In this case, the deputy began following a driver after noticing she had an out-of-state license plate and ran her vehicle through an AI-powered camera database - allegedly before the officer had identified any traffic violation or other criminal activity
The officer had access to both Flock and VehicleManager systems, according to the judge's ruling, and his search turned up over 50 sightings of the woman's vehicle across several states. The deputy sheriff eventually observed an infraction and pulled over the driver.
The judge's ruling does not label the use of Flock data to aid in arrests as illegal, rather, it clarifies that the officer in this case did not have probable cause to "intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy" with the technology - setting stricter precedent for when law enforcement may employ extensive ALPR databases during investigations.
This case involves a police officer who had access to data from both Flock and VehicleManager, the latter of which is owned by Motorola Solutions. An article from TechCrunch provides more details:
In this case, Judge Sara Hill said the deputy should have obtained a warrant before searching the Flock database for the woman's license plate, as he had "no apparent reason" for the search "other than the fact that [the woman's vehicle] had a California license plate."
The deputy then used the woman's travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained after the Flock search "must be suppressed as the fruit of a poisonous tree."
Judge Hill also took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people's location - even when they're in public places - becomes "constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."
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