Listen to “Flock or the Fourth Amendment? Huntington Chose Poorly” on Spreaker.
Huntington City Council voted 6-4 early Tuesday morning to authorize a five-year contract worth roughly $2.1 million with Flock Safety for a package of public-safety technology that includes license-plate recognition, live cameras, drones and audio detection.
Flock cameras are raising questions across the country — from city halls to federal courtrooms.
The fundamental issue: Flock or the Fourth Amendment?
When the two come into conflict, the Fourth Amendment must win. Huntington City Council would have been wise to remember that.
Here is what the amendment says:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
A bedrock of American liberty, if ever there was one.
To be clear, the Fourth Amendment does not create a blanket right to remain anonymous while traveling in public. A license plate is displayed for everyone to see. An officer may observe it. A citizen standing on a public sidewalk may photograph it. All reasonable.
The question is what happens when government takes millions of otherwise isolated observations, places them in a searchable database and gains the ability to reconstruct where people have traveled, when they traveled and potentially whom they visited.
Is that secure in your person? Is that reasonable?
The basic purpose of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has said, is to protect the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials. The Court has also warned against allowing technology to create a “too permeating police surveillance.” (Chatrie 2026)
Huntington is, of course, not the federal government. Cities exercise public-safety authority granted through state law. But that authority is not unlimited. No state or municipality may exercise its police powers in a way that violates the federal Constitution.
Public safety is a legitimate government responsibility. So is respecting individual liberty.
Systems such as Flock can collect and organize observations on a scale no individual police officer could possibly match. Huntington’s approved package goes beyond a few conventional security cameras. The council’s own agenda describes audio detection, live video cameras, drone services and license-plate recognition.
Each tool may have a legitimate law-enforcement purpose. The concern is what they become when linked together.
Artificial intelligence can read license plates, identify vehicle characteristics, sort enormous numbers of images and allow officers to search past observations in seconds. The Norfolk, Virginia system now being challenged in federal court uses 176 cameras operating around the clock and generally retains collected information for 21 days.
That does not mean every person observed has done anything wrong. It means every person observed becomes a data point available for examination later.
How does the system distinguish the good guys from the bad guys? At the collection stage, it generally does not. It records first. Suspicion may come later.
That is the danger. Government surveillance should begin with legitimate suspicion and lawful process — not with the indiscriminate collection of information on everyone in the hope that some of it may someday prove useful.
Chatrie v. United States
The Supreme Court has now offered an important warning.
In Chatrie v. United States, police used a geofence warrant to require Google to disclose cellphone-location records associated with devices near the scene of a bank robbery. On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled that obtaining Chatrie’s stored cellphone-location history was a Fourth Amendment search — even though the information covered only a limited period and was held by a private technology company.
The Court did not declare every geofence warrant unconstitutional. It sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the particular warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity.
Chatrie does not directly decide the legality of Flock cameras. Cellphone-location information can follow a person into homes and other private spaces, while license-plate readers generally photograph vehicles traveling on public roads.
But the principle is relevant. Chatrie was a search. Many believe Flock amounts to the same and minus probable cause or a warrant, what right does government have to proactively undertake it?
Government cannot always avoid the Fourth Amendment merely by arguing that individual pieces of information were exposed to a company or observed for a short period. Technology’s ability to gather, retain and analyze information matters.
The Flock issue itself is presently before the Fourth Circuit in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk.
A federal district judge ruled on January 27 that Norfolk’s particular system did not constitute a Fourth Amendment search. The judge reasoned that the cameras captured vehicles only at scattered locations and could not reconstruct the whole — or substantially the whole — of a person’s movements. The plaintiffs appealed, arguing that the ongoing collection and searchable accumulation of those observations amounts to warrantless location tracking.
Norfolk won at the trial-court level. But the final word has not been written.
Note: Chatrie was decided after the Norfolk ruling.
There is no denying that this technology could help law enforcement solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles, locate missing people and put dangerous individuals behind bars. Those are good outcomes.
But good intentions do not suspend constitutional limitations.
The Fourth Amendment was not written for moments when government power is unpopular or obviously abusive. It was written to restrain government when officials believe their actions are reasonable, helpful and necessary. Restrain is a key word; that is when constitutional guardrails matter most.
Huntington City Council should reopen this matter before the system is deployed and the city is locked into a five-year arrangement. The legal questions remain unsettled. The constitutional concerns are real.
And when government must choose between greater surveillance and greater protection of individual liberty, it should never treat the Fourth Amendment as an inconvenience standing in the way.