Kansas Lawsuit: ALPRs Turn a License Plate Into the 'Functional Equivalent' of a 'GPS Tracking Device'

By themselves, license plates, which debuted in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, are pretty low-tech. But when combined with a network of AI-assisted automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), those aluminum rectangles stamped with numbers and letters become tracking devices that can provide a comprehensive history of a driver's movements, potentially revealing sensitive information about his habits, health, relationships, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Police departments across the country nevertheless deploy such systems and routinely search the information they collect without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, a warrant, or any sort of judicial supervision. Police in Wichita, Kansas, for instance, have access to data from about 200 Flock Safety ALPR cameras, which are deployed widely enough that it is nearly impossible for the average driver to avoid surveillance as he goes about his daily life. That program violates the Kansas Constitution's privacy protections, according to a lawsuit that the Kansas Justice Institute (KJI) filed this week in the Sedgwick County District Court. The plaintiff in Grimmett v. Wichita, local privacy activist Mason Grimmett, "is a law-abiding citizen trapped in Wichita's warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program," says Sam MacRoberts, KJI's litigation director. "He's done absolutely nothing wrong, but he's still being tracked, monitored, and databased. That's unconstitutional. If Wichita wants to track its citizens, it needs to go to a judge and get a warrant." Information from Wichita's ALPR surveillance system, which includes photographs, locations, and many other details that can be inferred from them, is retained for at least 30 days but "can be stored indefinitely" in some circumstances, Grimmett's complaint says. The database, which offers both real-time and historical information, can be accessed by "virtually every police officer in Wichita," plus "hundreds of other law enforcement agencies." In practice, police can search that database at will on computers or mobile phones, conducting sophisticated queries that specify vehicle characteristics, generate travel maps and route predictions, and may include "convoy analysis," which "documents vehicles that have been spotted in the vicinity of a target vehicle." The lawsuit notes that ALPR photos include bumper stickers and decals, which can alert police to a driver's political views. Wichita police are supposed to use the city's surveillance network and database only when they have a "legitimate law enforcement purpose." But Wichita police Lt. Brian Safris has conceded that it's "not even possible" to enforce that policy by making sure that each search complies with it. The lawsuit mentions several cases in Kansas and other states where cops have been caught using ALPR systems for unapproved purposes such as stalking ex-girlfriends, possibly unfaithful spouses, and objects of romantic interest. "One situation of an outside agency one time misusing the Flock system is not shocking to my conscience at all," Capt. Casey Slaughter, who oversees Wichita's ALPR program, said after one of those abuses came to light in 2022. "It's just not. And I'm just being real honest. I knew it was going to happen eventually. And it happened." When such abuses are discovered, they may result in disciplinary action, dismissal, or criminal charges. But given frequently lax internal supervision and the complete lack of independent oversight, we can be confident that the cases we know about are just the tip of the iceberg. And the potential for abuse is multiplied many times because information collected by one agency is typically shared with many others. The Wichita Police Department officially shares its ALPR data with a long list of Kansas law enforcement agencies, which may in turn share the information with others. "Wichita would not know whether Junction City [one of its many ALPR partners] was providing information from Wichita's surveillance database to Junction City's partner agencies" or "any other agency," the complaint says. And when Wichita police officers serve on federal task forces, they may "provide Wichita's data to the federal law enforcement agencies for which they are deputized, even if Wichita does not formally share its Flock data with those federal agencies." The broad dissemination of ALPR data means that even a department with relatively strict internal rules cannot know how the information is used. "Once the surveillance data is shared," The Wichita Eagle noted in 2022, "Wichita police officials have no control over how those outside agencies use it and no way to flag unlawful searches of its license plate reader database." That situation is replicated in the thousands of municipalities that use ALPR cameras. In 2020, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, "nearly 90% of sheriffs' offices with 500 or more sworn deputies reported using the technology," while every police department serving more than 1 million people had ALPRs. The extent of ALPR surveillance has surely grown in the six years since that survey. Flock alone has installed some 90,000 cameras in over 5,000 local jurisdictions. Even tiny towns like Greers Ferry, Arkansas, have deployed ALPRs based on the expectation that they will help deter, detect, and investigate crime. As the KJI lawsuit emphasizes, that strategy entails routine surveillance of innocent people who are not suspected of criminal activity. And even when ALPR systems identify criminal suspects, they may be wrong in many cases, given their estimated accuracy of 80 percent to 85 percent. During a single month this year (from June 26 to July 27), Wichita's ALPR network "conducted 904,603 license plate searches," the lawsuit notes. That suggests the system misidentified vehicles somewhere between 135,690 and 180,920 times. "One innocent Kansas couple has been pulled over multiple times, once at gunpoint, because the Flock ALPR dragnet surveillance system wrongly flagged their minivan as a stolen pickup truck," the complaint says. Police departments like Wichita's have concluded that such risks are acceptable given the usefulness of ALPR technology. But that is not their call to make, the lawsuit argues. Like the Fourth Amendment, Section 15 of the Kansas Bill of Rights prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures," although it broadly protects "persons and property," as opposed to "persons, houses, papers, and effects." Also like the Fourth Amendment, Section 15 requires that warrants be based on "probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation," and that they "particularly" describe "the place to be searched and the persons or property to be seized." Even assuming that Section 15 provides no more protection than the Fourth Amendment, the lawsuit says, Wichita's ALPR surveillance qualifies as a "search" under the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Katz v. United States. According to that decision, the Fourth Amendment applies when someone has an "expectation of privacy" that "society is prepared to recognize as 'reasonable,'" as Justice John Marshall Harlan II put it in his concurring opinion. Do drivers like Grimmett have a reasonable expectation that they will not be electronically tracked whenever they hit the road? KJI thinks so. The lawsuit offers several reasons for reaching that conclusion. Even in public, it notes, an individual "maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements," as the Supreme Court recognized in the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, which involved phone location information collected by cell sites. "Society's expectation," the Court added, "has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period." Carpenter and Chatrie v. United States, which was decided in June, established that "individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements," the lawsuit says. The complaint also notes that Kansas has criminalized stalking, which includes "utilizing any electronic tracking system or acquiring tracking information to determine the targeted person's location, movement or travel patterns." And the Wichita Police Department has itself recognized that ALPR technology raises legitimate privacy concerns: In 2022, it urged state legislators to enact a law that exempted ALPR data from public record requests, precisely because such information is personal and sensitive. "Wichita's warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program gives police access to information previously unknowable, including the ability to reconstruct a person's movements," the lawsuit says. And that fact has aroused local objections: "Wichitans have publicly denounced and criticized Wichita's warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program. Around the Nation, countless other citizens have publicly denounced warrantless ALPR surveillance programs." Some citizens have gone further than criticism, the complaint notes: "Multiple ALPR cameras were reportedly damaged or cut down" in Houston, Texas; in Volusia County, Florida; in Arlington County, Virginia; and in North and South Carolina. A couple of years ago, Wichita police Capt. Aaron Moses "told the City Council that the City keeps the locations of its Flock cameras secret because it's afraid that the public will vandalize or destroy the cameras." In addition to meeting the Katz test, the lawsuit argues, Wichita's ALPR surveillance qualifies as a search based on the property-focused analysis that the Supreme Court applied prior to that case and continues to use from time to time. "Under its traditional use, verifying payment of registration taxes and adequate insurance, a government-mandated license plate might not have been a trespassory search under Section 15," the complaint says. "However, when coupled with Wichita's ALPR dragnet surveillance program, it is now the functional equivalent of affixing a GPS tracking device, which constitutes a trespassory search." The Supreme Court recognized the latter point in the 2012 case United States v. Jones, saying police needed to obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to a drug suspect's car. "The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. "We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted." Under either the Katz test or the approach exemplified by Jones, the lawsuit says, the implication for Wichita's ALPR surveillance system is clear: Police are conducting searches when they use that system to track people's movements. And that matters because "warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable and therefore invalid, subject to a few narrowly established exceptions" that do not apply to most uses of ALPR networks. Wichita's ALPR program "is akin to an unconstitutional general warrant or writ of assistance," the complaint says. "It is subversive of the liberty of every individual, including the Plaintiff's. It violates Plaintiff's privacy and security against arbitrary invasions. It has become too permeating. It permits, authorizes, and implements unreasonable, nonconsensual, suspicionless, and warrantless surveillance, tracking, cataloging, and databasing, which includes the ability to reconstruct the movements of every motorist in Wichita, which was previously unknowable." For these and other reasons, the lawsuit argues, the program "violates the text, structure, history, and purpose of Section 15 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights." Last April, the Institute for Justice deployed similar arguments, based on the Fourth Amendment, in a federal lawsuit challenging San Jose's "creepy" and "deeply intrusive" ALPR network. But Flock, which has a contract with San Jose as well as Wichita, is unfazed by civil liberties concerns about its business. The company says its "mission" is "to eliminate crime" by "collect[ing] the objective evidence police need to solve crime, which includes license plates and vehicle information." Garrett Langley, the company's founder and CEO, says he envisions "a Flock camera on every street corner."