On October 1, the same day the Apex Public Safety Committee met and recommended nothing, a federal judge in Oklahoma threw out every piece of evidence in a drug case because a deputy had run a license plate through Flock without a warrant. The Chief’s argument for these cameras is public safety. This is a public safety argument against the way they are used, and it comes from the bench.
We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. What follows is a reading of a published federal opinion, quoted at length so you can check every line against the original. The PDF is linked above and at the bottom.
Case: United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, No. 26-CR-00189-SEH, United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma. Opinion and Order, document 62, filed October 1, 2026. Thirty-eight pages.
Judge: Sara E. Hill, United States District Judge.
Result: the defendant’s motion to suppress was granted. In the court’s words, the ALPR search “intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” so “it was a search under the Fourth Amendment.” It was “not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of Kyle’s Fourth Amendment rights.” Because the search led to everything else, “all evidence obtained after Alaniz initiated the ALPR search must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.”
The two systems the deputy used are named in the opinion: Flock and VehicleManager. The court described what they have in common as “gathering and organizing historical data about a vehicle’s whereabouts on public roadways for use by law enforcement across the country.”
This part matters more than the legal reasoning, because it is ordinary. Nothing exotic happened. Read it and then ask whether anything in it would be out of place in Apex.
The case against these cameras is usually made in the language of privacy, and the case for them is made in the language of safety. This ruling scrambles that, because the remedy a court reaches for is not a privacy remedy. It is suppression. Evidence goes away. A prosecution fails.
The defendant in this case was facing federal charges. The ALPR query was not wrong about where the car had been. The problem was that nobody needed a warrant, or probable cause, or any individualized suspicion at all, to pull a month of location history. So the search was unconstitutional, and everything downstream of it went with it, including the traffic stop and whatever the stop produced.
Apex has no ALPR ordinance. There is no warrant requirement and no stated standard an officer has to meet before querying a vehicle’s history. The Department’s own audit records free-text reasons typed by officers. If an Apex case has been built on a warrantless 30-day lookup, this is the motion that gets filed against it.
That is a question for the Town Attorney, not for us. It is also a question the committee can ask out loud on December 3, and the answer belongs on the record before anyone signs a renewal.
We are not claiming this court had Apex in mind. We are pointing out that the facts it found constitutionally significant are the facts of the Apex program, item for item.
These are verbatim. Page references are to the opinion as filed, and the whole document is linked at the bottom so you can read them in context rather than taking our selection on trust.
“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.”
United States v. Kyle, at 34 to 35“Think about it this way. We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: ‘Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week.’ But we do not expect people we know—let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement—to randomly approach us to say: ‘Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.’”
“Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts.”
At 35. This is the passage to read aloud at a Council meeting.“It could track and log a couple struggling to start a family at the fertility clinic. It could show how often someone visits a liquor store or casino. It could show which doctor someone goes to or what lawyer’s office someone visits. It also collects mundane information about people’s commutes, but it collects a tremendous amount of such information all the time.”
“But this leaves the question of why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.”
At 36 to 37“It is not difficult to imagine what is next: more cameras on more street signs, buildings, and perhaps on more police cars. It is also no longer difficult to imagine law enforcement using a fleet of drones hovering over an entire city so they don’t miss the movement of a single vehicle. This is not hypothetical catastrophizing.”
At 35 to 36“No doubt, ALPR technology comes with remarkable benefits that the Court cannot ignore. But the Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great… It is not too much to draw the line at indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
At 37. Note the first half. The court did not pretend the technology is useless.This is the part that makes the ruling more than one judge’s opinion. It rests on two Supreme Court decisions. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), held that acquiring cell-site location records is a Fourth Amendment search, and recognised that people have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.” And Chatrie v. United States, which the opinion cites as 146 S. Ct. 2193 (2026), a geofence warrant case in which, as this court read it, the majority concluded that “the police conducted a search when they gained access to Location History data.”
The court also dealt squarely with the case the other side relies on. United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), says there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements on a public road. Judge Hill acknowledged that and declined to apply it in a vacuum, writing that “the rapid development of technology requires courts to take a more nuanced approach.” Anyone arguing the other way will start with Knotts, and this opinion is a direct answer to it rather than an evasion.
The Public Safety Committee returns to the ALPR program on December 3 and is expected to recommend to the full Council. These three are answerable from what the Town already holds, and none of them requires anyone to take a position on the cameras.