There’s a camera network spreading across America that photographs your license plate every time you drive past — going to work, dropping your kids at school, heading to church, attending a protest. Flock Safety, an Atlanta company founded in 2017, now operates an estimated 100,000 to 120,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in 6,000 to 7,000 communities, working with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. A crowd-sourced map by the group DeFlock has mapped roughly 138,000 ALPR cameras nationwide — about 82% of them Flock’s.
These cameras don’t just read plates. They log the make, model, color, bumper stickers, and visible damage of your vehicle — building a searchable database of where millions of law-abiding Americans go, every single day. And the backlash is growing: 82 communities across 28 states have cancelled their Flock contracts, half of those cancellations coming in just the first six months of 2026.
I’m not a lawyer. I’m a cab driver running for Congress. But I can read the Bill of Rights, and what these cameras do runs straight through three amendments. Here’s the case.
The Fourth Amendment: No Unreasonable Searches
The Fourth Amendment protects you against unreasonable searches. The government’s answer has always been: “You’re on a public road — you have no privacy there.” But the Supreme Court already blew a hole in that argument in Carpenter v. United States (2018), ruling that long-term tracking of a person’s movements — even in public — is a search that requires a warrant. One photo of your car at one intersection is public. A month-by-month record of everywhere you’ve ever driven is a detailed portrait of your entire life: your doctor, your lover, your church, your politics.
And the courts are starting to agree. In 2024, a trial court called a Flock camera network a “dragnet over an entire city” and compared it to putting a GPS tracker on every vehicle — the exact kind of tracking the Supreme Court struck down in United States v. Jones (2012). The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its Flock contract in 2026 over unresolved questions about who owns the data and whether it gets shared with federal agencies. If the cops’ own data practices can’t survive scrutiny, why should your movements be in their database?
The First Amendment: The Right to Speak, Assemble — and Not Be Watched Doing It
The First Amendment protects your speech, your press, your assembly, and your right to petition the government. Now ask yourself: if the government keeps a permanent log of every car parked outside a protest, a mosque, a gun show, or an opposition campaign rally — how many people stay home? That’s called a chilling effect, and it’s exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to prevent.
And we don’t have to imagine it. It just happened right here in Springfield, Missouri. On September 22, 2026, dozens of residents packed City Hall to speak against the city’s 41 Flock cameras — a five-year, $45,000-a-year contract signed in 2025. Councilman Brandon Jenson had proposed a full review of the Flock contracts. Instead, the mayor moved the review to committee with no public comment, the council went along 5–3 — and when residents objected, two people were arrested. Mia Hyder, attending her first public meeting ever, had her microphone cut and was dragged out in handcuffs for speaking against the cameras. There’s now a petition demanding the charges be dropped and residents be heard.
Read that again: people were handcuffed for speaking against the surveillance cameras at a public meeting about the surveillance cameras. If that doesn’t chill your speech, nothing will.
The Fourteenth Amendment: Due Process and Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment promises due process and equal protection under the law. Flock’s system fails both tests in practice:
No due process. Nobody notifies you when your movements go into a police database. There’s no hearing, no consent, no opt-out — your data is retained (Springfield police say 30 days for routine scans, longer for investigations) and you never get a say. When plate readers misread a plate — and they do — innocent drivers get pulled over at gunpoint over a computer’s mistake, with no process beforehand.
No equal protection. These cameras don’t go up evenly. They cluster in some neighborhoods and not others, which means some communities get tracked and stopped and others don’t. A surveillance system pointed hardest at the people with the least power to object is the opposite of equal protection.
What I’d Do About It
When I’m in Congress, I’ll fight for three things:
One — a federal warrant requirement for ALPR databases. If the government wants a month of your movements, it can go to a judge like the Fourth Amendment says.
Two — real data rules: short retention limits, no federal data-sharing without a warrant, public audit logs, and mandatory disclosure of every camera contract — they’re public records, and cities shouldn’t be allowed to hide them.
Three — protect the right to object. What happened in Springfield on September 22 — cutting microphones and handcuffing residents at a hearing about their own privacy — should never happen in America again.
Safety and the Constitution aren’t enemies. We can catch criminals without building a machine that watches everyone, everywhere, all the time. The 99% deserve both.
I’m Alexander Heidenreich. I’m for the 99 — not the surveillance state.
Paid for by Alexander J.S. Heidenreich for Congress.