Edward Abrams-Phillips drove from Wisconsin into Michigan in April 2025, bought cannabis that is legal there, and headed home. Automatic license-plate readers operated by Flock Safety logged his vehicle repeatedly on Interstate 41 and the border crossing. Brown County deputies later cited those exact hits in a criminal complaint as part of their probable-cause justification to stop and search his car. The document stated the vehicle “travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there.” The deputy claimed to smell raw marijuana. Abrams-Phillips was arrested. His original bail-jumping charges tied to domestic violence were dismissed. The only conviction that remained was marijuana possession—the offense the travel data had been used to find.
Pattern Recognition Without Individualized Suspicion
Flock’s network of fixed cameras photographs every passing plate and stores the results in a searchable database shared across thousands of agencies. Audit logs from Brown County on the day of the stop show deputies running dozens of queries across thousands of cameras, most labeled generically as “warrant” or “traffic inv.” The system does not require a warrant for the initial search of historical location data. One state’s officers can query cameras in another state and treat the resulting pattern as suspicious.
This is not limited to cannabis. In May 2025 a Johnson County, Texas deputy searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras across 6,809 networks—including cameras in states where abortion remains legal—while investigating a woman accused of a self-administered abortion. The search reason logged in the system was “had an abortion, search for female.” Officials later described the query as a welfare check. Records obtained by journalists show the office had opened a death investigation of a non-viable fetus and consulted prosecutors about possible charges.
In Madison Heights, Michigan, the cannabis retailer JARS was required by settlement to install a Flock camera at its parking-lot entrance and give police “unhindered live access” to the feed and all data as a condition of its operating license. When the business later posted a “No Flock Zone” sign that blocked the camera’s view, the city sent a demand letter threatening sanctions.
Image: Wikimedia
Mission Creep and the Carpenter Question
Flock and participating agencies point to recoveries of abducted children and identification of homicide suspects. Those outcomes occur. The infrastructure that produces them also enables pattern analysis of ordinary travel, reproductive decisions, and visits to legal businesses. The ACLU has noted that Flock’s default nationwide sharing lets officers in one jurisdiction track drivers in another without a warrant or individualized suspicion. Location history becomes a searchable record treated like a streaming profile, except the recommendation can be a traffic stop or an arrest.
Courts have begun examining the density of this data. The Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States held that prolonged cell-site location information requires a warrant because it reveals the whole of a person’s movements. Lower courts reviewing ALPR networks have so far upheld more limited deployments while acknowledging that denser, longer-retention systems could cross the same constitutional line. Washington state already restricts ALPR use to stolen vehicles, missing persons, and active felony warrants and bans collection near health-care facilities and houses of worship. Most states have drawn no such boundaries.
The cameras were sold as tools for the worst emergencies. The records now show them being used to reconstruct legal trips across state lines and to generate the probable cause that follows. The data sits in the database until someone decides a pattern looks suspicious enough to act on.
