Take the Cameras Down
Traffic cameras were sold as convenience. What they've become is a warrant-free surveillance network — and the Fourth Amendment doesn't have an exception for technology.
Traffic cameras were sold as convenience. What they've become is a warrant-free surveillance network — and the Fourth Amendment doesn't have an exception for technology.
A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in the same week. She hadn't done a thing wrong. A Milwaukee police employee simply never cleared an old vehicle alert from a Flock license-plate camera system. Her car kept flagging, officers responded, and she ended up staring down guns over a database entry somebody forgot to delete. That already happened. It is not a future risk.
And that is not the only way this goes wrong. The Washington Post found at least fifty law-enforcement officers across the country who have been charged with or accused of using these camera networks to track people in their personal lives — mostly women, mostly ex-partners. One Florida officer ran his ex-wife's plate 717 times. A Georgia police chief tracked a woman he used to date roughly 600 times before he was stopped. Nobody hacked the system. It worked exactly as built. The only difference was who was sitting at the keyboard.
I have watched this problem grow for years, and it has gotten completely out of hand. It started with the so-called motion-sensor cameras that began showing up at nearly every red light and intersection. We were told they were there to manage traffic, improve signal timing, cut congestion, and make the roads safer. Most people never thought twice about them. Why would you question a device that was supposedly just telling a traffic light a car was waiting?
Look at where we are now. Cameras are everywhere. Many of them no longer simply detect whether a vehicle is sitting at an intersection. They capture license plates, identify vehicles, record locations, and store that information in databases that let someone search a person's movements after the fact. What began under the language of traffic management and public safety has become something much more intrusive: a government surveillance network.
I want to be precise about the difference, because not every camera is the problem. A red-light camera that photographs a car running a signal, issues a ticket, and deletes the image is a traffic-enforcement tool. It only records the person who broke the law. A networked automatic license-plate reader is something else. It photographs every car that passes — guilty or innocent — and feeds that information into a searchable database that can place your vehicle at a specific location on a specific day, weeks or months later. One is enforcement. The other is a tracking system paid for with public-safety money.
I do not believe that is what most Americans agreed to when these cameras started going up.
There is a world of difference between police using technology to investigate a known suspect and the government collecting information on thousands of people who are suspected of nothing. If law enforcement develops probable cause that someone committed a crime and needs location information as part of that investigation, the Constitution already has the answer. Get a warrant. Go before a judge, show probable cause, describe what you are looking for, and explain why you have a lawful reason to obtain it.
What concerns me is the growing idea that government should be allowed to collect the information first and develop suspicion later. That turns the Fourth Amendment upside down. The government should not get to watch everybody on the chance that somebody being watched might one day become a suspect.
The courts are starting to catch up to this, and it is worth naming the cases. In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government generally needs a warrant for historical cell-site location data because tracking a person's movements over time reveals "the whole of a person's physical movements." This past June, in Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that acquiring someone's cellphone location data through a geofence warrant is a Fourth Amendment search. The justices sent that particular case back to decide whether the warrant was narrow enough, but the core point stands: your location history is not free for the taking just because a company holds it. Then on August 5, right here in the Southern District of Mississippi, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ruled that "tower dump" warrants — the ones that hand police the identity and location of every phone that connected to a cell tower during a chosen window — are unconstitutional as a technique. Not unconstitutional in one case. Unconstitutional because a single search can produce thousands of records on people who have done nothing wrong.
That is the same logic that applies to a networked camera database. These systems do not ask for one person's movements. They build a searchable record of everyone's movements and wait for someone to come looking. Judge Reeves put it plainly: the government cannot have the entire haystack just because there might be a needle in it. A camera network does not get a free pass on that principle simply because the cameras hang on poles instead of cell towers.
The technology is new. The principle behind the Fourth Amendment is not. Our founders understood the danger of broad searches without particularized suspicion. They did not have cellphones or license-plate readers or searchable databases, but they understood government power. The Fourth Amendment was written to limit that power, not to protect us only until technology found a way around it.
I know the defense of these systems. They help solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and find missing people. I am not going to pretend that is false. Flock has said its cameras contribute to more than a million investigations a year and that this past July alone the system helped detect more than a thousand missing people and more than twenty thousand stolen vehicles. Those numbers matter to the families involved. But there is a difference between generating a hit on a plate that is already flagged and proving that expanding these networks makes communities measurably safer. Independent evaluations in Mesa, Arizona; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana found no significant reduction in overall crime. In the one place a real controlled trial was run — Vallejo, California — researchers did see more stolen vehicles detected, but they also found a misread rate above one in three. This technology is genuinely good at catching a plate that is already on a list. It has not proven itself as a general crime deterrent. The gap between those two things is exactly where ordinary people's privacy gets spent.
This problem is everywhere now. We have let surveillance technology become part of the everyday landscape with almost no public debate about what these systems actually do. Who owns the information? How long is it kept? Who can search it? Which agencies can access it? Is it shared across jurisdictions? Most of these systems defaulted to keeping data for thirty days — only now being shortened under public pressure — and multi-agency sharing remains one of the biggest unresolved fights. Can someone's travels be reconstructed days, weeks, or months later? Most importantly, does anyone have to show probable cause before looking?
Those questions should have been answered before the infrastructure went up, not years later when we finally see what it is capable of.
People are starting to answer them by walking away. Flock's network has grown past 100,000 cameras nationwide. Yet this year alone more than fifty cities and counties have canceled, suspended, or deactivated their contracts, on top of roughly a hundred that have done the same since 2021. These are not all the same kind of places. Harrisonburg, Virginia pulled the plug over Fourth Amendment concerns and damaged public trust. The Los Angeles Police Department let a three-year contract expire. When communities with very different politics reach the same conclusion, it tells you something. This is not about ideology. It is about people looking at what got built and realizing they never agreed to it.
I support law enforcement. I want police to have the tools they need to investigate crimes and protect communities. I have spent thirty-five years in this work — writing bonds, sitting in courtrooms, watching both sides of the system up close. I have seen what it looks like when investigators have exactly the evidence, they need to hold the right person accountable. I have also seen what it looks like when a system built to catch the guilty sweeps up the innocent along with them. Supporting law enforcement has never required surrendering constitutional rights. The warrant requirement is not an inconvenience standing in the way of police work. It is one of the protections that separates legitimate government authority from unlimited government power.
We have become far too comfortable accepting policies because they arrive wrapped in the words convenience, technology, or public safety. Those words do not override the Constitution. The question is not whether technology can help solve crimes. Of course it can. The question is how much information about ordinary, law-abiding citizens the government should be allowed to collect and keep simply because the technology now makes it possible.
If the cameras hanging over our intersections have become part of a system for tracking and storing the movements of people who are not suspected of any crime, then we have crossed a line that should never have been crossed.
Take the cameras down.
Not because the tools have no use.
Because no government agency should be able to search where you have been until it can first show a judge why it has the right to ask
Lucas Nolan
, USA TODAY
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveillance-abuse
Emily Featherston and Brendan Keefe
About the Author
Mike Morrison is the 2026 PBUS National Bail Agent of the Year and President of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association. With more than 35 years of hands-on experience as a licensed bail agent and owner of Mike Morrison Bail Bonding Company in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he brings a practical, real-world perspective to his writing on criminal justice, constitutional rights, public safety, government accountability, taxation, technology, and public policy.
Morrison has published nearly 200 articles examining the decisions, institutions, and policies that affect working Americans. His writing is grounded in experience rather than theory, drawing from decades spent in courtrooms, jails, communities, and the criminal justice system. His commentary has earned more than one million views across social media in 2026 alone.
He regularly presents on bail policy and professional standards at the Mississippi Judicial College and leads ethics and training programs for bail professionals nationwide.
Independent, plain-spoken, and focused on accountability, Mike writes about the intersection of government, liberty, public safety, and the real-world consequences of policy decisions on Mississippi families and the nation.
© 2026 Mike Morrison. All rights reserved. (Revised 8/15/26)
