CATAWBA — Automated license-plate cameras in the Town of Catawba are coming down after the Town Council declined to keep paying for them.
WHKY reported that the town and its police department tried five Flock Safety cameras in a 60-day trial. The cameras photograph license plates and other visible vehicle traits that investigators can later search. Police Chief Brian Bixby supported keeping the system after the trial. The council declined that request, including a smaller proposal of about $3,000 for a single camera.
Because the council did not approve continued funding, the town did not sign a permanent contract with Flock Safety. The cameras will be removed, WHKY reported.
Catawba First News has not independently reviewed the council minutes or the vendor proposal. The local account above is drawn from WHKY’s report.
What the cameras are built to do
Flock Safety sells automated license-plate readers, or ALPRs. A unit on a pole photographs passing vehicles, reads the plate, and logs visible details such as make, color, and body type, along with the time and place of the scan. Police can then search that file for a stolen car, a missing person, or a vehicle tied to a crime.
That is the case police departments usually make. Critics answer that the same file is a running log of ordinary travel, that access is hard for the public to see, and that a town’s cameras can be queried by agencies far outside its limits if the contract allows sharing.
The Fourth Amendment question
The fight is not mainly about a single snapshot of a plate on a public road. A plate has to be displayed. Courts have long treated a car moving in public as something police may observe without a warrant.
The harder question is what happens when those snapshots stack up.
In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that pulling a person’s historical cell-phone location records is a search under the Fourth Amendment. The records were detailed enough, and kept long enough, to reveal the whole of a person’s physical movements. The Court said people do not give up all constitutional protection just by stepping outside.
Privacy lawyers have tried to carry that idea over to Flock networks. Their argument: if cameras sit on enough roads, keep the pictures, and let an officer search a plate across days or weeks, the database can reconstruct a travel pattern that no officer could have followed in person. They also point to sharing. A query from another department, or a longer retention period written into a contract, can widen a small-town camera into someone else’s investigative tool.
Police and Flock say the comparison fails. A plate scan is not a phone in a pocket. It does not follow a person indoors. Many systems delete images on a short rolling schedule unless an investigator downloads a hit. And a sparse set of cameras, they argue, leaves gaps too large to count as continuous tracking.
Federal courts have mostly sided with that narrower view so far, while leaving the door open if a network gets dense enough.
In January 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis threw out a challenge to Norfolk, Virginia’s Flock system, roughly 176 cameras. In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, he held that the plaintiffs had not shown the network captured the whole of their movements. Their cars were photographed hundreds of times over several months, but the hits were spaced in time and distance. A single plate scan of a vehicle on a public road, he wrote, does not invade a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Institute for Justice, which represents the residents, appealed to the Fourth Circuit. That appeal was still pending in public reporting as of June 2026. It is not a ruling that every Flock contract is lawful, and it is not a ruling about Catawba.
A federal court in Kansas reached a similar result in a criminal case, denying a motion to suppress evidence taken from a warrantless search of a Flock database. Defense lawyers there had argued the query was the plate-reader version of Carpenter. The court disagreed.
The live constitutional line, then, is practical. How many cameras. How long the town keeps the file. Who else can search it. Whether a hit is a one-off look at a public plate, or a stitched map of a person’s week. Towns that sign Flock deals are making that call in a contract, usually before any court in their circuit has drawn the line for them.
Catawba’s council did not have to answer the constitutional question to end the trial. It only had to decline the bill. The cameras come down either way. The debate they walked into will not.
