Kansas Lawsuit Claims ALPRs Convert License Plates into a GPS-Style Tracking Device

License plates, on their own, are a fairly simple and low-tech invention that arrived in the United States around the dawn of the 20th century. Yet when these metal plates are linked to a network of AI-assisted automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), they transform into powerful tracking tools capable of laying out a full chronology of a person’s movements, potentially exposing intimate details about habits, health, relationships, political leanings, and religious beliefs.

Despite this, law enforcement agencies nationwide continue to employ such systems and routinely interrogate the collected data without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, a warrant, or any form of judicial oversight. In Wichita, Kansas, for example, authorities can access information from roughly 200 Flock Safety ALPR cameras, installed so broadly that avoiding surveillance in everyday life becomes nearly impossible. A lawsuit filed this week by the Kansas Justice Institute in Sedgwick County District Court contends that this program breaches the privacy protections of the Kansas Constitution.

The plaintiff in Grimmett v. Wichita, local privacy advocate Mason Grimmett, is described by KJI’s litigation director, Sam MacRoberts, as “a law-abiding citizen trapped in Wichita’s warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program.” He notes, “He has done nothing wrong, yet he is being tracked, monitored, and databased. That’s unconstitutional. If Wichita intends to monitor its residents, it must obtain a warrant from a judge.”

Grimmett’s complaint states that the data from Wichita’s ALPR system—including photographs, locations, and numerous derivable details—are retained for at least 30 days and, under certain circumstances, may be stored indefinitely. The database provides both real-time and historical information and is accessible to “virtually every police officer in Wichita,” as well as “hundreds of other law enforcement agencies.”

In practice, officers can freely search the database from computers or mobile devices, performing advanced queries that specify vehicle traits, generate travel maps and predicted routes, and may even include “convoy analysis,” which “documents vehicles that have appeared near a target vehicle.” The lawsuit also highlights that ALPR images can capture bumper stickers and decals, which can reveal a driver’s political views.

The Wichita Police Department is supposed to use the city’s surveillance network and database only for legitimate law enforcement purposes. Yet Lt. Brian Safris acknowledges that ensuring every search complies with that standard is “not even possible” to enforce. The suit cites several instances in Kansas and other states where officers used ALPR systems for purposes not authorized, such as stalking former partners or suspected romantic rivals.

“One instance of an external agency misusing the Flock system is not shocking to my conscience at all,” said Capt. Casey Slaughter, who oversees Wichita’s ALPR program, after one such abuse came to light in 2022. “It’s just not. And I’m being completely honest—I knew it would happen eventually. And it did.”

When abuses come to light, they may lead to disciplinary actions, dismissal, or criminal charges. Yet the combination of lax internal oversight and a complete absence of independent supervision makes it likely that the known cases are only the tip of the iceberg, with the risk of misuse multiplied by the fact that information gathered by one agency is typically shared with many others.

The Wichita Police Department formally shares its ALPR data with a long list of Kansas law enforcement agencies, which may in turn share that information with others. “Wichita would not know whether Junction City [one of its many ALPR partners] was providing information from Wichita’s surveillance database to Junction City’s partner agencies” or to “any other agency,” the complaint states. And when Wichita officers serve on federal task forces, they may “provide Wichita’s data to the federal law enforcement agencies for which they are deputized, even if Wichita does not formally share its Flock data with those federal agencies.”

The wide dissemination of ALPR data means that even a department with fairly strict internal rules cannot determine how the information is used. As The Wichita Eagle reported in 2022, once “the surveillance data is shared,” Wichita police officials lose control over how those external agencies use it and have no way to flag unlawful searches of its license plate reader database.

That pattern repeats across the thousands of towns and cities that rely on ALPR cameras. A 2020 figure, cited in a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, shows that “nearly 90% of sheriff’s offices with 500 or more sworn deputies reported using the technology,” while every police department serving more than 1 million residents had ALPRs.

The reach of ALPR surveillance has undoubtedly grown since that survey. Flock alone has installed around 90,000 cameras across more than 5,000 local jurisdictions. Even small communities like Greers Ferry, Arkansas, have adopted them with the expectation that they will deter, detect, and investigate crime.

As the KJI suit emphasizes, this approach entails routine monitoring of innocent individuals who are not suspected of wrongdoing. And even when ALPR systems flag a criminal suspect, the accuracy is not perfect, estimated at about 80 to 85 percent.

In a single month this year (from June 26 to July 27), Wichita’s ALPR network conducted 904,603 license plate searches, the lawsuit notes. That implies the system misidentified vehicles somewhere between 135,690 and 180,920 times. The complaint cites an instance where an unsuspecting Kansas couple was pulled over multiple times, including a gunpoint stop, because the Flock ALPR dragnet had erroneously tagged their minivan as a stolen pickup truck.

Law enforcement agencies like Wichita’s have concluded that these risks are worth the benefit, given ALPR’s perceived usefulness. Yet the lawsuit contends that such judgments are not theirs to make.

Much like the Fourth Amendment, Section 15 of the Kansas Bill of Rights bars “unreasonable searches and seizures,” though it broadly protects “persons and property,” rather than the broader phrasing of “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” And similar to the Fourth Amendment, Section 15 requires warrants to be based on “probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation,” and that they “particular[ly]” describe the place to be searched and the persons or property to be seized.

Even granting that Section 15 offers no more protection than the Fourth Amendment, the suit argues that Wichita’s ALPR surveillance constitutes a “search” under the Supreme Court’s Katz v. United States ruling from 1967. That decision ties the Fourth Amendment to an individual’s “expectation of privacy” that society regards as reasonable, as Justice John Marshall Harlan II explained in his concurring opinion.

Do motorists like Grimmett have a reasonable expectation that they will not be tracked electronically every time they drive? KJI believes they do.

The lawsuit advances several grounds for that conclusion. It notes that even in public, a person retains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of their physical movements, as recognized by the Supreme Court in the 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision involving cell-site location data. The Court observed that “society’s expectation” has been that law enforcement would not—and, for the most part, could not—secretly monitor and catalog every movement of a person’s car for a prolonged period. The suit states that Carpenter and Chatrie v. United States, decided in June, established that individuals possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in the entirety of their movements.

The complaint also points out that Kansas has criminalized stalking, including the use of any electronic tracking system or the collection of tracking data to determine a person’s location, movement, or travel patterns. It also notes that the Wichita Police Department itself acknowledged privacy concerns about ALPR: in 2022, it urged state lawmakers to pass a law shielding ALPR data from public records requests because such information is personal and sensitive.

“Wichita’s warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program gives police access to information previously unknowable, including the ability to reconstruct a person’s movements,” the lawsuit states. That claim has spurred local opposition: “Wichitans have publicly denounced and criticized Wichita’s warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program. Across the country, countless other citizens have condemned warrantless ALPR surveillance programs.”

Some critics have taken action beyond words: the complaint notes that several ALPR cameras were damaged or removed in Houston, Texas; Volusia County, Florida; Arlington County, Virginia; and in North and South Carolina. A few years ago, Wichita police Capt. Aaron Moses told the City Council that the city keeps the locations of its Flock cameras confidential to prevent vandalism or destruction of the cameras.

Beyond satisfying Katz, the lawsuit argues, Wichita’s ALPR surveillance can be viewed as a search under the traditional property-based analysis the Supreme Court had used prior to Katz, and that it still employs intermittently. “Under its conventional use, verifying registration taxes and adequate insurance,” a government-mandated license plate might not have been a trespassory search under Section 15. “However, when paired with Wichita’s ALPR dragnet surveillance program, it now operates as the functional equivalent of attaching a GPS tracking device, which is a trespassory search,” the complaint says.

The Supreme Court acknowledged this point in United States v. Jones (2012), ruling that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s car. “The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. “We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

Whether applying the Katz framework or the Jones approach, the suit contends, the implication for Wichita’s ALPR system is obvious: police are conducting searches when they employ that system to track individuals’ movements. This matters because warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable and invalid, with only a few narrowly defined exceptions that do not generally apply to most ALPR uses.

Wichita’s ALPR program is described in the filing as “akin to an unconstitutional general warrant or writ of assistance.” It claims the program undermines individual liberty, invades privacy and security, and has become overly pervasive. It permits, authorizes, and enforces unreasonable, nonconsensual, suspicionless, and warrantless surveillance, tracking, cataloging, and databasing, including the ability to reconstruct the movements of every motorist in Wichita, which had been previously unknowable. For these and other reasons, the lawsuit argues, the program violates the text, structure, history, and purpose of Section 15 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights.

Last April, the Institute for Justice pressed similar Fourth Amendment-based arguments in a federal lawsuit challenging San Jose’s ALPR network, described as creepy and deeply intrusive. Yet Flock, which holds contracts with both San Jose and Wichita, remains unfazed by civil-liberties concerns about its business model. The company states its mission is to “eliminate crime” by collecting the objective evidence police need to solve crime, which includes license plates and vehicle information. Garrett Langley, Flock’s founder and CEO, envisions “a Flock camera on every street corner.”