Schmidt v. City of Norfolk

Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 2:24cv621, Document 191 (E.D. Va., Norfolk Div.), Judge Mark S. Davis. Two citations exist for this one document: 2026 WL 207513 and 819 F. Supp. 3d 492. The court granted summary judgment to the City and denied Plaintiffs' cross-motion.

Standing is split. Plaintiffs Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington, captured 475 and 325 times over four months in 2025, have standing to challenge the ongoing collection and storage of their vehicle images in Norfolk's 21-day rolling database. Their plates were never queried outside the litigation, so, following Scholl v. Ill. State Police, 776 F. Supp. 3d 701 (N.D. Ill. 2025), they lack standing to challenge the query practice. The merits ruling reaches only collection and storage.

On the merits: Norfolk's 176 ALPR cameras (75 fixed clusters, plus police access to 43 third-party cameras in city limits) do not reveal "the whole" of a person's movements. Plaintiffs' vehicles were captured 2 to 3 full-plate-match times per day on average, "30 to 50 times" fewer data points per day than Carpenter's roughly 101, typically 2.5 to 3.5 miles and 45 to 50 minutes apart. The court places the system closer to the bounded GPS tracking in United States v. Jones than to the "near continuous" tracking in Carpenter or Beautiful Struggle.

"Unblinking eyes" is Plaintiffs' complaint language. The court's answer, in footnote 15, is quoted below.

How we know: Fully verified: opinion read directly (v3.10). Plaintiffs are appealing (4th Cir. No. 26-1227).

Full record →checked v3.10

The opinion's "2-3 times per day" figure is footnoted to ECF No. 113 at 9, the City of Norfolk's own district-court summary-judgment brief, and describes the plaintiffs' own vehicles. The City's appellate brief adds a figure for all vehicles: "even the 5% of vehicles that were most photographed were on average photographed no more than once a day," citing the report of its expert, Valentin Estevez. That report was first filed under seal, then refiled publicly with redactions on Nov 21, 2025 (Doc. 180-1), where Estevez puts it as the top 5 percent being "captured once or less on 65% of days." The passage saying whose plates that analysis covered is still redacted. Plaintiffs-Appellants' Reply Brief (Doc. 59) never mentions or disputes the figure, most plausibly because their theory rests on the system's capability, not observed capture frequency.

How we know: Updated Sept 28, 2026: the Estevez report was refiled publicly in redacted form (Doc. 180-1), and the appellate brief is now quoted in full. Earlier versions said the figure rested on a sealed declaration and shortened the brief's wording.

Full record →carried forward

Defending the suit, the City sought the plaintiffs' cell-site location data, first through three subpoenas to their cellphone carriers and then through a motion to compel, which also asked each plaintiff to identify the ten people they interacted with most. The City told the court the location data was the most relevant information to the case. Magistrate Judge Lawrence R. Leonard denied the motion. Because both sides agreed that Schmidt's carrier had improperly disclosed his records in response to a subpoena, the court ordered the City to destroy them.

How we know: Order read directly (Doc. 104, read Sept 28, 2026). The order does not name the carrier or say what became of the other two subpoenas.

Full record →carried forward

For Plaintiffs-Appellants, filed April 20, 2026: ACLU, ACLU of Virginia, and EFF jointly; the New Civil Liberties Alliance; EPIC; the Innocence Project and The Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law jointly; The Policing Project at NYU School of Law; the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability; and the Cato Institute.

For the City, filed June 18, 2026: a sixteen-state brief (South Carolina lead, joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and DC); the Commonwealth of Virginia; Human Trafficking Training Center LLC, Operation Light Shine, and Safe House Project jointly; Major Cities Chiefs Association, Major County Sheriffs of America, the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police, North Carolina Sheriffs' Association, and Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and Foundation jointly; the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Outreach Taskforce, and Multicultural Business Alliance; and the United States ("Brief of the United States as Amicus Curiae in Support of Defendants-Appellees").

The plaintiffs-side brief adds record figures: over 1 million vehicle detections in March 2026 alone with a sub-1% hotlist match rate, and a police audit failure (logs undownloaded until Feb. 2025, unreviewed until May 2025, by which point the system had been queried 230,000+ times).

How we know: Confirmed against the Fourth Circuit docket (CourtListener 72357963). Cato, the U.S., and the Florida chamber brief resolved in v3.13 and v3.19. The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability brief (Doc. 27) was missing until Sept 28, 2026.

Full record →checked v3.19

On Sept 8, 2026 the Clerk's Office asked both sides whether any similar case is pending in the Fourth Circuit or the Supreme Court. Plaintiffs-Appellants answered "NO". Defendants-Appellees answered "YES" on Sept 9 and named Porter v. United States, No. 26-5121: Elijah Porter's petition from the Fifth Circuit's March 17, 2026 decision (No. 25-60163), which held that accessing plate-reader data was not a Fourth Amendment search. The petition was distributed for the Supreme Court's Sept 28, 2026 conference. If the Court takes it, the Supreme Court will decide the question at the center of Schmidt.

How we know: Norfolk's filing read directly (Doc. 63, obtained Sept 28, 2026); Supreme Court docket fetched directly. Our earlier working guess, Chatrie v. United States, was wrong.

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On Sept 8, 2026 the case was "TENTATIVELY CALENDARED for oral argument during the December 8-11, 2026, argument session," with a Sept 15 deadline to flag conflicts. Plaintiffs-Appellants' lead counsel is unavailable Dec 8-9 but available Dec 10-11. Defendants-Appellees' counsel (Elaine Goldenberg) is unavailable all four days and states she is "fully available during the Court's January and March sittings." No order resolving this had been entered as of Sept 23, 2026.

How we know: Confirmed against the docket. The date itself is not settled; likely to move to January or March 2027.

Full record →checked v3.28

United States v. Gregory, 128 F.4th 1228 (11th Cir. 2025), concerns two warrantless pole cameras on one co-defendant's home for about 10 months. The Eleventh Circuit found no Fourth Amendment violation. The sixteen-state brief quotes the line below as its opening, and Judge Davis's opinion relies on it too. Judge Jordan's partial concurrence cautioned against reading the public-view doctrine as blanket immunity for pole cameras "regardless of the length of time they record," which the brief also quotes at p. 11.

How we know: Confirmed twice (v3.9 against Gregory itself, v3.10 against the brief). A full sentence-by-sentence fairness check of the brief was not done.

Full record →checked v3.10

The phrase is a verbatim quote from Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dep't, 2 F.4th 330, 341-42 (4th Cir. 2021), invoked in the Schmidt appellate briefing on both sides. Judge Davis's opinion discusses Beautiful Struggle at length but does not coin the phrase.

How we know: Resolved v3.8, reconfirmed against the opinion in v3.10.

Full record →checked v3.10