Schmidt v. City of Norfolk: federal judge holds Norfolk's Flock network is not a search

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).