An Arkansas Town Agrees To Remove a License Plate Camera Aimed at a Couple’s Home
Flock Safety, an eight-year-old company based in Atlanta, promotes its license plate readers (LPRs) as tools that can “stop crime in its tracks with evidence that drives action.” Charlie and Angie Wolf had a less benign take on the Flock Safety Falcon LPR camera that was installed directly across the street from their home on Lone Pine Road South in Cleburne County, Arkansas, on May 13. The retired couple viewed the camera, which regularly took photos of their driveway and front yard, as an invasion of privacy, since it was recording their movements and those of anyone who happened to visit them.
The Wolfs are hardly alone in expressing concern about the privacy implications of LPR cameras. But local officials in Greers Ferry, the tiny town that had contracted with Flock Safety to install the camera on Lone Pine Road South and four others, were unfazed by the couple’s objections. They repeatedly rejected the Wolfs’ request that the city move the LPR camera. Those officials had a change of heart after the Institute for Justice detailed the Fourth Amendment issues raised by the camera in a July 17 letter to the Greers Ferry City Council.
“After months of warrantless surveillance, we’re relieved the camera has finally been moved from in front of our home,” Charlie Wolf says. “But nobody else should have to experience this either, and it’s time for cities across the country to reassess whether partnering with Flock is really worth sacrificing our Fourth Amendment rights.”
The day after the camera appeared, Wolf asked the town’s police chief, Kallen Lacy, if it could be repositioned in light of its intrusiveness. The answer: “It’s not moving.” In June, the Wolfs sent the city council a letter officially requesting that the camera be moved, arguing that it violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.
“We are writing because the city of Greers Ferry has placed a surveillance Flock A.I. camera on county property directly across…from our residential home that photographs our yard, curtilage, and vehicles each time a car passes by and each time we leave or return home,” the Wolfs said in the letter, which Charlie Wolf read aloud at a city council meeting on July 8. “The Flock camera—and by extension, the city of Greers Ferry—is logging and tracking our movements and conduct in a manner that violates our constitutional right to be secure in our home and our right against unreasonable searches under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.”
For that reason, the Wolfs said, “we formally request that the city council remove the Flock camera so that it 1) no longer photographs our yard, curtilage, vehicles, or children and 2) no longer logs our movements to and from our home.” The camera “has continuously captured images of law-abiding citizens, friends, visitors, and our vehicles,” they noted. “This is done without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, a search warrant, [or] the benefit of impartial judicial review.”
Charlie Wolf reiterated the couple’s objections at the city council meeting. “Every time [
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