A police officer who sees your license plate while you drive through Waukesha hasn't invaded your privacy. But what happens when the government can search a massive database showing where your vehicle was seen, when it was there, and potentially where it traveled next?
Wisconsin is about to start answering that question in court.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed suit Thursday against Waukesha County and 11 municipalities over their use of Flock Safety license plate cameras. The lawsuit argues police should need a warrant before searching Flock's location database for someone's movements.
From Wisconsin Public Radio:
Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel for WILL, said they are asking the court to declare that law enforcement in the county must obtain a search warrant before they use the Flock system.
“And that a warrant is required under the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment, to search this database, which is a really powerful database that tracks your daily movements, just like a lot of other technologies do,” Lennington said.
Data from the cameras can be accessed by other law enforcement agencies.
Lennington said there are examples of misuse of the technology by police officers in Wisconsin and across the nation.
“If there just would have been some sort of oversight, like a warrant requirement from a judge, then these abuses would have been caught,” he said.
“That’s really the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, is to provide a check on law enforcement and to make sure that when they’re using very powerful surveillance tools, like Flock cameras, that those requests are reviewed before they’re put in the field,” he added.
The lawsuit comes as some local governments and law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin have moved to cut ties with Flock Safety. Opponents of the technology have raised privacy concerns and worries about how the data can be accessed and shared.
Some local leaders have said the technology is a tool that can be used to improve public safety.
Lennington said WILL is not asking that the municipalities cancel contracts with Flock Safety.
“We’re not asking that the cameras be taken down,” he said. “We’re asking that the constitutional standard be applied.”
More than 120 Flock cameras operate in Waukesha County, while the searchable network cited in the complaint contains data from more than 1,500 Wisconsin cameras and roughly 120,000 nationwide.
This isn't some argument that police should throw away useful technology. Flock cameras have helped agencies find stolen cars, locate missing people, and identify suspects.
Those are legitimate public-safety benefits, and conservatives shouldn't pretend otherwise simply because a privacy lawsuit has arrived.
Stevens Point Mayor Mike Wiza made almost exactly that case when his city suspended its Flock cameras this week.
Mayor Wiza's statement:
Law Enforcement agencies countrywide have been using Flock technology to assist in a variety of areas. By taking away tools that have been proven to help solve crimes and find missing or abducted persons, we are doing a disservice to the community. Anything that can help missing family members return home, reduce or even deter criminal activity, or assist victims in seeing justice served is a tool we need our Emergency Services to have at their disposal.
Our contract for use includes very specific language to ensure our data remains under our control and is used only for law enforcement purposes by those we allow. We require a level of trust and confidence in everyone we associate with, and we work hard to ensure that trust is maintained in line with our community’s expectations.
Recent events and allegations have cast doubt on that trust regarding the company's use of Flock camera data and the potential misuse of the system by people outside the Flock team.
Allegations from the City of Sheboygan have raised concerns we share regarding how the collected data is shared and managed. Reports are surfacing across the country about the system being misused by municipal and state employees with access to the data, and recently the Governor of Florida banned the cameras from all highways citing “growing signs of camera misuse, and concerns about surveillance.”
To that end, the City of Stevens Point will suspend data collection for all Flock cameras in the city, effective Tuesday, September 8, 2026. Our staff will enclose the units in a covering to prevent them from "seeing" and collecting data.
The operation of these cameras will remain suspended, and the City will explore termination of our contract with Flock.
Wiza praised technology that helps recover missing people and solve crimes but said concerns about data sharing and misuse had damaged the trust needed to continue operating the system.
Stevens Point shut off data collection Sept. 8 and is considering ending its contract.
The numbers from Waukesha County explain the uneasiness.
Muskego police searched the Flock database more than 300 times from July 25 through Aug. 24. Outside agencies performed more than 900,000 searches involving Muskego's nine cameras during the same period, according to the lawsuit.
From Wisconsin Public Radio:
In Muskego, police officers searched the Flock database over 300 times from July 25 and Aug. 24, according to the complaint. Muskego has 9 Flock cameras, the complaint says.
“Other agencies ran searches on the Flock Location Database that included the City of Muskego cameras over 900,000 times during the same period,” the complaint said.
NoCams Muskego is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Pete Karas, who is running for Wisconsin Secretary of State as a member of the Green Party, is the group’s co-founder. He agrees that a warrant should be required in order to use the database.
“If the government wants to search your cell phone, they need to get a warrant, or your Google history, they need a warrant,” Karas said. “But in this case, they can monitor and track you, and no warrant is needed.”
Thursday morning, Mukwonago Village Administrator Diana Dykstra said the village had not been served with the lawsuit or reviewed it yet.
“However, I can say that the Village has only been using the Flock system on a very limited trial basis since July, and had already decided not to proceed with Flock before the suit was filed,” Dykstra wrote in an email. “The Village is in the process of terminating its relationship with Flock.”
Oconomowoc Mayor Matt Rosek also said the city had not been served with the lawsuit yet. Rosek said city officials will be, “discussing the continued use of Flock” during a meeting next week.
In a response to the lawsuit, Waukesha County Corporation Counsel Erik Weidig wrote, “It is the practice of the Waukesha County Office of Corporation Counsel to not comment on pending litigation.”
The cameras can capture time, location, vehicle make and model, and other identifying details.
A plate visible on a public street is public information at that moment. An accumulated, searchable record of someone's movements raises a harder constitutional question.
WILL argues that searching such a database reveals enough about a person's movements to trigger Fourth Amendment protections. The lawsuit isn't demanding that Flock disappear; it asks courts to require probable cause and a warrant before police search someone's location history, with traditional exceptions available for genuine emergencies.
Police and municipalities will have a strong response. License plates are exposed to public view, cameras are positioned along public roads, and officers have used plate readers for years. No Wisconsin court has yet ruled that WILL is right about Flock's particular system.
Still, technology can change the scale of government power without changing the words of the Constitution.
The Founders never imagined a camera that could photograph thousands of passing vehicles, combine those sightings with cameras across the country, and make the resulting history searchable from a computer terminal.
They didn't need to imagine the device; they understood government power.
Good policing deserves good tools, while good government also needs boundaries.
Wisconsin's courts now get to decide whether one of those boundaries is still called a warrant.
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