A Texas man serving 60 years for armed robbery is asking a federal appeals court to throw out his conviction because police tracked his car through Flock cameras without a warrant.
Charles Brownlee, 37, was found guilty in 2024 of five armed robberies. His lawyers say authorities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area used Flock cameras to follow his vehicle and assemble a "pattern of life" that tied him to the crimes. In a brief to the 5th Circuit Court, they argued that Flock "gives police the power to find almost anyone and reconstruct their movements," and that officers should have obtained a search warrant before querying its databases. Texas has tens of thousands of Flock cameras. Brownlee tried to have the Flock data excluded before trial, but the judge denied the request.
He is not arguing in a vacuum. In a separate federal case, Judge Sara E. Hill ruled that using Flock databases to track a drug trafficking suspect across state lines was unconstitutional. A DEA officer had run the woman's plate through the databases and found her recent travels suspicious; she was later found with methamphetamine. "Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society," Hill wrote.
The legal backdrop is Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 Supreme Court decision that police generally need a warrant for historical cell-phone location records, because a long record of someone's movements reveals far more than any single moment. Brownlee's team is effectively asking the court to apply that logic to cameras on public roads. That is the hard part. Courts have long held that what you do in public view carries little privacy protection, and Flock's defenders can point to that. Hill's ruling suggests at least one judge sees the aggregate differently.
A single judge's decision does not bind the 5th Circuit. Its answer will show whether searchable, stitched-together road data is treated like a phone's location history or like a stranger's glance at a license plate.