Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington live in and around Norfolk, Virginia. Like most ordinary people, they have daily routines. Work, church, trips to the store, visits with family, school pickups. And like most ordinary people, they don’t like the thought of somebody following them around and watching their every move. 

But that is exactly what the city of Norfolk is doing. In 2023, the city installed over 172 cameras around town. These are not your standard traffic cameras. The cameras are strategically placed to capture everybody’s daily travel. They’re straight-up surveillance cameras, set up to watch people 24/7 as they go about their lives. 

As the police chief has explained, “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” 

The cameras snap photos of every car as they drive by and upload them into a database. Officials can then use this database to go back in time and create maps of where people have been, where they tend to drive, and even who they tend to meet up with. All of this happens without a warrant or even probable cause.  

But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow the government to set up a surveillance state. If the city wants to track suspicious people, it can do what the police have always done: get a warrant. What the city can’t do, though, is watch ordinary people everywhere they go and create a record of their lives without any judicial oversight. Lee and Crystal, with help from the Institute for Justice, are suing to make sure of that. 

Case Team

Attorneys

Staff

Dan King

Communications Project Manager

Case Documents

See More

Media Resources

Get in touch with the media contact and take a look at the image resources for the case.

Dan King Communications Project Manager [email protected]

Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington don’t want to be tracked everywhere. 

Lee Schmidt is a 42-year-old husband and father who lives in Norfolk. Norfolk is home to the largest naval base in the world. After serving his country for 22 years, Lee retired from the Navy this year with an honorable discharge. He plans to remain in Norfolk. It’s where he lives, goes to church, goes to the shooting range, and spends time with his wife and daughters. 

Crystal Arrington is a 44-year-old wife and mother who lives in Portsmouth (two miles outside of Norfolk). Crystal runs a home-healthcare business, where she takes care of elderly people who can no longer care for themselves. She drives in and around Norfolk every day. It’s where most of her clients, friends, and family live. Crystal’s clients often need her help getting out of the house and driving around. 

Lee and Crystal, like most ordinary people, expect a degree of privacy as they go about their lives. Of course, where they drive is to some degree exposed to the public. But no rational person expects somebody to be secretly hiding out there in the world, tracking their every move, and potentially using that information to learn where they like to go, what they like to do, and who they like to spend time with.  

Norfolk’s camera network tracks people everywhere without a warrant. 

Norfolk, it turns out, is surveilling Lee, Crystal, and everybody who drives in and around Norfolk. In 2023, the city installed a network of over 172 cameras around town. The cameras were strategically placed so that, in the police chief’s words, “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” To truly understand what’s going on here, you need to know a bit about a private company called Flock Safety, Inc. 

Flock describes itself as “a tech company eliminating crime.” Flock offers a suite of tech options—including surveillance cameras—to local governments so that law enforcement officials can “[s]top wasting valuable time hunting for evidence” and leverage “the power of intelligent evidence at scale.” Flock’s cameras automatically photograph cars as they drive by, record their license plate numbers, use AI technology to create a distinct “Vehicle Fingerprint,” and then enter that information into a database that Flock customers across the country can access. Flock’s cameras are now in over 5,000 cities across the country and growing. 

Law-abiding folks like Lee and Crystal are being swept up in the Flock machine every day. Every time they drive by a Flock camera, their location information gets stored in Flock’s database. Norfolk officers then have 30 days to download as much information as they want from the database on a rolling basis. They can use that data to create location history maps. They can even see where Lee and Crystal have driven outside of Norfolk. Because nearby cities (and thousands more across the country) have Flock cameras too, Norfolk officers have access to what the police chief calls a “curtain of technology” that can track travel across cities. And officers in those cities, in turn, have access to Lee’s and Crystal’s data. 

There are no meaningful restrictions on Norfolk officers’ access to the Flock data. They do not need to get a warrant. They do not need to have probable cause. Worse yet, Norfolk’s operating procedures actually require officers to log into the Flock system and to use it during their entire shift. While the operating procedures purport to limit use of the data to “law enforcement purposes,” that term is undefined—which, in practice, means it’s defined by each individual officer. 

As you might expect, these kinds of surveillance databases have been subject to abuse in other parts of the country. In Kansas, two police officers used Flock cameras to stalk their ex-partners. In California, several police departments learned that data from their license plate reader database had been shared with other departments in other states, without their knowledge and in violation of California law. Compiling so much sensitive data in one place, moreover, can attract hackers, which can reveal private information. 

Constant surveillance without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. 

The Fourth Amendment protects the people’s right “to be secure in their . . . persons against unreasonable searches.” It was inspired, in large part, by founding-era search practices that gave officials unfettered discretion to invade private property and root around for smuggled goods and papers critical of the government. These were fishing expeditions, plain and simple. 

We live in a different world now. Physically invading property is no longer the only way to invade our privacy. Advances in technology have given the government new ways of intruding that the founders couldn’t have imagined. But the basic problem that inspired the Fourth Amendment—granting officials unchecked power—is the same. Yesterday’s unfettered searches of homes and drawers are today’s warrantless drone surveillance and GPS tracking. 

Fourth Amendment law, while imperfect, has tried to keep up with these technological advances. In 2018, the Supreme Court held that officials had to get a warrant based on probable cause before they could subpoena seven days of historical location data from a cell phone carrier. In 2021, following that decision, the Fourth Circuit held that constant warrantless aerial surveillance over the entire city of Baltimore was unconstitutional. 

The concern in both cases was that tracking people’s locations over time, even in public, would allow the government to learn intimate details about a person’s life—from habits to religion to health to friendships—that would otherwise be impossible to know without effectively stalking that person. The courts have made it clear: such power cannot be used without judicial oversight. In other words, law enforcement needs a warrant based on probable cause to ensure these surveillance tools aren’t being misused. 

That’s equally true in Norfolk. The city’s camera network—its “curtain of technology”—is watching Lee and Crystal whenever they drive around town. And officers can access that data whenever they please, for whatever reason they please. Would catching crime be easier if the city could watch people 24/7? Sure. But the Fourth Amendment wasn’t adopted to make life easier for police. It was adopted to make us secure from abusive searches—no less when those searches track us across an entire city. And the main way the Fourth Amendment does that is with a simple rule: If the government wants to surveil you, it should have to get a warrant. 

Case details—the parties, legal claim, court, and litigation team. 

The plaintiffs are Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington. They have sued in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Their legal claim is that Norfolk’s warrantless camera system violates their Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable searches.” 

Norfolk’s cameras conduct searches for two reasons: They are purposefully investigating everybody who drives in town. And, in the Supreme Court’s terms, they invade Lee’s and Crystal’s reasonable expectation that they won’t be constantly watched and their travels compiled in a database that could be used to learn their routines and associations. These searches, moreover, are unreasonable because officials can access all this data without a warrant or even probable cause—the traditional safeguards against abusive searches. 

Lee and Crystal are represented by IJ Attorney Michael Soyfer, IJ Litigation Fellow Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, and IJ Senior Attorneys Robert Frommer and Joshua Windham. 

About the Institute for Justice 

The Institute for Justice (IJ), founded in 1991, is the national law firm for liberty. This case is part of IJ’s Project on the Fourth Amendment, which seeks to bolster the right of all Americans to be secure in their persons and property. IJ is currently litigating several other challenges to warrantless searches, including a challenge to a New Jersey program forcibly collecting and retaining newborn blood, and challenges to warrantless entries of private land in Virginia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania (state and federal).