Tarrant Co TX Sheriff on Flock Cameras: "If you're in the public, there's no expectation of privacy"

Our Take

Credit to Justin Machacek for catching this exchange at a Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting, where Sheriff Bill Waybourn leans on the old standby: "if you're in public, there's no expectation of privacy." It's a line law enforcement officials reach for every time someone questions ALPR networks, and it's meant to end the conversation. It shouldn't.

The courts have already started to push back on this exact logic. A cop watching you drive past a single intersection is nothing like a statewide grid of cameras logging your plate, timestamp, and location every time you move, then storing that data for weeks or months and sharing it across agencies. That's not "public observation," it's a permanent, searchable record of where you've been — the kind of mosaic the Supreme Court flagged in Carpenter v. United States as a different animal than a single glance from a sheriff's deputy. Treating mass, networked tracking as legally identical to a passerby noticing your car is a sleight of hand, and it's one that elected officials and sheriffs keep getting away with in budget hearings and commissioners court meetings where nobody pushes back.

This is exactly why documenting these systems county by county matters. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets in Tarrant County and beyond, and head to take-action if you want to push your local commissioners to ask harder questions than "how much does it cost."