Police Can Track Your Car for MONTHS. Here's How.
The short version: A Florida defense attorney's case file shows ALPR networks can reconstruct a car's movements over nearly a year without a warrant, raising serious Fourth Amendment red flags.
Our Take
Credit to Patrick McGeehan, the Daytona Beach Lawyer, for pulling back the curtain on something we've been warning about: this isn't hypothetical fearmongering, it's a real case file. When investigators can pull roughly a year of historical vehicle images — tracking changes in a car's condition over time — from Flock Safety and Motorola Vigilant systems, we're no longer talking about a single traffic stop or a targeted investigation. We're talking about a retroactive map of someone's entire life, built without a judge ever signing off on it.
That's the core problem. Courts have long recognized that long-term location tracking is different in kind from a single snapshot — that's the whole logic behind the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision on cell-site data. Yet ALPR networks routinely let local police departments query months of movement history with nothing more than a login and a reason that sounds plausible. No warrant, no independent review, just a database query. The technology may help close cases, but convenience isn't a constitutional substitute for a warrant, and right now most departments aren't even required to pretend otherwise.
If a video like this makes you wonder how far your own town's camera network reaches, check our map to see what's already watching your street, and if you want to push back on retention policies and warrant requirements where you live, our take-action guide is a good place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Daytona Beach Lawyer, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.