↓ Skip to main content
People Over Privilege

Two Suits, One Warrant

·1452 words·7 mins
Lysander Demos
Author
Lysander Demos
Lysander writes at the intersection of individual rights and collective sovereignty. Drawing from the philosophical traditions of the Social Contract and the democratic spirit of the ancient Dēmos (the people), he advocates for a society where every person’s inherent rights are held sacred above the accumulated privileges of institutions, corporations, or political classes.
Capture and Statutes - This article is part of a series.
Part : This Article
Part : Green Bay Answered the Flock Hotlist Request
Part : Milwaukee Police Answered the Cell-Site Simulator Request
Part : What Wisconsin Regulates

In July this series wrote that no Wisconsin statute governs automatic license plate readers and that it had found no Wisconsin court ruling on them. The first half still holds, but the second moved twice this fall.

Waukesha County, September 9
#

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public-interest law group, filed suit in Waukesha County Circuit Court on behalf of a citizens’ group called NoCams Muskego, a taxpayer group called Citizens Defending Liberty, and an Oconomowoc homeowner. The defendants are Waukesha County and eleven of its cities and villages: Muskego, Oconomowoc, New Berlin, Waukesha, Delafield, Brookfield, Mukwonago, Hartland, Menomonee Falls, Elm Grove, and Pewaukee.

The claim is that searching the database without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable searches. The complaint counts more than 120 Flock cameras in Waukesha County and more than 1,500 in Wisconsin. From July 25 to August 24, Muskego police searched the shared database more than 300 times, and searches by other agencies that included Muskego’s cameras exceeded 900,000. Among them the complaint names the California Highway Patrol and the FBI; more than 3,000 agencies searched Menomonee Falls’s cameras about 1.1 million times.

The plaintiffs are not asking that a camera come down. “We’re asking that the constitutional standard be applied,” the institute’s deputy counsel, Dan Lennington, told Wisconsin Public Radio. The complaint asks for a declaration that an officer needs a warrant before searching the database, absent a recognized exception, a permanent injunction, and damages.

On October 7 the defendants moved the case to federal court. Their brief does not mention Chatrie. It rests on a 2021 Seventh Circuit decision that three cameras watching a home for months were not a search, and distinguishes Carpenter on the ground that people leave their cars but carry their phones. The municipalities have also asked the federal judge to pause the case until the Seventh Circuit decides a pending challenge to Illinois’s expressway plate cameras, where the Justice Department has argued that capturing a plate image is not a search. The institute says it will contest the move and wants the state court to decide.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, October 14
#

The ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take an original action. The petitioners are the Wisconsin Council of Churches, for its member congregations, and a Green Bay pastor. The respondents are the cities of Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha.

The claim is Article I, Section 11 of the Wisconsin Constitution, the state’s own search-and-seizure clause, which the petition asks the Court to read on its own authority. The question presented is whether the government’s acquisition of historical location data from “an aggregated, AI-assisted, multi-camera ALPR network” is a search. It asks the Court to declare three things:

  • that searching a person’s stored plate history invades “a reasonable, constitutionally protected expectation of privacy in a person’s aggregate movements”;
  • that doing so without a warrant, absent an exception such as a genuine emergency, violates the state constitution;
  • and that the protection is “not diminished merely because individual vehicular travel occurs upon public thoroughfares.”

The petition’s facts are drawn from the cities’ own records. Green Bay runs about 46 Flock readers alongside Axon in-car systems, keeps a 30-day archive, shares it with 299 outside agencies, and recorded 9,447,030 vehicles in the five weeks from January 1 to February 7. Milwaukee runs three platforms, Flock, Axon, and Genetec, and holds access to data from more than 800 jurisdictions outside the city. Racine is moving its fixed cameras from Flock to Axon. Kenosha has a ten-year, $14.6 million master technology contract with Axon.

The petition notes that the vendor’s deletion policy applies only to data it holds. It stops applying once an agency downloads the data, and agencies “possess the unilateral capability to manually flag, export, and archive specific vehicle location records indefinitely.” The 30-day figure describes the vendor’s retention, not the department’s.

The petition also leans on an Oklahoma federal ruling from two weeks earlier that a retrospective search of a person’s movements in a plate-reader database was a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant.

The Court has not yet said whether it will take the case. Milwaukee’s police department stated its view in May: in a presentation to the Fire and Police Commission it quoted a federal district court in Illinois on the “nearly uniform consensus of courts” that plate readers are not Fourth Amendment searches. That Illinois decision is the one now on appeal to the Seventh Circuit, and the one the Waukesha County defendants want to wait for.

What the two have in common
#

Neither suit asks that a camera be removed or a contract cancelled. Neither suit contests the collecting. Both contest the assembling: who may search what has been kept, and upon whose authority.

Both suits build on the Supreme Court’s June decision in Chatrie v. United States, in which Justice Kagan wrote for the Court that acquiring a phone’s stored location history is a search because of how much of a life it records (SCOTUSblog’s account). Each suit asks a court to say a plate-reader network records as much.

They arrive from opposite directions. One suit is brought for taxpayers and property owners under the federal Fourth Amendment in a circuit court; the other for congregations under the state constitution, taken to the state’s highest court directly. They filed five weeks apart. Between them they name ten cities, five villages, and a county.

What did the Legislature do? A bill from seven Democrats to require a warrant for plate-reader data died in committee in March without a hearing. So did a second, from a Republican, that would have banned the readers outright.

Citizens took the question to the courts instead, from both sides and within five weeks, with the same complaint.

Sources

The Waukesha County suit:

The Supreme Court petition:

The bills: AB 576 (warrant for plate-reader data) and AB 883 (ban), both failed March 23, 2026

A note on method. This dispatch was assembled with the help of automated search tools and AI assistance; the petition, the complaint, the notice of removal, the defendants’ brief, the bills, and the Milwaukee letter were read in the original. Any error is the author’s. It describes the record as of October 28, 2026 and is not legal advice. Corrections are welcome at contact@peopleoverprivilege.com.

Capture and Statutes - This article is part of a series.
Part : This Article
Part : Green Bay Answered the Flock Hotlist Request
Part : Milwaukee Police Answered the Cell-Site Simulator Request
Part : What Wisconsin Regulates