Florida's Flock Camera Shutdown: What License Plate Reader Evidence Means for Your Criminal Case

On August 31, 2026, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every permit for automated license plate readers in state highway rights-of-way and gave agencies 30 days to take them down. Roughly 700 are coming off state roads. The next morning, the News Service of Florida reported that the Governor and Cabinet had approved about $4.6 million over the prior year for local agencies to buy roughly 440 of the same cameras. Neither fact helps a defendant on its own. Cameras coming down is not data going away. What matters is what the reads show, how long the records survive, who searched them, and whether that search can be tested in court.

FDOT revoked all state right-of-way permits for license plate readers on August 31, 2026. The order removes hardware. It deletes no data and decides no past search.

Key Takeaways

• FDOT revoked all state right-of-way permits for license plate readers on August 31, 2026, giving agencies 30 days to remove about 700 cameras.
• Fla. Stat. section 316.0777 already made FDOT permission discretionary and required removal within 30 days of notice, so no new law was needed.
• Fla. Stat. section 316.0777(2)(b) bars using an automated license plate reader to issue a traffic citation or a notice of violation in Florida.
• Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29, 2026, held stored location data is a Fourth Amendment search, unsettling ALPR rulings issued before it.
• The order deletes no data. Flock's default retention is now seven days, making a preservation demand urgent in every South Florida case.

What the FDOT Order Does, and What It Leaves Alone

The order arrived as a one-page memorandum from FDOT's chief operating officer, rescinding all prior approvals for license plate readers in state rights-of-way and citing a recent exponential increase in deployments alongside reports of misuse, privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes. FDOT will issue no further permits. Miss the 30-day deadline and the state removes the equipment itself.

This was not an executive order and it changed no law. Fla. Stat. section 316.0777(2)(b) already placed these installations at the discretion of the Department of Transportation and already required removal within 30 days of notice. FDOT flipped a switch the Legislature handed it. A future administration can flip it back without legislation, and the memo decides nothing about whether the cameras were lawful.

The reach is narrower than the headlines suggest. It covers rights-of-way on the State Highway System, not city streets, county roads, private property, or shopping centers, where the Governor said roughly 98 percent of these cameras sit. Some sheriffs shut their programs entirely. Others did the minimum.

A client's vehicle may have been read by one camera coming down next week and four others going nowhere. Removing hardware says nothing about the reads already stored.

The Funding Record Is Now Part of the Evidence

The September 1 reporting is more useful to a defense lawyer than the ban. Since September 2025, 18 Florida agencies won approval for about 440 readers through the State Board of Immigration Enforcement grant program, funded from a $250 million immigration enforcement appropriation.

The applications are the point. One coastal county asked for 23 readers and nine trailers for checkpoints, proposed fixed cameras on Interstate 95, and said it would store data for up to one year so officers could develop a pattern of life to identify home and work locations and plan enforcement actions. That is a Florida agency describing in writing the capability courts have said these systems do not have.

Rulings blessing fixed ALPR networks leaned on limited camera density and short retention. When an agency says in writing that it intends to build a year of movement history, those assumptions stop being abstract. The applications are public records. Get them.

Where the Fourth Amendment Stands After Chatrie

The government has won these fights with one argument. A plate is exposed to public view, and a database of plate photographs is an organized version of what an officer could have seen anyway. In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 2:24-cv-621 (E.D. Va. Jan. 27, 2026), a federal judge granted summary judgment to the city, holding the network did not capture enough images to reconstruct the whole of a driver's movements. That case is on appeal in the Fourth Circuit.

Then came Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, decided June 29, 2026. In a 6 to 3 opinion by Justice Kagan, the Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain stored cell phone location data through a geofence warrant, notwithstanding the third-party doctrine. The Court called it a straightforward extension of Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).

Watch the sequence. Schmidt was decided five months before Chatrie, as was most of the ALPR case law the government will hand your judge. Those opinions rest on a third-party framework the Supreme Court has since narrowed for stored location records held by a private company. Flock is a private company holding stored location records.

The full Chatrie decision and what it means for Florida location data is worth reading alongside any ALPR motion, because the reasoning, not the holding, is what moves these cases.

How This Data Shows Up in a Criminal Case

The data does two jobs, and the second is often invisible in the reports. The first is substantive proof placing a vehicle somewhere at a time. The second is lead generation. An investigator runs a partial plate or a body style, gets a candidate list, and builds outward. The report then starts with what the officer learned next rather than how the officer got there.

In federal practice it corroborates movement. Controlled buys, stash house theories, and courier patterns charged under 21 U.S.C. section 841 and 21 U.S.C. section 846 are routinely supported by camera reads, as are courier allegations inside 18 U.S.C. section 1956 counts. In the Southern District of Florida, a handful of reads turns a thin association argument into a relationship the government maps for a jury.

Lead generation is the part that does not appear in the report. A query fills the gap between an anonymous tip and a specific tag, and the narrative simply starts after it.

When the Search Itself Is the Crime

A second body of law cuts the other way, because misusing these systems is a crime. In August 2026 a former Sarasota officer was arrested after investigators alleged he ran the same Florida plate more than 350 times with no active investigation. The charges included felonies under Fla. Stat. section 815.06 and Fla. Stat. section 838.022. A national review that month identified at least 50 officers charged or accused of improper access.

Federal analogues include the Driver's Privacy Protection Act at 18 U.S.C. section 2721, its civil remedy at 18 U.S.C. section 2724, and 18 U.S.C. section 242. Misuse history is Giglio material.

Send the Preservation Demand First

A written litigation hold goes to the investigating agency, and where the contract permits to the vendor, naming the plate, the date range, the camera identifiers, the stored images, and separately the audit trail. A demand that asks only for reads returns reads and nothing about who went looking.

Then work the audit log. You want the user, the timestamp, the case code, the stated reason, the network searched, and whether federal or out-of-state agencies queried the same data. Audits elsewhere have surfaced searches run for agencies with no direct access.

Build the suppression record around capability, not category. Put the camera count, the number of distinct reads, the retention the agency used in practice, the sharing network, and the agency's own pattern-of-life statements before the judge. Paired with Chatrie, that is the question the Fourth Circuit has under advisement.

"A demand that asks only for reads returns reads and nothing about who went looking. Do not assume removal equals deletion. Hardware and records follow entirely different rules."— Aaron M. Cohen, AMC Defense Law

Four Mistakes That Cost You the Record

Do not assume removal equals deletion. Hardware and records follow entirely different rules.

Do not wait on preservation. Fla. Stat. section 316.0778 leaves the maximum retention to a schedule set by rule, so it varies by agency and contract. Flock cut its recommended default from 30 days to seven on August 13, 2026.

Do not accept the report's account of how the vehicle was identified. A jump from an anonymous tip to a specific tag usually has a query filling the gap.

Do not talk to agents because no charges have been filed. Pre-indictment is when the theory is still being assembled, and when an unrepresented explanation does the most damage to a defense.

Why the Clock Is Short Right Now

The Legislature will write rules next spring. Whatever it passes governs future conduct, not the reads sitting in a database from a stop last March. The nearer risk is decommissioning. Agencies canceling contracts outright are unwinding vendor relationships in weeks, and records get purged in transitions. A preservation letter sent in October may arrive after the answer stopped existing.

Common Questions

Facing a Case Built on Surveillance Evidence in Florida?

AMC Defense Law represents clients in federal and state criminal matters in South Florida and nationwide, including federal drug conspiracy cases, white collar investigations, and prosecutions built on digital and location evidence. If you are under federal investigation, have received a target letter, or believe license plate reader data may be part of a case involving you, the preservation and discovery work described above is time-sensitive.

Consultations are confidential. Call 561-542-5494 to discuss your situation privately.

Aaron M. Cohen is the founder of AMC Defense Law, a federal and state criminal defense firm based in Boca Raton, Florida. Florida Bar No. 541427.

If you or your loved ones have been arrested, call Aaron M. Cohen, 24 hours a day to get help.