A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that police cannot search a month’s worth of a driver’s location history pulled from automated license-plate-reader networks without a warrant, suppressing 91 pounds of methamphetamine and roughly $7,000 seized in a Tulsa County traffic stop.
The ruling comes in the federal case against Melisa Kyle, who is charged with possessing meth with intent to distribute. U.S. District Judge Sara Hill threw out the evidence after finding that a Tulsa County deputy violated the Fourth Amendment twice over.
The case started when Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Freddie Alaniz, who also works with the DEA, spotted a Mazda SUV with a California plate on an Oklahoma highway and began following it. Judge Hill wrote that Alaniz did so “for no apparent reason other than” the out-of-state plate.
Alaniz ran the plate through Flock and VehicleManager, two automated license-plate-reader systems that log photographs, dates, times, and locations every time a participating camera captures a vehicle. The search returned more than 50 records tracing roughly a month of the Mazda’s movements across multiple states, showing a short trip toward the California-Arizona border and a return route toward Missouri.
Alaniz later observed a genuine traffic violation and stopped Kyle. He issued her a warning, handed back her license, then asked to search the SUV. She refused. He detained her anyway for a drug-dog sniff. The dog alerted, the SUV was searched, and Kyle was arrested.
Judge Hill found two separate constitutional violations.
First, she ruled Alaniz had no legal basis to extend the stop after returning Kyle’s license. Prosecutors pointed to her short trip, amount of luggage, nervousness, cigarette smoking, the rental car, and what they called a questionable explanation for her travel. Hill rejected that reasoning, noting those are the same unremarkable things innocent people do on road trips every day — driving far for a short visit, overpacking, losing track of dates, renting a car, getting nervous when a cop starts asking questions.
Second, and more consequential, Hill ruled that pulling a month of stored location data on Kyle’s vehicle was itself a search requiring a warrant. She described the license-plate-reader network as “indiscriminate mass surveillance” and leaned on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chatrie v. United States, which recognized a privacy interest in historical cell-phone location records.
“Why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time?”
The ruling does not shut down Flock cameras nationwide, and it does not bind courts outside this case. Hill herself acknowledged that nearly every other court to consider the question — including another federal judge in Oklahoma — has ruled the opposite way, which makes a Justice Department appeal likely.
Even if prosecutors win that fight at the 10th Circuit, they still have to overturn Hill’s separate finding that Alaniz illegally extended the traffic stop in the first place — a second obstacle standing between the government and the evidence it wants back.
The case now heads toward appellate review on a question that goes well beyond one Tulsa traffic stop: whether driving on a public road means accepting that the government can quietly compile, store, and search a month-by-month record of everywhere your vehicle goes.
