Flock cameras can help Arkansas police trace where a vehicle has been, but a plate match doesn’t establish who was driving or prove that a crime occurred. Arkansas law limits how plate data may be obtained, kept, and shared, and certain violations provide grounds to exclude evidence.
Preserve Relevant Records Promptly
If police mention a Flock alert or vehicle-location search, tell your attorney promptly. Images and search records may help explain what happened, including facts that support your defense. Routine deletion can make some of that information unavailable.
What Flock License Plate Cameras Record
An automatic license plate reader, or ALPR, photographs passing vehicles and uses software to read their plates. Flock’s license plate reader policy describes records that can include the plate and vehicle images, plate number and state, vehicle characteristics, capture time, and camera location. This article concerns Flock’s ALPR system; its other video and surveillance products raise additional questions.
An Alert About a Vehicle
A captured plate can trigger an alert when it matches a watch list, such as a list of stolen vehicles. The original image, reason for the listing, and current status matter.
A Search of Past Sightings
Investigators can search available records for earlier sightings. A series of time-and-location records can reveal travel patterns, subject to camera coverage, retention, and access limits.
These records show individual sightings. They don’t establish every place a vehicle traveled between cameras. A plate match doesn’t, by itself, identify the driver. Shared vehicles, rentals, and the timing of possession can matter when police connect a vehicle to a suspect.
Arkansas Limits on Use, Retention, and Sharing
Ark. Code § 12-12-1803 permits specified ALPR uses, including lawful comparisons by state, county, and municipal law enforcement against listed motor-vehicle and law-enforcement databases. The 2025 amendments also authorize private landowners, leaseholders, and businesses to use ALPR for specified safety, crime-deterrence, and private-property access purposes.
| Who Holds the Data? | Arkansas Retention Limit |
|---|---|
| Private landowners, leaseholders, and businesses | No more than 60 days. |
| Other eligible entities, including law enforcement | No more than 150 days, subject to the law-enforcement investigation exception below. |
Source: Ark. Code § 12-12-1804. These are statutory ceilings, not guaranteed storage periods.
Law enforcement may retain data for an ongoing investigation. That data must be destroyed when the investigation ends without charges or the related criminal action concludes. An agency’s actual retention period can be shorter: Flock’s current evidence policy states a seven-day standard unless the customer agreement specifies otherwise.
Governmental sale, trade, or exchange is restricted; law enforcement may share data indicating evidence of an offense with another law-enforcement agency. Compelling data from covered private, parking, or secured-access users requires a valid subpoena. That compulsory-disclosure rule doesn’t answer whether a particular police search also requires a warrant under the Constitution.
A Camera Alert and the Decision to Stop You
A software match can be wrong. A plate character or issuing state may be misread, or the information behind an alert may have changed. The relevant evidence includes what the officer actually saw, what the database reported, and what was verified before the stop.
The Arkansas State Police rule, 12 CAR § 24-104(a), requires an officer initiating a stop based on an ALPR alert to visually verify the plate characters and issuing state, verify plate status through dispatch or an ACIC/NCIC query, and make reasonable efforts to compare occupants with any wanted-person description. This is an Arkansas State Police rule; the agency involved in your case may have its own policies.
An alert also doesn’t automatically authorize everything that follows. The legal basis for the stop, continued detention, and vehicle search must be assessed separately. A policy violation and an unconstitutional stop are different issues, with different grounds for seeking exclusion.
When Police Search Your Travel History
The constitutional question changes when police use a searchable network to reconstruct someone’s movements. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court required a warrant for the historical cell-site records at issue. In Chatrie v. United States (2026), it held that obtaining Google’s cell-phone Location History was a Fourth Amendment search. Both involved cell-phone information; neither directly decided the legality of Flock searches.
On October 1, 2026, an Oklahoma federal district judge ruled in United States v. Kyle that a warrantless search through Flock and another ALPR system violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights. The records covered about a month and more than 50 sightings across multiple states. The court suppressed evidence and also found a separate unlawful extension of the stop.
Kyle is a district-court ruling from Oklahoma, not binding authority in Arkansas. Courts have reached different conclusions about ALPR searches. For your case, the useful questions include how much travel history police accessed, which networks they searched, whether they obtained a warrant, and whether their search stayed within its authorized scope.
Arkansas Law Provides Specific Grounds for Exclusion
A defense shouldn’t stop at the Fourth Amendment. Ark. Code § 12-12-1805(a)(3) requires covered agencies, including law enforcement, to adopt rules and policies for obtaining, retaining, and destroying plate data and make them available for public inspection. Failure to satisfy that requirement is expressly grounds for a court to exclude evidence obtained under the ALPR law.
Separately, § 12-12-1806 bars plate data and evidence derived from it from being received in covered Arkansas proceedings if disclosure would violate the ALPR law. That makes the source, retention history, and route of disclosure relevant to an evidence challenge.
These provisions don’t make every internal policy error an automatic dismissal. A motion needs to identify the applicable requirement, establish the violation, and identify the evidence affected. A constitutional challenge also requires a violation of your own Fourth Amendment rights. Exceptions, such as objectively reasonable reliance on a warrant, can permit evidence despite a constitutional defect. Even when evidence is excluded, the effect on the prosecution depends on the admissible evidence that remains.
What to Preserve and Request for Your Defense
Tell your attorney the plate number, relevant dates, who had access to the vehicle, and which agency contacted you. Useful records to pursue include:
- Original images and metadata. Compare the photographed plate and vehicle with the software’s reading, recorded time, and camera location.
- Alert and verification records. Check why the plate was listed, whether the listing remained current, and what officers confirmed.
- Search and access logs. Identify the user, stated reason, date range, networks searched, and results obtained.
- Policies and preserved exports. Establish the retention rules in effect and whether copies survived deletion from the searchable database.
- Your own corroborating records. Keep original receipts, work records, rental documents, messages, and recordings that can explain where you or the vehicle were.
A sighting that contradicts the accusation can help your defense, but an absence of sightings doesn’t prove a vehicle was elsewhere. Camera coverage and missing records matter. Preserve originals without editing them, and get advice before giving investigators an account of your movements.
Related Reading
Is Flock Evidence Part of Your Criminal Case?
Wesley Rhodes represents people facing criminal investigations and charges in Central Arkansas. A consultation can address the records to preserve, the basis for the police search, and the evidence supporting the accusation.
Updated November 1, 2026
This blog post is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading this content does not create an attorney-client relationship with Wesley Rhodes, Attorney at Law. If you need legal advice about your specific situation, you should consult with a qualified criminal defense attorney.