A federal judge in the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled on October 2, 2026 that a sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching Flock Safety’s AI-powered automated license-plate-reader network without a warrant. The deputy had queried the system solely because the driver’s car bore an out-of-state plate, pulling over 50 location records spanning a month before using that travel history to justify a vehicle search that turned up 91 pounds of methamphetamine. Judge Sara Hill suppressed all Flock-derived evidence and the drugs recovered from the search, calling the network “indiscriminate mass surveillance” and rejecting older precedent that treated license-plate tracking as unprotected public information. The ruling is among the first federal decisions to find warrantless Flock searches unconstitutional.