Kenosha said in August that it was finished with Flock Safety’s license plate cameras. The city then approved a 10-year, $14.6 million technology contract with Axon that, according to a petition filed at the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Oct. 14, includes hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the Flock cameras with Axon hardware. For someone driving through Kenosha, the logo on the pole changed. The rules for what police can do with a record of where that person’s car has been did not.
That gap is what the petition goes after. The ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed it for the Wisconsin Council of Churches and Green Bay pastor Melissa Pagel against the cities of Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha. It asks the justices a single question: when police query a plate-reader database to see where a vehicle has been, is that a “search” under Article I, Section 11 of the Wisconsin Constitution? A yes would attach a warrant requirement to the data itself, no matter which company made the camera or how many times a city changes suppliers.
What the church council wants Wisconsin’s justices to declare
The petition does not ask the court to take down a single camera or cancel a contract. It asks for a declaratory judgment that accessing, querying or analyzing historical plate data is a search, and that doing it without a warrant violates the state constitution unless a recognized exception, such as genuine exigent circumstances, applies. ACLU staff attorney Wes Haslam told FOX 11 in Green Bay that the goal is a judge in the loop: “We don’t want law enforcement entities being able to self-police.”…