---
title: "A California Plate, Thirty Days of Sightings, and a Search a Judge Ruled Unconstitutional"
description: "Bodycam footage shows a Tulsa County deputy searching Flock at 60 mph, then quizzing a driver on her own month of travel"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-08T15:24:45Z
modified: 2026-10-09T08:24:16Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-california-plate-thirty-days-of-sightings-and-a-search-a-j-0187e9
language: en
tags: ["surveillance", "police", "drugs", "privacy", "flock", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A California Plate, Thirty Days of Sightings, and a Search a Judge Ruled Unconstitutional

*Bodycam footage shows a Tulsa County deputy searching Flock at 60 mph, then quizzing a driver on her own month of travel*

By Jan Sokol · October 8, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-california-plate-thirty-days-of-sightings-and-a-search-a-j-0187e9

## In brief

- 404 Media obtained bodycam footage of the Tulsa County Flock search that a federal judge ruled unconstitutional
- Deputy Freddie Alaniz began searching Flock and Motorola’s Vigilant after seeing the car’s California plates
- The ALPR data showed 79 hits over 30 days, about 50 while Melisa Kyle had the rental car
- Officers found 91 pounds of meth, but Judge Sara Hill suppressed all evidence obtained after the ALPR search
- Flock says the ruling is limited to the facts of this case and expects an appeal; none had been filed yet

A deputy sheriff named Freddie Alaniz was parked beside a highway in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, watching traffic, when a rented car went past. It had California plates. A federal judge would later find that this was the whole of it. The one reason he went digging into the driver’s past was the name of a state stamped on a strip of metal.

Body camera and in-car footage of what happened next, [obtained by 404 Media](https://404media.co/watch-footage-of-the-flock-search-a-judge-ruled-unconstitutional/) together with records from Flock and from Motorola’s licence plate reader system, shows how that digging worked. The court had accepted the video as evidence but never put it online. A 404 Media reader went to the U.S. District courthouse in Tulsa and paid the clerk for a copy.

Last week U.S. District Judge Sara Hill [ruled the search unconstitutional](https://rews.cc/a/federal-judge-rules-flock-plates-search-was-unconstitutional-067653). She called it an “unconstitutional warrantless search” and “indiscriminate mass surveillance,” and she threw out the evidence, even though the car was carrying more than 91 pounds of methamphetamine. The driver is Melisa Kyle. [Court coverage](https://cbs12.com/news/local/federal-judge-rules-warrantless-license-plate-reader-search-violated-fourth-amendment-flock-license-plate-reader-alpr-database-melisa-susan-kyle-oklahoma-vehicle-data-judge-sara-hill) spells her first name with one “s”; 404 Media spells it Melissa.

## “I just started running her info”

In the footage Alaniz is driving at 60 miles per hour with one hand on the wheel and the other on his laptop. He is searching Flock before he has even finished pulling her over. Later he explained it to colleagues: he “saw her go by, and I just started running her info on Flock and Vigilant.” Vigilant is Motorola’s system. “She actually didn’t have any \[Flock\] hits until just west of Amarillo, \[Texas\], so I thought I’d drive up,” he said. “I got her for a lane violation.”

On paper the violation held up. According to [Public Radio Tulsa](https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/local-regional/2026-10-07/oklahoma-federal-judge-rules-deputys-unwarranted-flock-camera-searches-violated-fourth-amendment), Hill found the stop itself justified: the deputy cited Kyle for failing to signal at least 100 feet before changing lanes and for following too closely. The problem was the database queries, which he ran before he had seen any infraction at all.

## A month on a screen

Kyle told him the car was a rental. He had her get out and sit in his vehicle while she found the rental paperwork, and he told her she would only get a warning. She said she had driven from Missouri to spend a few days with family in California after separating from her husband. While she talked, he scrolled through her movements on his laptop. There were 79 hits from Flock and Motorola cameras over 30 days, about 50 of them from the few days she had the car. The map showed her leaving Missouri and crossing Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. A Motorola camera caught her at Topock, Arizona, on the California line. Then the same route ran backwards.

There was nothing from inside California itself. 404 Media suggests this may be because Flock sharply limited nationwide sharing from California cameras after illegal searches for immigration violators and for a woman who had an abortion.

Each click on the map brought up a photograph of her car, a place and a time. With the record open in front of him, he tested her memory against it. “Do you remember what day you left Missouri?” Government lawyers later argued in court that small differences between her answers and the camera data showed she was lying about where she had been on particular days, and that this gave the deputy probable cause.

## “You are not free to go”

He gave her the warning, closed the laptop and said he wanted to ask a few questions.

> Your short trip to California, I feel like. I don’t feel, I know from my training and my experience that people who do very short trips to California and come right back are transporting large amounts of drugs. People who do that—not everybody, but some people do. With my training and experience, I feel that may be something going on here. May I search your car?

She said no. He called for backup and told her: “You are being detained. You are not free to go.” To a colleague he said that “she went to California for two days, kind of making stuff up when I ask her where she stayed at.” Her travel history, her nervousness and the gaps in her memory became his grounds for the search. In the car the officers found 91 pounds of meth. On the footage Alaniz calls it “a motherlode.”

Courts have a familiar arithmetic, and it is worth saying plainly as reflection. A search that is done routinely to people with nothing to hide only reaches a judge when it is done to someone who had something. The other drivers whose trips were mapped and found innocent never get to stand in a courtroom.

## The judge on the open road

Hill answered the government’s list of suspicions with a description of ordinary travel: “Many of us drive longer than we want to get to a desired destination, or to no destination at all other than the road and sights ahead. Many of us lose track of what exact day of the week it is when we are traveling, even if it is for just a moment. Many of us travel for myriad reasons (some better than others), cross state lines, pack too much, buy too much, smoke cigarettes, and rent cars. And many of us even get a bit nervous when talking to law enforcement.”

Her central finding was that the deputy’s search “provided him with more than 50 individual records of Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month.” Because it reached into her “reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” it was a Fourth Amendment search. It was done “without a warrant” and “was not supported by probable cause.” She also found no reasonable suspicion to keep Kyle at the roadside once the warning had been given. “Once an officer returns the driver’s license and registration, the traffic stop has ended and questioning must cease,” the ruling says. Everything that came after the database search, the travel records and the drugs included, is suppressed as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”

## Eleven agencies and a hardware store

The records filed in court show who was watching. Alaniz could see a photo of the rental car taken by a camera owned by a Lowe’s store in Missouri. He could see images from Texas state police cameras, from the New Mexico State Police and from the Kingman police department. Over five days the car was scanned more than 50 times by 11 different law enforcement agencies. Nobody voted for a national tracking grid. Through shared logins, one appears to have been put together anyway.

Flock was not a party to the case. Its spokesperson said that “this ruling is limited to the specific facts of this case,” that it sets no controlling precedent and that it will not change how police use the technology. The company says it expects an appeal and a reversal. Public Radio Tulsa reports that no appeal had yet been filed, and that neither the Tenth Circuit nor the Supreme Court has decided whether reading licence plates this way counts as a search. In the meantime lawmakers have [four bills aimed at Flock’s network](https://rews.cc/a/four-bills-now-target-flock-s-license-plate-network-from-fou-546ae0), and in Florida [one camera hit put the wrong woman in jail for 13 days](https://rews.cc/a/one-ping-from-a-flock-camera-13-days-in-a-florida-jail-for-t-c737fe).

The cameras kept working after the arrest. Motorola’s report shows that once the car was impounded, it was scanned twice more that day while riding on the back of a tow truck.