Vince Nowicki on License Plate Cameras and Your Privacy: Where the Debate Stands

Automated license plate reader cameras, often called "Flock cameras" after the best-known company that makes them, photograph passing cars and their plates. Police can then search those images. In Pinellas County, the Sheriff's Office uses cameras from several companies, including Flock Safety, Motorola and Axon, and every patrol car carries license plate reader technology.

In September 2026, Commissioner Vince Nowicki filed a resolution asking Pinellas County to end its agreements with license plate reader companies and take the cameras off county roads. His reason is simple: he believes government should track people based on evidence, not record everyone's movements just in case.

On 10/8/26, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri made his case to the County Commission for keeping the cameras. It was a serious discussion between two officials who both say they want the public protected. They disagree on how best to do it. This page lays out both sides and where things stand.

Key facts

• The state acted first. On 8/31/26, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) ordered license plate readers removed from state road rights-of-way within 30 days.
• Commissioner Nowicki's resolution would end county contracts and data sharing with Flock Safety, Axon and other license plate reader providers, and remove the cameras from county roads within 30 days. It does not cover speed or red-light cameras.
• The sheriff presented on 10/8/26. He asked commissioners to keep the program, and said the Flock Safety contract alone costs $287,000 a year.
• Data can be kept for years. Florida law allows the Sheriff's Office to store license plate reader data for three years.
• No vote yet. The commission took no formal action on 10/8/26. Afterward, Commissioner Nowicki said a majority of his colleagues did not appear ready to end the contracts, but he still wants the cameras taken down.

The state's removal order

On 8/31/26, Bay News 9 reported that FDOT was revoking its permits for license plate readers on state roads, including Flock cameras. The FDOT memo cited an "exponential increase in deployments coupled with concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and surveillance schemes." Cameras on state roads had to come down within 30 days.

The order did not reach cameras on county or city roads. Florida Politics reported on 9/2/26 that 23 of the Sheriff's Office's 73 fixed readers were on state roads under FDOT permits and would have to come down. The rest of the local network, including readers on all 560 Sheriff's Office patrol vehicles, was not affected.

Other agencies in the region have acted too. Bay News 9 reported that the Pasco County sheriff ended his Flock contract in September, saying it lacked support from county commissioners.

What Commissioner Nowicki proposed

On 9/1/26, the day after the state order, Commissioner Nowicki announced that he had filed a resolution, according to ABC Action News (WFTS). If approved, it would:

• End county contracts, subscriptions, agreements and data-sharing arrangements with Flock Safety, Axon and any other license plate reader provider.
• Remove existing cameras from county roads and county-owned or county-controlled rights-of-way within 30 days.
• Bar the county from entering, renewing, extending or expanding any license plate reader agreement.
• Ask the Sheriff's Office and the cities in Pinellas to end their own contracts and remove their cameras.
• Require county staff to report back within 60 days on how many cameras there are, where they are generally located, who owns and runs them, and what ending the contracts would cost.

The resolution does not touch speed cameras, red-light cameras or other surveillance tools.

Why he believes it matters

Commissioner Nowicki has been clear that he supports law enforcement. His concern is the kind of surveillance these cameras create. He told ABC Action News:

"You know, public safety and personal liberty are not competing goals, and government should track suspects based on evidence and not collect everyone's movement just in case."

He also answered a common argument, that license plates are already public:

"People say, 'Oh, your license plates are public.' People can see them anyway, so what's the big harm? Well, people can see my face in public too, but I don't want government to track my face and my movement everywhere."

He told Bay News 9 that he does not believe removing the cameras would leave police without tools:

"Having these cameras doesn't prevent people from doing any crime, and I don't think it's de-tooling police because police have been capturing criminals for a long time before Flock cameras, and they'll be doing them after cameras, as well."

And he said it is time to take a hard look: "I think we will look back and say, was this too far? And I think that time is here."

The 9/10/26 commission meeting

At the commission's 9/10/26 meeting, Commissioner Nowicki said he was ready to move forward but would defer to his colleagues. As reported by the Tampa Bay Reporter:

"I'm happy to entertain and move that forward today. Though if it's the will of the board to wait for the sheriff to come and do a presentation … I won't make a motion."

The commission chose to wait for a work session with Sheriff Gualtieri. Commissioner Brian Scott said he supported waiting out of respect for the sheriff's role as an independently elected constitutional officer.

Commissioner Nowicki also asked for a general accounting of the Sheriff's Office's tools so the public could see the full picture. "Taxpayers spend a lot of money for those assets," he said. "I think it's important for the voters and taxpayers to know the tools, the abundance of tools that the sheriff's office does have." County Administrator Barry Burton agreed to prepare a white paper on the topic.

What the sheriff told commissioners on 10/8/26

Sheriff Gualtieri strongly supports license plate readers, and his case deserves a fair hearing. At the 10/8/26 work session in Clearwater, he urged commissioners to let the program continue and walked them through its cost, its uses and its safeguards, Bay News 9 reported.

Why he wants to keep it. The sheriff said he does not want to lose a tool that helps solve violent crimes and robberies and helps find missing people. He said the cameras photograph only license plates and vehicles, not people. Florida Politics reported that he called the readers potentially "the greatest public safety invention since the two-way radio," and said: "We can't not have it. We just have to do it the right way." The Tampa Bay Reporter reported that commissioners were shown how the technology helped locate a senior with Alzheimer's disease and a 6-year-old abduction victim.

More than a plate. The work session also showed that these systems do more than read plate numbers. Florida Politics reported that "commissioners also established that the images can capture more than a plate and that investigators can search by characteristics such as vehicle color, roof racks or bumper stickers even without a plate number." That means a car can be found by a sticker on its back window, not just by its plate, which widens how much the cameras can track.

What it costs. He said the Flock Safety contract costs $287,000 a year. The Sheriff's Office uses systems from several companies, including Motorola, Axon and Flock.

How the data is protected. "It's confidential. The storage is encrypted. It's CJIS compliant. We do have audits in place for misuse. We will continue to enhance that," he said, according to Bay News 9. He also pointed to a part of Florida law that requires agencies to release license plate reader data about a resident who asks for it, as long as that person is not the subject of an investigation. WFLA reported that he said he would never allow information gathered by the cameras to be sold.

How long it is kept. Florida law allows the Sheriff's Office to store the data for three years. The sheriff said he expects the Legislature to lower that number, and that he welcomes tighter rules.

The legal question. He said every appellate court in the United States that has considered the issue has held that license plate reader use does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

His support for more regulation. "We need audits, we need accountability," he said. "There's no question about it." He added: "I wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly support regulation in the Legislature and in Congress to make sure that everybody is doing it right." He said he would be open to a law that takes away the law enforcement certification of deputies who misuse the system.

The difference between the sheriff and Commissioner Nowicki is not whether privacy and accountability matter. It is whether stronger safeguards are enough, or whether the cameras should come down.

The accountability questions

The work session also showed why Commissioner Nowicki's privacy concerns are not theoretical.

The sheriff's presentation came one week after a now-former Pinellas deputy was arrested on felony charges for allegedly misusing a license plate reader database 300 times to track a woman he was romantically interested in, Bay News 9 reported. Florida Politics reported that two deputies had recently been arrested on accusations of abusing law enforcement databases, and that one of them allegedly searched databases 381 times, 300 of them license plate reader searches.

The sheriff was candid about why the system did not catch it. "The reason why the audits didn't catch it was because he was lying," he said. "There is room to do more and do better on audits. Some of it is we're waiting on the manufacturers to enhance their algorithms." Florida Politics reported that he also said: "You can't say for certain it's not going to happen again."

Commissioners raised other questions about how far the data travels:

• What the images show. The work session established that images can capture more than a plate. Investigators can search by features such as vehicle color, roof racks or bumper stickers, even without a plate number.
• Data sharing. Commissioner Scott noted that Pinellas shares data with agencies elsewhere. The sheriff said, "We do share with a lot," and that whether all of those agencies have the same protections "is something that is worthy of consideration and discussion."
• Outside users. Commissioner Chris Scherer asked whether the Sheriff's Office would know if an officer elsewhere improperly searched data collected in Pinellas. The sheriff pointed to agreements requiring agencies to audit their own users, and said additional safeguards are still being developed.

These are the questions behind Commissioner Nowicki's resolution: who can see residents' movements, how misuse is caught, and whether the benefits justify collecting data on everyone.

What the courts have said

The sheriff told commissioners that every appeals court to consider the question has upheld license plate readers. That matches the published record so far. But the question is not settled, and a federal judge in Oklahoma recently ruled the other way.

The Oklahoma ruling. On 10/1/26, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled in United States v. Kyle that a Tulsa County deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched a driver's travel history in Flock and other license plate reader systems without a warrant. According to the ruling, the only reason for the search was that her car had California plates. The system returned more than 50 sightings of her car across several states over about a month. The judge threw out the evidence found afterward.

Judge Hill wrote that these systems give officers "a continuously updated location history for all vehicles caught on ALPR cameras within the network. This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." She added: "Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts." And she asked: "why is it the government's business where everyone goes all the time?"

This is a trial court ruling, not an appeals court decision, and it is not binding on courts in Florida. The judge herself noted that nearly every court to look at the issue had reached the opposite result. The government may still appeal.

A 40-year-old case. Courts that have upheld license plate readers have leaned on United States v. Knotts, a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court case. In Knotts, police suspected a man of stealing chemicals used to make illegal drugs. They hid a radio beeper in a container of chloroform and followed the car carrying it. The Court said a person driving on public roads "has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another."

Recent appeals courts have relied on that language. In 2026, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held in United States v. Porter that using a license plate reader was not a search, and called it "more analogous to the beeper signals in Knotts." The Court of Appeals of Virginia reached the same conclusion about Flock cameras in Commonwealth v. Church (2025) and Robinson v. Commonwealth (2026), also citing Knotts.

Commissioner Nowicki sees an important difference. Knotts involved police following one suspect in an active investigation. Today's cameras log every passing car and store the records, whether or not anyone is suspected of anything. Judge Hill made a similar point. She noted that the Knotts Court itself said that if "dragnet type law enforcement practices" ever came about, "there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable." More than 40 years later, she wrote, courts face "technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice" the Court had warned about.

The Supreme Court has also become more cautious about digital location tracking. In United States v. Jones (2012), it held that attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect's car was a search. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), it held that police generally need a warrant to get weeks of a person's cellphone location records. Courts disagree on whether license plate cameras are closer to the beeper in Knotts or the phone records in Carpenter. Until a higher court decides, it remains an open question.

Where things stand

As of 10/8/26, the commission has not voted on the resolution. Florida Politics reported that commissioners took no formal action at the work session and did not settle on specific policy changes.

After the presentation, Commissioner Nowicki said it was clear that a majority of his fellow commissioners did not want to end the contracts, Bay News 9 reported. He was direct about where he stands:

"A majority of my colleagues seem to be OK with dragnet surveillance. I personally want the cameras taken down."

Commissioner Rene Flowers sees it differently. She said she is comfortable with how the Sheriff's Office is using the system and believes most of her colleagues agree. "I think we're well within our bounds," she said. "It's a matter of educating the community."

The debate is also moving to Tallahassee. The sheriff predicted that state lawmakers will add new rules in the next legislative session, and said he expects the Legislature to shorten how long the data can be kept.

Commissioner Nowicki supports stronger audits of how license plate reader data is accessed and used. He expects the Florida Legislature to take up the issue in its coming 2027 session.

For more on Commissioner Nowicki's record, see his watchdog record.

Frequently asked questions

What is Vince Nowicki's Flock camera resolution?

It would end Pinellas County's contracts and data sharing with Flock Safety, Axon and other license plate reader companies, remove the cameras from county roads within 30 days, and ask the sheriff and cities to do the same. It does not cover speed or red-light cameras.

Why does Commissioner Nowicki want license plate cameras removed?

He believes the cameras amount to broad surveillance of everyone who drives by. He has said "government should track suspects based on evidence and not collect everyone's movement just in case." After the 10/8/26 work session, he said, "I personally want the cameras taken down."

Does Commissioner Nowicki oppose law enforcement?

No. He has said he supports law enforcement. His position is that "public safety and personal liberty are not competing goals," and that government should track suspects based on evidence.

What does the Pinellas sheriff say about license plate cameras?

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri says the cameras photograph only plates and vehicles, not people, and help solve violent crimes and find missing people. He opposes removing them but supports more audits, more regulation and tougher penalties for misuse.

How much does Pinellas pay for Flock cameras, and how long is the data kept?

The sheriff told commissioners on 10/8/26 that the Flock Safety contract costs $287,000 a year. Florida law allows the Sheriff's Office to keep license plate reader data for three years, and the sheriff said he expects the Legislature to lower that.

Has the County Commission voted on removing the cameras?

Not yet. The vote was delayed until after a 10/8/26 work session with the sheriff, and no formal action was taken that day. Commissioner Nowicki said afterward that a majority of commissioners did not appear ready to end the contracts.

Are license plate cameras legal under the Fourth Amendment?

Courts disagree. Appeals courts that have ruled, including the federal Fifth Circuit in 2026 and the Court of Appeals of Virginia, have held that license plate reader use is not a search, relying on a 1983 Supreme Court case, United States v. Knotts. On 10/1/26, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that a warrantless search of a driver's Flock travel history violated the Fourth Amendment. Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor any Florida appeals court has settled the question.

What did the Oklahoma judge rule about Flock cameras?

In United States v. Kyle, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill ruled on 10/1/26 that a deputy's warrantless search of a driver's month-long license plate reader history was an unconstitutional search, and she suppressed the evidence. She described the system as "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." The ruling is from a trial court and is not binding in Florida.

Sources

Every fact and quote above comes from the published reporting and public records listed here.

1. Spectrum News Staff, "FDOT orders removal of Flock cameras along Florida state highways," Bay News 9, 8/31/26. baynews9.com
2. Chad Mills, "Pinellas Co. commissioner calls for removing Flock cameras from county roads," ABC Action News (WFTS), 9/1/26. www.tampabay28.com
3. Spectrum News Staff, "Pinellas sheriff defends Flock cameras amid state removal order," Bay News 9, 9/2/26. baynews9.com
4. Jesse Mendoza, "Flock crackdown hits Pinellas, forcing 29 cameras down but leaving most of the network intact," Florida Politics, 9/2/26. floridapolitics.com
5. Mark Parker, "Pinellas County punts Flock camera ban discussion to October 8," Tampa Bay Reporter, 9/29/26. tampabayreporter.com
6. Jesse Mendoza, "Bob Gualtieri defends Flock cameras, looks to AI as a solution as Pinellas confronts oversight gaps," Florida Politics, 10/8/26. floridapolitics.com
7. Josh Rojas, "Pinellas sheriff defends license plate readers, commissioner wants them removed," Bay News 9, 10/8/26. baynews9.com
8. Mark Parker, "Pinellas sheriff mounts fiery Flock camera defense, admonishes commissioner," Tampa Bay Reporter, 10/8/26. tampabayreporter.com
9. WFLA News Channel 8, "Pinellas County officials discuss future of license plate reader contracts," WFLA, 10/8/26. www.wfla.com
10. Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners, Work Session, 10/8/26, Item 26-1501A, "Overview of Automated License Plate Recognition Deployment" (agenda and video). pinellas.legistar.com
11. United States v. Kyle, No. 26-CR-00189-SEH, Opinion and Order (N.D. Okla. 10/1/26), Judge Sara E. Hill. storage.courtlistener.com
12. Jason Koebler, "Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was 'Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance' and Unconstitutional," 404 Media, 10/2/26. www.404media.co
13. United States v. Porter, No. 25-60163 (5th Cir. 3/17/26). www.ca5.uscourts.gov
14. Commonwealth v. Church, Record No. 0737-25-1 (Va. Ct. App. 10/14/25) (unpublished). www.vacourts.gov
15. Robinson v. Commonwealth, Record No. 1912-24-1 (Va. Ct. App. 4/7/26). www.vacourts.gov
16. United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). supreme.justia.com
17. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012). supreme.justia.com
18. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). supreme.justia.com

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