A privacy activist in Wichita, Kansas has sued to shut down the city’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) program, arguing that blanketing a city with camera surveillance is “the functional equivalent of affixing a GPS tracking device” to every car that drives past. The case is worth watching in Arizona, because it rests on the same idea we make here: that a state constitution’s privacy protection can reach warrantless mass tracking even when the federal courts have not settled the question.

What the case is about

  • Who: Mason Grimmett, a local privacy activist, represented by the Kansas Justice Institute (KJI).
  • Against whom: the City of Wichita.
  • Where: Sedgwick County District Court — Grimmett v. Wichita.
  • The claim: that Wichita’s warrantless ALPR surveillance violates Section 15 of the Kansas Constitution, the state’s counterpart to the Fourth Amendment.

According to the complaint and reporting, Wichita runs roughly 200 Flock Safety cameras, keeps reads for at least 30 days (potentially indefinitely), and shares access with hundreds of other law-enforcement agencies. In a single month, police reportedly ran more than 900,000 plate searches.

The “GPS tracking device” argument

The suit leans on two U.S. Supreme Court cases that should sound familiar from our constitutional case:

  • United States v. Jones (2012) — attaching a GPS tracker to a car to follow its movements is a search that requires a warrant.
  • Carpenter v. United States (2018) — long-term, aggregated location data gets constitutional protection because it reveals “the whole of a person’s physical movements.”

The complaint argues that a dense, always-on ALPR network does the same job as a GPS tracker — just pointed at everyone at once — and calls it “akin to an unconstitutional general warrant.” As KJI’s litigation director put it, the plaintiff “has done absolutely nothing wrong, but he’s still being tracked, monitored, and databased.”

The suit asks the court to declare the warrantless program unconstitutional under the Kansas Constitution and to order it stopped.

Why it matters for Arizona

No court has yet ruled on whether a large, searchable ALPR network violates Arizona’s Article 2, Section 8. The Kansas case won’t decide that — it’s a different state, a different constitution, and it’s only just been filed. But it is a clear, live example of the exact legal theory this project describes: that state privacy clauses, read seriously, may not permit suspicionless mass location tracking without authority of law. How a Kansas court answers it could become a persuasive data point for the same argument here.

Source: Jacob Sullum, “Kansas Lawsuit: ALPRs Turn a License Plate Into ‘the Functional Equivalent of a GPS Tracking Device’”, Reason, July 31, 2026. This post summarizes third-party reporting about a newly filed lawsuit; the allegations have not been decided by any court.