Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington live in and around Norfolk, Virginia. Like most ordinary people, they have daily routines. Work, church, trips to the store, visits with family, school pickups. Like most ordinary people, they don’t like the thought of somebody following them around and watching their every move. But that is exactly what the city of Norfolk is doing. In 2023, the city installed over 172 cameras around town. These are not your standard traffic cameras. The cameras are strategically placed to capture everybody’s daily travel. They are straight-up surveillance cameras, set up to watch people 24/7 as they go about their lives. As the police chief has explained, “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” The cameras snap photos of every car as they drive by and upload them into a database. Officials can then use this database to go back in time and create maps of where people have been, where they tend to drive, and even with whom they tend to meet. All of this happens without a warrant or even probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. If the city wants to track suspicious people, it can do what the police have always done: get a warrant. What the city can’t do, though, is watch ordinary people everywhere they go and create a record of their lives without any judicial oversight. Lee and Crystal, with help from the Institute for Justice, are suing to make sure of that.
