Texas man challenges armed robbery conviction over Flock camera surveillance

Charles Brownlee, a 37-year-old Texas man sentenced to 60 years in prison for five armed robberies, is seeking to overturn his conviction through the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. His legal team argues that law enforcement used Flock camera data to unconstitutionally reconstruct a “pattern of life” by tracking his vehicle's movements across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Brownlee’s lawyers contend that the AI-powered Flock system, which utilizes an estimated 13,000 cameras across Texas, provides police with an invasive level of surveillance power that requires a judicial search warrant. They argue the database indiscriminately collects vast amounts of locational data, allowing authorities to effortlessly reconstruct a person's movements.

While a district judge previously denied Brownlee’s request to block the use of this data as evidence, the legal challenge arrives amid broader scrutiny of the technology. In a separate recent case, a federal judge ruled that using Flock databases to track a drug trafficking suspect's movements across state lines was unconstitutional, citing a reasonable expectation of freedom from dragnet-style surveillance in public.