North Carolina GOP Congressman Pat Harrigan Acted After Cops Ran a Woman’s Plate 717 Times

A Florida police officer searched his estranged wife's license plate history 717 times.

Now a Republican congressman says that kind of government snooping needs to end.

Pat Harrigan just introduced a bill forcing police to get a warrant for that power.

The Database That Scans Twenty Billion License Plates Every Month

Flock Safety cameras photograph every passing car, logging the plate, the location, the timestamp, and identifying details like bumper stickers.

The network scans roughly 20 billion plates a month across the country.

Police can search that history, pull data shared by other agencies, and rebuild a person's entire movement pattern without ever asking a judge.

Rep. Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, says that's exactly the problem.

"These systems track everything that you do, where you work, where your kids go to school," Harrigan said.

"That's an extraordinary amount of information about somebody that the government has that has never committed a crime," he said.

A Florida Officer Used It to Stalk His Estranged Wife 717 Times

Florida officer Christopher Goodson was arrested in August after investigators say he searched his estranged wife's vehicle 717 times, some while he was off duty.

A North Carolina officer was separately accused of running the system 31 times to monitor her boyfriend's ex-wife.

A federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara Hill, ruled that police violated the Fourth Amendment by pulling a month of a driver's movements without a warrant.

Florida is now moving to end state permits for the cameras entirely.

Colorado lawmakers from both parties have pushed a similar warrant requirement through their statehouse, and Iowa is working through a matching bill right now.

This isn't a one-state glitch.

It's the same pattern showing up everywhere Flock cameras get installed: no warrant, no real oversight, and officers who treat a 20 billion plate database like a personal lookup tool.

Rep. Lauren Boebert said in a Daily Caller op-ed that she "stands with law enforcement" but "even more firmly with the Constitution," and warned against "the quiet acceptance of fixed, always-on camera networks."

Harrigan's bill, H.R. 10822, would require a warrant before police search most of this data and force most records to be deleted within 24 hours.

It would ban searches based on political or religious bumper stickers and stop private vendors from selling the data or using it to train AI.

Harrigan wants "702-like" guardrails: audits, reporting requirements, and lawsuits worth at least 1,000 dollars per violation.

States that don't comply could lose federal criminal justice funding.

Police would still be free to use the cameras for real investigations and genuine emergencies.

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The Same Fight Conservatives Already Won Over the NSA

Conservatives fought this exact battle before, and they won it.

The Freedom Caucus forced warrant requirements onto Section 702, the surveillance law that let federal agencies search Americans' communications without one in the name of national security.

License plate tracking is the local, street-level version of the same problem: a government database that knows where you worship, where you work, and where you send your kids to school, built without a single vote from Congress.

Flock itself just announced new rules forcing officers to tie every search to a specific case, proof the company knows the system has been abused.

"We have to approach this in a 702-like manner," Harrigan said, and he's right.

The Fourth Amendment doesn't come with an exception for cameras.

Sources:

• Ben Smith, "Holy Flock: GOP Congressman Has Had Enough of Government Tracking Americans," RedState, October 18, 2026.
• Lauren Boebert, "I Stand With Law Enforcement and the Constitution," The Daily Caller, September 1, 2026.
• KOKH Fox 25, "Federal Judge Rules Warrantless License Plate Reader Search Violated Fourth Amendment," KOKH Fox 25, 2026.