UPDATE: The court hearing has been rescheduled for Tuesday, April 1 in Roanoke Circuit Court at 3:00 p.m.
The city of Roanoke and the sheriff of Botetourt County are going to court over a request to provide surveillance camera data requested by a Virginia citizen and journalist.
As part of Cardinal News’s State of Surveillance project, Executive Editor Jeff Schwaner took several drives through Southwest and Southside Virginia to visit reporters. He then filed a Freedom of Information Act request with multiple locations, requesting the Flock camera data of his own vehicle.
The trip took him through nearly 20 cities, towns and counties that use license plate-reading technology, most installed and maintained by Flock Safety. Those locations include Roanoke, Martinsville, Danville, Lynchburg and Staunton, and more than a dozen localities in between.
Staunton, Martinsville and Augusta County provided the data requested in a timely manner, pursuant to Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
Other agencies asked for more time, as is their right under the law.
The city of Roanoke and Botetourt County Sheriff Matthew Ward filed a request for a declaratory judgment with the Roanoke City Circuit Court.
Such a judgment essentially asks the court to define the legal rights between multiple parties who are in a dispute. In this case, the city and the sheriff’s office are the plaintiffs and Schwaner is the defendant. The localities asked the court to rule whether they are legally bound to provide the data requested by Schwaner under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
The plaintiffs have stated, in court documents, that they fear that fulfilling the request would be running afoul of their agreement with Flock, as well as the policies of each locality, and could be considered a felony.
A hearing is set for March 20 in Roanoke.
Cardinal News reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
“The City of Roanoke does not typically comment on pending litigation and has no information to provide on this matter at this time,” wrote a city spokesperson.
At the time this story was published, Botetourt County had not responded.
So what are the issues between the parties over the status of Flock LPR footage and data?
With little legal precedent to follow, two very different opinions of public surveillance footage emerge
“I structured the request so that it mirrored the type of question any citizen might have,” Schwaner said. “With all these police cameras around, how many times have I been photographed while going about my daily business? When and where was I caught on camera?”
The city of Roanoke and Ward made a number of claims in their motion as to why they believe they should not have to release that data.
‘No records’ exist because they didn’t search for one
The city argued that a new record that didn’t previously exist would need to be created to fulfill the request because a search must be keyed into the Flock database. Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act provides that government agencies may not be required to create new records to fulfill a request.
“That doesn’t check out to me,” said Brad Haywood, an attorney and founder of Justice Forward Virginia, a nonpartisan advocacy organization that focuses on criminal justice reform.
“Just having to do a search through a spreadsheet doesn’t mean it’s not a record. It means it’s a record where you might have to look for it a little harder,” he continued. “They have the data, they just have to find it within their gigantic database.”
Section 2.2-3704(g) of the Freedom of Information Act reads: “The excision of exempt fields of information from a database or the conversion of data from one available format to another shall not be deemed the creation, preparation, or compilation of a new public record.”
The Roanoke Police Department’s Flock cameras have captured more than 160,000 vehicles in its database in the last 30 days, according to information on its Flock transparency page on the morning of March 11, 2025.
“That sounds like 160,000 records to me,” Schwaner said.
Are the records ‘investigative’ if they’re not being used in an investigation but a local policy or contract defines them as such?
The motion claims that local policies define the license plate reader data as investigative data and that providing it would be against policy. As of the time of this story’s publication, Schwaner said, he is not under criminal investigation — to his knowledge.
“If it’s just your own car, you haven’t done anything wrong, nobody’s claiming you did anything wrong. I think that’s bogus,” Haywood said of the localities’ argument.
The motion claims that the Flock contract with the two agencies prevents them from making a non-investigative search of the data. Schwaner said that the Flock contractual language defines Permitted Purpose as a “legitimate public safety and/or business purpose.”
“Part of a public safety agency’s business purpose is to respond to FOIA requests,” Schwaner said.
Schwaner points out that Flock contract section 4.1 specifically reserves its own right to use agency data to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests and other court orders. “Seems pretty clear that Flock imagines this data to come under scrutiny in FOIA requests. Why don’t these law enforcement agencies?”
Schwaner said other parts of Flock’s boilerplate language state that while Flock owns the hardware and software, that the Footage or Agency data belongs to the law enforcement agency.
“When police departments get these contracts, they don’t own the cameras — they lease the cameras. Flock owns the cameras,” Haywood said. He added that local police departments don’t have data collected by Flock cameras on their own servers — that information lives on Flock’s web servers.
“Flock is such a black box,” Haywood said.
“As a part of their contract, they may be doing tricky things like saying, ‘This data will not be accessible by you. All you’ll be able to get is the data under these circumstances,’” he continued.
That means government agencies can plausibly claim that the records are not in their possession and the agency cannot obtain the information, pursuant to its contract with Flock, he added.
Is fulfilling a FOIA now a ‘felony’?
The motion also claims that searching the data to fulfill a FOIA request would constitute a felony by violating Virginia Code 18.2-152.5:1 — “using a computer to gather identifying information.”
That statute says that it is unlawful for any person, other than a law enforcement officer acting in their official duties, to use a computer to obtain, access, or record, through the use of material artifice, trickery or deception, any identifying information.
“They also have to comply with FOIA,” Haywood said. “That’s actually kind of ludicrous that they’re saying that, especially if you’re asking for data about yourself.”
He noted that there’s so little legal precedent on these topics that it’s difficult to determine what could run afoul of the law.
“My request actually provides my license plate number. I just want to know where my vehicle was photographed by Flock cameras,” Schwaner said. “Flock cameras don’t capture bank account numbers, credit card numbers, biometric data, fingerprints or passwords or other information like that, according to Flock and police. That’s what the statute is protecting as ‘identifying information.’ Flock LPRs take pictures of cars and can recall those pictures by searching a license plate number.”
Other localities responded to the FOIA request
“It’s always disheartening to hear of a locality that seems to be working overtime to avoid having to release records to citizens and journalists. It’s even more so when they then go to court over it, especially when other localities are more open and accountable with their data,” said Megan Rhyne of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government in an email.
Schwaner said that the data he received from other police agencies are simple photos showing his own vehicle as caught on LPR cameras. “There’s no other identifying information in the photos. It’s the back of my car, over and over again.” When other cars appeared in the photo, the responding agency redacted the license plates of those other vehicles. Requests for data were sent to 13 additional localities in the last week of February. Three responded after conducting searches for Schwaner’s car and license plate, two declined to search, and the rest asked for additional time.
Roanoke police performed 481 searches of Flock data in the past 30 days, according to information on its Flock transparency page on the morning of March 11, 2025.
“How much officer time has been spent on those hundreds of searches Roanoke has done in the last four weeks? I don’t think it takes that much time to do a search,” Schwaner said.
“They work for the people who live here, and the people who live here want to know what their government’s doing and they want to know what technology is being used to surveil them,” Haywood said. “I think it’s really unfortunate that these agencies are erring on the side of opacity rather than transparency.”
