Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Journal
Texas Law Review (forthcoming)
Abstract
What does the Fourth Amendment have to say about video analytics running on citywide camera systems? Video analytics (also known as computer vision) involves hardware and software in cameras that turns video surveillance streams into useful data, identifying, categorizing, matching, and alerting police about objects, people, and incidents. Video analytics can identify objects (e.g., hat, backpack, person, car) and track that person or thing back in time and through the streets using video surveillance footage. For police officers conducting virtual patrols or retrospective investigations, video analytics lets police scan thousands of linked cameras for suspicious behavior or a particular suspect, thus drastically enhancing police surveillance power.
The Fourth Amendment question is whether this form of police investigation is a "search," violating a reasonable expectation of privacy. Traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine has long allowed video cameras in public under the theory that people have negligible expectations of privacy in public areas. The open question is whether a digital video analytics system that allows for city-wide continuous object identification, classification, matching, tracking, sorting, and storing of images changes the constitutional analysis.
This Article argues that video analytics presents a different constitutional problem than traditional video surveillance. Properly understood what is happening behind the scenes with video analytics should alter the reasonable expectation of privacy analysis. This Article builds upon recent Supreme Court cases to develop a theory for when digital surveillance becomes a Fourth Amendment search.
The Article also uses video analytics to explore the limits of Fourth Amendment doctrine. Interestingly, the tension in applying the existing Fourth Amendment framework to the puzzle of video analytics reveals several unstated but important.
Recommended Citation
Andrew G. Ferguson,
Video Analytics and Fourth Amendment Vision,
Texas Law Review (forthcoming)
(2025).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2256