Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department

Incident Summary & Facts

In 2020 the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) launched the Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) program, a six-month pilot run with contractor Persistent Surveillance Systems and paid for by a private philanthropy. Several planes flew at least 40 hours a week. Their cameras captured about 32 square miles per image, once per second, giving roughly twelve daylight hours of coverage of about 90% of the city each day. The resolution was limited to one pixel per person or vehicle, so people appeared as “blurred dots or blobs.” Contract analysts used the imagery to track people and vehicles to and from “Target Crimes” (homicides, shootings, armed robbery, carjacking), including before and after the crime and the people they met. Their reports could be combined with BPD’s ground cameras, license plate readers, and gunshot detectors. Raw data was to be retained for at least 45 days.

Community advocates whose work takes them to violent-crime scenes sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, claiming the program violated the Fourth Amendment, and sought a preliminary injunction against its operation and against BPD accessing its data. The district court denied relief, and a divided panel affirmed. While en banc rehearing was pending, the pilot ended, the City terminated the contract, and all but 14.2% of the imagery was deleted. BPD kept the remainder and about 200 investigation reports tied to roughly 150 open cases, and it moved to dismiss the appeal as moot.

This case did not involve a use-of-force encounter; it concerns warrantless mass aerial surveillance.

Core Legal Issue

Whether the appeal was moot, and whether BPD’s warrantless access to AIR data, a citywide, retrospective record of outdoor movements, is a Fourth Amendment “search” under Carpenter v. United States, entitling plaintiffs to a preliminary injunction.

The Holding

The en banc Fourth Circuit held that the appeal was not moot because BPD still held and could access AIR data and reports. It further held that “because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements… accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment.” The denial of a preliminary injunction was reversed and the case remanded.

The Court’s Analysis:

• Mootness: Plaintiffs sought to bar BPD from “accessing” AIR data. Because BPD retained images and reports tied to open investigations, an injunction could still provide effective relief.
• Carpenter controls: Like CSLI and long-term GPS (Jones), the AIR program created a “detailed, encyclopedic” retrospective record that let police “travel back in time.” Its “retrospective quality” was like “attach[ing] an ankle monitor” to every person in the city, rather than the short-term beeper tracking approved in Knotts.
• Gaps don’t save it: Coverage limited to daylight, low resolution, and tracks that were “often shorter snippets” did not prevent police from identifying people. Habits, context clues, and integrated BPD systems could identify “the people behind the pixels” and pick up tracks again over consecutive days.
• The search is the access: The court rejected the argument that AIR data was just “one more investigative tool.” As in Carpenter, the search occurs when the government accesses the data that makes the deductions possible. Earlier flyover and pole-camera cases involved discrete surveillance of particular targets, not a database of everyone’s movements.
• Remaining injunction factors: A likely constitutional violation satisfied irreparable harm, and the equities and public interest favored relief.
• Dissents (Wilkinson, J., joined in whole or part by six judges; Niemeyer, J.; Diaz, J.): The appeal was moot. The majority improperly displaced the district court’s factual findings and stretched Carpenter to cover short-term tracking of public movements. Aerial-surveillance precedent and programmatic-search cases like Sitz, along with deference to local experiments against violent crime, supported the program.