In June 2024, a North Charleston police lieutenant named Ryan Terrell used the city’s surveillance camera network to track his wife. He suspected she was having an affair with a fellow sergeant. Over multiple days, he accessed city-owned camera feeds, followed her movements through live video, and eventually confronted her and the other officer in a Target parking lot.
He was demoted to Master Patrol Officer and placed on 6 months’ probation. He wasn’t fired.
That same year, South Carolina’s Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told the Post and Courier something that should’ve gotten more attention: “There has not been public policy put into place by the South Carolina Legislature regarding the use of these devices, (or the) privacy concerns regarding the collection, handling and disposition of the data they collect.”
She was talking about the 200+ Flock Safety cameras her agency had just discovered on state roads. Installed without permits. Nobody at SCDOT knew they were there.
Terrell’s story and Hall’s admission are connected. Both are symptoms of the same problem: South Carolina has no law governing license plate cameras. No statute. No enforceable rules. Nothing. And that vacuum shapes everything that follows.
The database nobody authorized
SLED (the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) operates a centralized ALPR database that’s been collecting plate scans since at least 2019.
The numbers are hard to process. 422 million license plate reads between 2019 and 2022. Over 100 million per year. Retained for 3 years. Accessible to 2,000+ individual user accounts across 99+ agencies. Fort Jackson and Parris Island are listed as contributors.
There’s no statute authorizing this database. SLED’s own guidelines are internal policy. They carry no penalties if violated. They can be changed at any time without public input.
In 2013, a SLED officer logged into the ALPR database to search for a vehicle he personally owned. He found an image of his plate and falsified the record to show someone else’s plate instead. His access was removed. When the Post and Courier later filed a FOIA request asking for more recent misconduct cases, SLED refused to provide any documents, citing ongoing litigation.
That’s the accountability mechanism for a database with 422 million records. One documented case. No way to know what’s happened since. And no law that would make any of it illegal.
Berkeley County: 56 cameras, zero debate
Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office operates 56 Flock Safety cameras as of mid-2025. That’s the highest count for any county sheriff’s office in South Carolina. More than 10 times what Richland County SO runs.
You’d think a surveillance expansion of that scale would generate some public discussion. It hasn’t. There’s been virtually no local news coverage. No council vote on record. No published use policy. No transparency portal. No public audit procedures.
And it’s not just the sheriff’s office. Goose Creek PD, Moncks Corner PD, Hanahan PD, Jamestown PD, and St. Stephen PD all participate in the Flock data-sharing network within Berkeley County. The cameras blanket the county, and the public process that led to their deployment is, as far as anyone can tell, nonexistent.
The county’s state senator, Brian Adams (R), spoke in favor of license plate readers during a state senate debate on ALPR regulation. The senator representing the county with the most sheriff’s office cameras in the state is pushing for fewer restrictions on the technology.
This is what expansion without guardrails looks like. No law requires public notice before cameras go up. No law requires a vote. No law requires a transparency portal or use policy. So none of those things happen, and 56 cameras appear without a single resident being asked.
Florence County: the private property workaround
In February 2024, after SCDOT discovered those 200+ unpermitted cameras on state roads, the agency paused all new permits for ALPR installations on state rights-of-way. It was a reasonable response to an embarrassing revelation. For a brief moment, it looked like someone was pumping the brakes.
Florence County Sheriff T.J. Joye found a workaround. He started installing Flock cameras on private property adjacent to public roads. His framing to reporters: homeowners “wanna help any way they can and contribute to helping us catch criminals and felons.”
Meanwhile, Florence PD’s 30 cameras were funded through a $397,500 state legislative appropriation. Not a local budget line item. State money, allocated by the local delegation, for a surveillance system with no statewide regulatory framework.
The Florence County delegation went further. They introduced H5146, a bill to force SCDOT to cooperate with Florence County in facilitating ALPR installation. The bill passed the House 61-39 with some privacy amendments (90-day data deletion, a commercial use prohibition), but those restrictions were set to expire July 1, 2026. Temporary guardrails with a built-in sunset.
And here’s the detail that captures the whole problem in miniature: Florence County SO retains ALPR data for 1 year. Florence PD retains for 30 days. Two agencies in the same county, operating under no shared standard, because no statewide standard exists.
The transparency test
In December 2025, the Columbia Muckraker sent identical FOIA requests to multiple South Carolina law enforcement agencies. The request was simple: audit logs from Flock’s system. Who searched what, and when.
The responses told you everything you need to know about the current state of ALPR accountability in South Carolina.
Florence PD provided the records for free. Took 1 day.
Bluffton PD mailed a USB drive. Cost: $20. Arrived in days.
Richland County Sheriff’s Department quoted $9,152. The breakdown: $37/hour search fee plus $0.15 per page. Estimated timeline: 6 weeks of full-time work. They wanted 25% upfront before they’d start.
The journalist argued the fee violates SC FOIA law, which explicitly states that copy charges don’t apply to electronic records. Richland County didn’t budge. This wasn’t their first time. In 2020, the department was ordered to pay $6,000 in FOIA penalties for similar stonewalling.
Three agencies, three wildly different responses to the same request. The difference isn’t policy. It’s attitude. And without a law that standardizes transparency requirements for ALPR systems, the Richland County approach is just as legal as the Florence PD approach. There’s nothing on the books that says otherwise.
What “no law” actually means
Every case study in this post traces back to the same root cause. South Carolina has no statute governing automatic license plate reader systems. That’s not an abstract policy gap. It has specific, documented consequences:
No limits on data retention. SLED keeps plate scan data for 3 years. Florence County SO keeps it for 1 year. Florence PD keeps it for 30 days. There’s no statewide standard because there’s no law that sets one.
No access controls. 2,000+ users across 99+ agencies can query SLED’s database. There are no statutory restrictions on who gets access or what they can search for.
No installation authorization required. 200+ cameras were installed on state roads without permits. When the state paused permits, Florence County moved cameras to private property. No law prevented either outcome.
No penalties for misuse. Lt. Terrell used surveillance cameras to stalk his wife and was demoted. The SLED officer who falsified a plate record had his access removed. No criminal charges in either case. No law makes what they did a crime.
No transparency requirements. Richland County can quote $9,152 for electronic records that Florence PD hands over for free. Berkeley County can deploy 56 cameras without a single public meeting. No law requires disclosure, reporting, or public notice.
No democratic oversight. Berkeley County’s cameras went up without a vote. Florence PD’s cameras were funded by state appropriation, not local budget approval. The public has no formal say in whether these systems get deployed in their communities.
None of this is illegal. That’s the problem. Bills exist that would change this. They’re sitting in committee. Meanwhile, the cameras keep scanning and the database keeps growing, governed by nothing but internal policy and good intentions.
If you want to do something about it, the action guide has 5 concrete steps: FOIA requests, council meetings, outreach, and more.
Take Action
Find your city council, county council, and state legislators.
Sources
- Live5News: North Charleston police officer demoted for using cameras to track wife (Jun 2024)
- Post and Courier: A company installed license plate cameras without permission (Mar 2024)
- Post and Courier: SC law enforcement ALPR investigation (Dec 2020)
- WLTX: SC Senate debates license plate reader bill guidelines
- WPDE: Deputies navigate obstacles to install cameras in Florence County
- WMBF: Local agencies find creative ways around issues installing license plate readers (Jul 2024)
- Columbia Muckraker: SC sheriff’s office quoted me $9,000+ for a Flock records request (Dec 2025)
- The Policing Project: SCPIF v. SLED
- SC Legislature: H. 4675
- SC Legislature: H5146
