Inside the Lawsuit to Shut Down SLED's Unauthorized Surveillance Database

In 2013, a SLED officer logged into South Carolina’s license plate reader database and searched for his own vehicle. He found an image of his plate. Then he altered the record to show someone else’s. His access was revoked. When the Post & Courier later filed a public records request for any recent database misconduct, SLED refused to hand over a single document.

That same database has been used to stalk a domestic partner through a false “missing person” report that triggered license plate alerts on their vehicle, turning a law enforcement tool into a personal tracking system. State Rep. Todd Rutherford documented the case himself.

And then there’s Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright, who oversaw Flock Safety camera deployment across his county before pleading guilty to federal charges: conspiracy to commit theft from federal programs, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and obtaining controlled substances through fraud. He faces up to 30 years.

This database contains 430 million records of where South Carolinians drive. Over 2,000 users currently have credentials to search it. The officer who tampered with records had credentials. The person who stalked their partner had credentials. Chuck Wright had credentials. All with little to no oversight.

What SLED built (and who said they could)

Cameras mounted on poles and road fixtures photograph every license plate that passes. Each image gets tagged with GPS coordinates and a timestamp, then uploaded to a searchable database run by SLED, the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division. Type in a plate number, and you can pull up everywhere that vehicle has been for the past 3 years. (Full breakdown of the technology here.)

SLED admitted the following in court filings:

430 million vehicle location observations stored
99.8% of those records involve vehicles with zero connection to criminal activity
99+ law enforcement agencies can access the database
2,000+ individual users have login credentials
The data is kept for 3 years

South Carolina has about 5.2 million residents. That works out to roughly 83 location records per person in the state.

Court filings document a 35-37% misread rate: transposed characters, misidentified letters, partial plates matched to the wrong vehicle. One in three scans is wrong. In Greenville, a Flock camera misread a rental car’s plate and flagged it as stolen. Two sisters were pulled over at gunpoint, handcuffed, and put in the back of a squad car. The car wasn’t stolen.

The cameras weren’t installed by the book, either. In February 2024, SCDOT Secretary Christy Hall revealed that more than 200 Flock Safety cameras had been installed on state roads without permits. Hall paused all new camera permits and noted that the legislature had never put any public policy in place regarding the technology. Flock’s spokesman said their teams just “move very quickly.”

The lawsuit

In 2023, the South Carolina Public Interest Foundation and a Greenville resident named John Sloan sued SLED in Richland County. Their lawyers, from NYU’s Policing Project, built the case around a pointed question: who gave SLED permission to do this?

Their argument has three layers.

SLED has no statutory authority

SLED's authorizing statutes say "criminal." A database where 99.8% of entries have zero connection to crime doesn't qualify. SLED can't point to a SINGLE statute that authorizes a statewide vehicle surveillance database.

If the statutes authorize this, they're unconstitutional

Read broadly enough to cover mass vehicle tracking, SLED's statutes would hand the agency unlimited surveillance power with no guardrails. Facial recognition? GPS tracking of every resident? There's no limiting principle. That's an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power under SC's own constitution.

SLED broke the rules it set for itself

SLED wrote its own policy (Policy 13.40) governing the database but skipped the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by SC's Administrative Procedures Act. No legislative approval. No public input.

The case deliberately avoids the Fourth Amendment, because federal courts have spent years fighting about whether license plate cameras violate the Constitution and the results are all over the map. The SC plaintiffs sidestepped that mess entirely. They’re arguing on state law, which means federal precedent can’t overrule them.

If the court agrees, SLED’s database goes dark until the legislature writes a new law with actual, real limits.

What happens when there are no limits

In Milwaukee, a police officer used Flock to look up the license plate of someone he was dating. 120 times. He also searched the plate of that person’s ex 55 times. The Milwaukee County DA charged him in February 2026.

That officer had access to a single city’s camera network. SLED’s database spans the entire state, with 156 times the retention window and no audit trail that’s ever been made public.

A Houston HIDTA bulletin, forwarded by the FBI to its intelligence community, instructed Flock users to enter search reasons “as vague as permissible.” The bulletin also told officers to exclude agencies that comply with public records laws from their data-sharing networks and to limit searches to avoid jurisdictions that release audit logs.

“Enter search reasons as vague as permissible.”

FBI intelligence bulletin forwarded to law enforcement nationwide. Reported by 404 Media.

That’s a federal agency coaching officers to evade transparency. SLED’s own policy has no public audit mechanism. If officers in South Carolina are following the same playbook, there’s no way to tell.

The legal ground shifting under SLED

The SC lawsuit isn’t happening in isolation. Two federal cases working through appellate courts right now could reshape the legal ground under SLED’s database.

Schmidt v. City of Norfolk could set the precedent. The Institute for Justice sued Norfolk, Virginia over its 176 Flock cameras. Norfolk’s police chief admitted it would be hard to drive anywhere in the city without passing one. In January 2026, a federal judge sided with Norfolk, ruling the cameras didn’t capture enough data to reconstruct detailed movements. But the judge also warned that the analysis “could conceivably tip the other way” as camera networks grow. IJ won on standing. Ordinary residents can challenge ALPR systems without being individually targeted. Now, IJ is appealing to the Fourth Circuit.

That circuit covers Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and West Virginia. A Fourth Circuit ruling on ALPR surveillance would be binding law in South Carolina.

The Fourth Circuit already has its own precedent pointing toward privacy. In 2021, the full court ruled that Baltimore’s aerial surveillance program (planes continuously photographing the city) was an unconstitutional search. Norfolk’s ground-level camera network captures more detailed data, on more people, with better precision than Baltimore’s planes ever did.

And then there’s the Supreme Court. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court ruled 5-4 that government access to 7 days of cell phone location data is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. SLED keeps 3 years of vehicle location data. That vehicle data is more precise (exact GPS coordinates, not approximate cell tower range), and the retention period is 156 times longer.

Carpenter v. US (2018)

Duration 7 days

Precision Cell tower range

Warrant Yes

Ruling Unconstitutional

SLED Database

Duration 3 years

Precision Exact GPS

Warrant No

Ruling Pending

Four bills, one that actually fixes it

Four bills in the 2025-2026 SC session attempt to regulate license plate cameras. Only one goes for the throat. We wrote a deep dive on H.4675, and here’s the comparison.

H.4675, the Community Data Protection and Responsible Surveillance Act, is sponsored by 4 Freedom Caucus Republicans: Reps. Kilmartin, Chumley, Edgerton, and Magnuson. It would ban third-party cloud storage of camera data (which makes Flock’s entire business model illegal in SC), prohibit AI-based vehicle tracking, set a 21-day retention limit, require warrants for data access, explicitly block immigration enforcement use, and let residents sue for violations. If it passed, every existing Flock contract in the state would be void.

The other three bills (S.447, H.3155, H.4013) set 90-day retention limits and basic access controls but leave the biggest problems untouched. Two of them (S.447 and H.4013) would explicitly authorize SLED’s database, retroactively legalizing the system the lawsuit is trying to shut down.

	H.4675	S.447	H.3155	H.4013
Retention	21 days	90 days	90 days	90 days
Warrant required	Yes	No	No	No
Cloud storage banned	Yes	No	No	No
AI tracking banned	Yes	No	No	No
Federal access blocked	Yes	No	No	No
Residents can sue	Yes	No	No	No
SLED database authorized	No	Yes	No mention	Yes
Sponsors	4R (Freedom Caucus)	Adams (R)	Rutherford (D)	5 GOP

Freedom Caucus Republicans and Democratic Rep. Rutherford both want mass surveillance of South Carolina drivers to stop. Two ALPR regulation bills, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are sitting in the same House Judiciary Committee right now.

S.447 is the furthest along: it passed a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in April 2025, where ACLU-SC advocacy director Josh Malkin testified, but the full committee carried it over without a vote. The other three bills haven’t had a hearing.

The collision course

If the Richland County court rules that SLED lacks statutory authorization, the database goes dark. The legislature would have to pass a new law to bring it back, and privacy advocates would have real leverage over what that law looks like.

But if the legislature passes S.447 or H.4013 before the court rules, it could retroactively give SLED the authorization it never had, without fixing any of the problems: no warrant requirement, no federal access restrictions, no cloud storage ban, no audit trail.

The people who tampered with records, stalked their partners, and pled guilty to federal charges all had access to this system. 2,000 users still do. The legislature can write the rules, or a court will write them first.

Sources

SC Legislature bills

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