In the age of AI, police departments across the country are using increasingly powerful and complex technology every day. In South Carolina, the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) is using one such tool, automated license plate readers, without legislative permission—and without the limitations placed on them by many states. SCPIF has teamed up with The Policing Project at NYU School of Law to prevent SLED from operating this illegal vehicle surveillance program.
Improper Data Collection
SLED is not only utilizing license plate readers without legislative authority, but they’re also taking full advantage of the lack of oversight. For example, other states have laws limiting how long captured data can be stored or which crimes it can be used to investigate. In New Hampshire, for example, data has to be purged within three minutes unless it is matched to a vehicle of interest to law enforcement. In South Carolina, there are no state laws limiting how long police can retain vehicle surveillance information. Since the lawsuit was filed, SLED appears to have reduced its data retention period from three years to one year — but that remains longer than many other states.
431,000,000
License plates recorded in SC
The Policing Project has discovered that, as of June 2023, SLED’s vehicle surveillance database held more than 431 million data entries pinpointing the precise timestamped location of drivers all across South Carolina. More than 99.8 percent of those location observations had no connection to any vehicle of interest to law enforcement at the time that data was captured.
Who’s affected?
This should be of concern to anyone who drives in South Carolina. It’s a vast amount of data to be stored about the travel habits of law-abiding citizens and that data can be abused. Ben Hoynes, Counsel for The Policing Project, said this type of data has been abused in other states to track people who have been to gun shows, political rallies, gay bars, houses of worship, or other sensitive locations that could reveal private information about the vehicle’s driver. “We’ve also seen reporting recently of vehicle surveillance data being used to search and identify lawn signs and bumper stickers with political speech on them,” Hoynes pointed out, “because the data includes actual images of cars.” Law enforcement officers have even stalked and harassed former romantic partners using license plate data.
There can also be issues when the readers misread a license plate and an innocent person is treated as a violent criminal based on that misinformation. The risk of abuse and mistakes is too great for SLED not to have legislative approval, oversight, and guardrails in place. SCPIF is working with The Policing Project on this important issue and has filed a motion for summary judgment asking a South Carolina state court to declare the program to be unlawful. We are optimistic a judge will rule that SLED cannot operate a vehicle surveillance program without the approval of the state legislature and expect a hearing to be set in the months to come. “We simply want SLED to follow the law and, under existing South Carolina law, they are not authorized to operate a vehicle surveillance program,” Hoynes said. “If the legislature chooses to pass a statute authorizing SLED to do this, they’re certainly able to do that. There should be meaningful guardrails in place to ensure that data is used for limited purposes and consistent with civil rights and protecting the privacy of South Carolinians.”
“We’re not saying how SLED should do policing. We’re saying that South Carolinians should have a say in how their state agency is doing policing”
Joshua manson, the policing project
Executive agencies like SLED only have the authority granted to them by the state legislature and that authority is limited by the statutes that govern them. Even the most generous reading of the statutes that give SLED their authority does not permit this massive surveillance of South
Carolinians.
“We’re not saying how SLED should do policing,” explained Joshua Manson, Director of Communications for The Policing Project, “We’re saying that South Carolinians should have a say in how their state agency is doing policing. The representative of the people of South Carolina is the state legislature, and they haven’t had a chance to weigh in. Give South Carolinians the chance to weigh in, because right now, the agency is bypassing the people of South Carolina.”