SC Has No License Plate Camera Law

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 pulled up 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, but 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 point to the same root problem: South Carolina has no law governing license plate cameras. No statute sets retention limits, controls who gets access, requires public notice before cameras go up, or creates penalties when the system gets abused. Four case studies from across the state show what that looks like in practice.

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.

SLED’s own guidelines are internal policy, not statute, so they carry no penalties if violated and 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, but no charges were filed. 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. The South Carolina Public Interest Foundation has sued to shut the database down.

Berkeley County: 56 cameras, zero debate

Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office operates 56 Flock Safety cameras as of mid-2025, the highest count for any county sheriff’s office in South Carolina. That’s more than 10 TIMES what Richland County (Columbia) 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, and no public audit procedures whatsoever.

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, completely nonexistent. Their state senator, Brian Adams (R), isn’t pushing for oversight. He spoke in favor of license plate readers during a state senate debate on ALPR regulation.

No law requires public notice before cameras go up, no law requires a vote, and 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. For a brief moment, it looked like someone was trying to 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 was that 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 and 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.

The result is two agencies in the same county operating under completely different rules. Florence County SO retains ALPR data for 1 year. Florence PD retains for 30 days. No statewide standard exists to reconcile them.

The transparency test

In December 2025, the Columbia Muckraker sent identical FOIA requests to multiple South Carolina law enforcement agencies asking for audit logs from Flock’s system. They wanted to know who searched what, and when.

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 on the other hand, quoted $9,152. The breakdown: $37/hour search fee plus $0.15 per page, with an estimated timeline of 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 trying this stunt either. 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. 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

South Carolina has no statute governing automatic license plate reader systems. Every case study in this post is a consequence of that fact.

The data has no guardrails. SLED keeps plate scans for 3 years, Florence County SO for 1 year, Florence PD for 30 days. No statewide standard exists because no law sets one. Meanwhile, 2,000+ users across 99+ agencies can query the database with no statutory restrictions on who gets access or what they search for. When the Columbia Muckraker asked Richland County for audit logs, the department quoted $9,152. Florence PD handed theirs over for free. Same records, same law, wildly different responses, and both are legal.

Nobody has to ask permission to deploy them. 200+ cameras were installed on state roads without permits. When the state paused permits, Florence County moved cameras to private property. Berkeley County deployed 56 cameras without a council vote, and Florence PD’s cameras were funded by state appropriation, not local budget approval. The public has no formal say in whether these systems go up in their communities.

And when the system gets abused, nothing happens. 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, because no law makes what they did a crime.

None of this is illegal, and until a law passes, none of it will be.

Bills exist that would change this, but they’re sitting in committee. The action guide has what you need to push back: FOIA templates, council meeting scripts, and outreach materials.

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