Background
On May 17, 2022, Michael Faile stole two designer handbags from Belk in Rock Hill and fled in a white Chevrolet pickup truck with a license plate partially obscured by black tape, leaving visible only the first two characters, “VM.” Damien Williams, a research analyst with the Rock Hill Police Department, searched the database of Flock Safety—a private automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) camera company under contract with the city—and located two photographs of Faile’s vehicle. The first, captured by a camera at the southbound I-77 exit approximately one-quarter mile from Belk about thirty minutes before the theft, showed the truck with tape covering all but the first two plate characters. The second, taken the following day in Camden fifty miles away, showed the plate fully visible. By running potential partial plate numbers through the National Crime Information Center and then confirming against the second Flock image, Williams identified the registered owner and provided the information to detectives, who traced the registration to Faile and eventually identified him through a photo lineup and SCDMV records. The Rock Hill Police Department paid for access to the Flock database, which retains images for thirty days.
Faile moved to suppress the Flock photographs before trial, arguing that the Rock Hill Police Department’s warrantless query of the Flock database was an unreasonable search and seizure under both the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 10 of the South Carolina Constitution. The trial court denied the motion, finding Faile had no privacy interest in the exterior of his vehicle or his license plate. The jury convicted Faile of shoplifting, and the court sentenced him to fifty-four months under South Carolina’s enhancement statute for a third-or-subsequent shoplifting offense.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals (Geathers, Hewitt, and Curtis, JJ.) affirmed, holding that the warrantless Flock search violated neither the federal nor the South Carolina Constitution.
On the Fourth Amendment question, the court applied the two-part Katz test and declined to extend Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), to ALPR data. Carpenter held that cell-site location information (CSLI) spanning 127 days creates an all-encompassing record of a person’s movements that implicates a reasonable expectation of privacy. The court distinguished this case sharply: officers found only two photographs of Faile’s vehicle, timestamped one day apart, within the Flock system’s thirty-day retention window. Those two images disclosed nothing about Faile’s daily routine, associations, or private life. The court noted that the exterior of a vehicle “is thrust into the public eye” under New York v. Class, 475 U.S. 106 (1986), that a person traveling on public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements from place to place under United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), and that South Carolina law affirmatively requires license plates to be mounted and visible on the rear of every motor vehicle. Searching Flock for a vehicle matching a partial plate description, the court held, “was comparable to searching South Carolina DMV records”—a routine investigative step that no court has found to implicate Fourth Amendment protection. The court surveyed consistent rulings from federal district courts across the country and aligned with them.
On the South Carolina Constitution question, the court acknowledged that Article I, Section 10’s explicit prohibition on “unreasonable invasions of privacy” provides “greater” protection than the federal floor. But it held that Faile was operating his vehicle in plain view on a public road and that the Flock camera “observed the same information that law enforcement could have obtained from visually noting the license plate number and conducting a routine check of DMV records.” Because the use of Flock was functionally equivalent to a roadside observation by an officer, the court found no unreasonable invasion of privacy under state law. The court declined to assess the hypothetical future misuse potential of ALPR systems, emphasizing that Fourth Amendment cases must be decided on the specific facts before the court.
Key Takeaways
- A law-enforcement officer’s warrantless query of a private ALPR database (Flock Safety) to identify a vehicle seen leaving a crime scene does not constitute an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment when the search yields only a small number of photographs taken on public roads over a short period and does not reveal an intimate pattern of movements—distinguishing the comprehensive 127-day CSLI tracking that animated Carpenter.
- South Carolina’s heightened constitutional privacy protection under Article I, Section 10 does not require a warrant to access an ALPR database when law enforcement seeks only the same information it could lawfully obtain by visual observation of a vehicle on a public road or from DMV records; the first published South Carolina appellate ruling on Flock Safety technology.
- South Carolina’s criminal enhancement statute for third-or-subsequent shoplifting offenses (S.C. Code Ann. § 16-1-57) applies even to property-crimes offenses, and courts should expect Fourth Amendment challenges to ALPR evidence whenever that evidence supplies identifying information in an otherwise thin case.
- Fourth Amendment challenges to new investigative technologies are evaluated case-by-case on the actual scope of the surveillance; systemic, speculative concerns about future police use of a technology are insufficient to sustain a suppression motion.
Why It Matters
Flock Safety cameras are proliferating across South Carolina municipalities, and Faile is the first published South Carolina appellate decision to address the constitutional permissibility of warrantless database queries. The court’s ruling tracks the emerging consensus in federal district courts that ALPR systems do not reach the scale of comprehensive digital surveillance that makes CSLI constitutionally different—as long as searches are limited, targeted, and do not reconstruct a comprehensive profile of a person’s movements.
Practitioners defending cases in which Flock evidence played a role should note two things: first, the court left open what happens if law enforcement uses Flock to conduct continuous, long-term tracking of an individual—the opinion’s reasoning suggests that a different result could follow as the scope of the query approaches GPS-level surveillance. Second, in the companion case decided the same day, State v. Eberhart (No. 2023-000234), a divided panel held that warrantless acquisition of private-bond-company GPS location data did violate the Fourth Amendment (though harmlessly admitted). The two decisions together signal that South Carolina courts are alert to the constitutional implications of digital location technology and that practitioners should continue to challenge novel surveillance tools, document the extent and duration of any data pull, and move to suppress whenever the scope of the query differs from a simple license-plate sighting.