ANDERSON, S.C. — Lamont Burks Jr. likely didn’t know that police were tracking his movement through South Carolina earlier this week, but a piece of technology used by law enforcement is what brought him into custody.
Wanted for first-degree murder in Sioux Falls, Burks Jr. was apprehended by the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office in northwestern South Carolina on Tuesday, Nov. 19.
“I can confirm his license plate did pass by a stationary license plate reader in Anderson County,” ACSO Public Information Officer Carrie Miller told Sioux Falls Live. “This notified deputies in the area to look for his car as it was associated with a murder in South Dakota.”
Burks Jr. was wanted in connection to a deadly shooting in Sioux Falls’ Dunham Park in late August. When a fight broke out between a large group of people. The fight led to gunshots from at least two different firearms, killing one person and injuring three more.
After an 11-week investigation, a grand jury in Minnehaha County indicted 32-year-old Walter Stewart and Burks Jr., 28. Stewart was located by police in Sioux Falls and arrested, but Burks Jr.’s whereabouts were unknown.
That was until he passed by an automatic license plate reader in South Carolina, which notified law enforcement there.
According to Flock, a company that manufactures ALPRs, the cameras scan license plates that pass by them, adding them into a database accessible to law enforcement agencies.
South Carolina news outlets report that the cameras in the Palmetto State capture roughly 400 million license plate numbers from more than 4 million vehicles that travel the state each year.
While police spokesman Sam Clemens confirmed that Sioux Falls does not have ALPRs installed in the city, the City of Madison implemented the use of ALPRs in 2022.
According to Flock’s transparency portal, Madison’s 27 ALPRs scanned nearly 45,000 license plates in the past 30 days, registering 478 hits on National Crime Information Center and Amber Alert databases.
The policy with the Madison Police Department, however, requires human verification of any hit from either database before action is taken. The cameras are also not equipped with facial recognition or traffic enforcement tools.
Nine months after they were installed in Madison, Chief of Police Justin Meyer told Keloland News in 2023 that the ALPRs had already helped apprehend suspects in a variety of cases, ranging from local thefts to stolen vehicles.
“They are proven assets at this point in time, and I don’t know that we could go back to running without them,” Meyer said.
In an email to Sioux Falls Live, Flock said it could not provide a list of jurisdictions in South Dakota that have ALPRs installed, saying the company doesn’t have “a reliable list.”
While the concept of ALPRs seems simple, the practice has been widely scrutinized throughout the nation. Various lawsuits challenge the legality and the scope, questioning law enforcement’s probable cause when capturing the data, as well as how much data is being collected.
In South Carolina, where Burks Jr. was apprehended, Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford has worked for years on a bill that would better regulate who can access ALPR data and why, arguing that the lack of regulation allows law enforcement to track citizens who aren’t committing crimes.
“They collect information about your license tag, which seems innocuous until you realize it’s kind of like the data in your cellphone, that you didn’t realize was so important,” Rutherford said in a March hearing of the South Carolina Legislature. “If Princess Kate was living in South Carolina, specifically in Florence, it would not be hard for people to have figured out that she was suffering from a disease because we could track her car to an oncologist using license plate readers.”
Law enforcement agencies across the country, however, say the ALPRs create a more proactive approach to solving crime and have helped put criminals in jail.
Since ALPRs led to the arrest of Burks Jr., he’s been l odged at the Anderson County Jail awaiting extradition to South Dakota. Officials in Anderson County say it’s up to the Sioux Falls Police Department to arrange a time to move Burks Jr., but that it could take longer if Burks Jr. decides to fight the extradition.
Court dates in Minnehaha County have not yet been established for Burks Jr. If convicted of first-degree murder, he faces a minimum sentence of life in prison and a maximum sentence of death.
Stewart, who is also charged with first-degree murder, is expected to appear in court on Nov. 25.
The Trust Project
