Lawsuit Forces Release of Operation Rolling Thunder Records

ARLINGTON, Va.—A prolonged dispute over police transparency has ended with the release of incident reports from Operation Rolling Thunder, an annual search-and-seizure blitz on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, South Carolina.

The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, initially requested the records on Oct. 11, 2022, less than one week after a five-day law enforcement campaign that produced nearly $1 million in cash seizures.

The Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office denied the request and two follow-up requests, prompting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on Jan. 16, 2024. South Carolina resident and attorney Adrianne Turner filed the special action with outside representation. South Carolina attorney Jake Erwin served as local counsel.

Spartanburg County responded to the lawsuit by releasing 262 pages of records it had previously attempted to withhold. The documents, which include all available incident reports from Oct. 2-6, 2022, show a systemic program of pretextual traffic stops. Since these operations began in 2006, the search-and-seizure machine has ensnared potentially thousands of innocent drivers.

“Operation Rolling Thunder turns traffic enforcement into a ruse,” Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Rob Johnson said. “The primary goal is not road safety, but to pull over and search as many vehicles as possible to find drugs and cash. When law enforcement found cash, they seized it—whether they had evidence of wrongdoing or not.”

The Supreme Court held in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond (2000) that mass enforcement schemes like this are impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. “Although individual pretextual stops are permissible, the Supreme Court has held the opposite when it comes to a systematic program of roadside stops,” Johnson said.

The 2022 records show the following:

• When claiming probable cause for a search, officers frequently guess wrong. More than 70% of vehicle searches produced nothing illegal.
• Officers rely heavily on speculation and innuendo. If people look nervous or avoid eye contact, the police count this as evidence of guilt. One officer faulted a driver for simultaneously talking too much and not enough. “While being vague about his trip, [the driver] would overexplain other things,” the officer wrote.
• Participating agencies thwart transparency laws by not keeping records of every search, making inspection impossible. Officers searched 144 vehicles but generated only 42 incident reports in 2022. Spartanburg County has no documentation for 102 searches that did not result in arrest or seizure, preventing exposure of potentially embarrassing or unconstitutional conduct.
• Officers stopped and searched as many as 45 commercial buses. The precise number is unavailable due to the lack of recordkeeping. Officers found drugs on 11 buses and identified six criminal suspects. Yet the police treated all bus passengers—potentially hundreds—like criminals.
• Drug-sniffing dogs are unreliable. The records show false positives and at least one false negative.
• Carrying any amount of cash is legal, but officers treat currency as contraband. The records describe no case in which officers found cash but did not seize it. All money was presumed guilty.
• Officers pressure property owners to sign roadside abandonment forms, giving up claims to their cash on the spot.
• Black travelers are especially vulnerable. Nearly 74% of suspects identified and 75% of people arrested were Black. Both of these rates are more than quintuple the national Black population of 14% in 2022.
• South Carolina residents mostly get a pass. More than 83% of criminal suspects identified during warrantless searches lived out of state. Nearly half were from Georgia.

“The police treat law enforcement like a competitive sport when they rush to pull over and search as many vehicles as possible within a set timeframe,” Johnson said. “This is not how policing should work.”

The 2022 incident reports are available for download in four batches:

Batch 1: Cash seizures.

Batch 2: Drug seizures not involving cash from Oct. 2-4, 2022.

Batch 3: Drug seizures not involving cash from Oct. 5-6, 2022.

Batch 4: Criminal cases not involving drugs or cash.