Rolling Thunder records show 102 undocumented searches, plus $15K in cash seized with no charges (2024)

SPARTANBURG — Deputies stopped two Black motorists driving on Interstate 85 in October 2022. The officers found no drugs or contraband during the stop and filed no charges, but confiscated nearly $15,000 in cash.

The episode was detailed in a cache of incident reports from the 2022 Rolling Thunder operation released after Virginia-based legal nonprofit Institute for Justice sued the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office for failing to provide the public records despite three separate requests.

The annual operation by the sheriff’s office involves bringing in law enforcement from around the state to make traffic stops along the interstate with the stated hope of confiscating illegally trafficked drugs.

Police use traffic violations as a reason to stop motorists before trying to establish probable cause for a warrantless search for possible narcotics or contraband.

Occasionally, officers will find money or other items and seize them through a process known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government to confiscate private property if it believes the property was involved in criminal activity.

Law enforcement can take the property without ever filing charges.

A spokesman for the sheriff’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the records.

$15,000 in cash

On the evening of Oct. 5, 2022, two Greenville County deputies noticed a blue Tesla traveling south down I-85 in the left lane without actively passing anyone. For this, deputies pulled them over, according to the incident report.

The pair in the vehicle, Kylee Newton and Kimanii Lightner, told the officers they were moving from Charlotte to Atlanta to start a new business. Deputies reported they smelled marijuana — a method police use to establish probable cause that’s come under fire in recent years, with legislatures and courts in other states barring the practice. Because of that smell, they decided to search the vehicle.

The report noted nothing illegal was found during the search and no charges were filed, but deputies did find a “large amount of United States currency.” The report doesn’t say how much money deputies found, but a federal forfeiture case said it was $14,980.

Still, the deputies called in federal law enforcement to seize the money under federal forfeiture laws and left the pair to go on their way without it.

In court filings, the federal government claimed the money was associated with bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering “or some other form of specified illegal activity.”

Prosecutors posted a notice of the seizure online and mailed a notice to Lightner but not Newton, records show. At the time, Newton had filed an administrative claim with Homeland Security over the seizure.

When neither contested the claim, a judge awarded the pair’s cash to the government by default.

Most warrantless searches were undocumented

While an incident report documents the Tesla stop and cash seizure, most of the 144 vehicle searches from the operation resulted in no written incident report. That’s because, in most cases, officers claimed they established probable cause to search a vehicle and then found nothing.

“One of the things that I think is just completely shocking is the lack of record-keeping for cases where they didn’t find anything,” said Rob Johnson, Institute for Justice senior attorney.

The records show that officers from multiple jurisdictions searched 144 vehicles as part of the interdiction program but only generated 42 reports.

In the 102 cases where officers conducted a warrantless vehicle search and found nothing, they didn’t document it.

“Those are the people whose rights were just obviously trampled on,” Johnson said. “The documentation is as if it never happened. It’s self-serving, and it also covers up the most acute violation of constitutional rights that is happening during this program.”

Policing crime or policing for money?In one case, officers pulled over a white man with Virginia tags for following too closely on northbound I-85.

The man was “visibly shaken,” a deputy wrote in his report. He called in a K-9, which gave a positive reaction.

A search turned up $13,000 and multiple THC vape pens, the report said, although it did not detail how the deputy knew the vapes were the illegal version of THC and not nicotine or another legal substance like Delta 8 or Delta 9 THC.

The man signed a Department of Homeland Security abandonment form for the cash and was released without charges or his money.

Johnson said such stops are problematic because they let police take money from people without doing the work to investigate potential crimes.

In those cases, “the police aren’t investigating. They aren’t doing their job to actually build a criminal case,” Johnson said. “They’re just taking cash and calling it a day, and that’s not the incentive that we want law enforcement to have.”

Racial bias?

Law enforcement seized more than $968,000 in cash, along with loads of drugs — mostly marijuana — during Rolling Thunder in 2022. Most of those cash seizures were associated with some evidence of criminal activity.

Of all the people stopped during the operation, 39 percent were White and 38 percent were Black, meaning Black people were disproportionately overrepresented during stops when compared to their population in the Carolinas and Georgia.

And of those identified in cases where an incident report was generated, which generally means something was seized, 74 percent were Black.

In one case from that year that generated allegations of racism, deputies stopped a bus from Shaw University, a historically Black college based in Raleigh. A K-9 was brought in and alerted to the presence of drugs, but a search revealed nothing.

Spartanburg Sheriff Chuck Wright has defended the program and denied it was racist.

Monier Abusaft, an attorney and the county’s lone Black council member who previously spoke against the operation, told The Post and Courier that he hadn’t examined the records but plans to.

“If we have a vast overrepresentation of people of color being stopped, arrested or suffering a seizure, then that is something we need to address,” Abusaft said.

Those details wouldn’t have been made public without a lawsuit.

The sheriff’s office initially refused to release the incident reports from the 2022 operation, calling a records request “unduly broad,” which led the Institute for Justice to file a lawsuit.

The sheriff’s office did not release the incident reports until after the lawsuit was filed, and it used a phased approach that had the last of the reports released after Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright won his primary election. During the campaign, Wright insisted he was transparent but called the records request “unreasonable.”

Johnson said he wants to identify the drivers whose vehicles were searched without doing anything wrong. Their identities are unknown because the searches weren’t documented.

“Those are the people whose rights were violated here,” Johnson said. “Those are the people who I think have a real claim that this program is unconstitutional, and from these documents, I do not know who those people are.”

Reporter Max White contributed to this report.