Richard Siegelman, head of security at Opry Mills in Nashville, Tennessee, told the Metro Transportation Licensing Commission that outside repossession companies can see vehicles entering the mall through its license plate readers. He also said the mall hasn’t had a car stolen on its property in about two years, and that the three or four stolen-car reports it hears each week have turned out to be repossessions.
Siegelman had come to the commission to talk about unlicensed taxis, according to WATE and its sister station WKRN, which reported his remarks on Oct. 24. The stolen-car numbers are his estimate. WKRN asked Metro Nashville Police for auto theft figures for Opry Mills, and the data wasn’t immediately available. He told the commission that a shopper reporting a theft will often turn out, after a conversation, to be behind on car payments.
What the mall has and hasn’t said
Whether Opry Mills chose to share customers’ plate data with repossession companies is something WKRN said it is still trying to determine; its requests to mall representatives were passed along several times. WSMV reported that Siegelman didn’t respond to its interview requests, that the mall is owned by Simon Property Group, and that it asked the company whether the mall sells the data. The station’s story reports no answer. Metro police hadn’t said whether they have access to the mall’s data when WSMV published. None of the reporting says the sharing is illegal.
A repo crew doesn’t need a court order or a warning
The reason a lender’s contractor would want that feed comes down to one line in commercial law. Under the uniform text of Section 9-609 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which Tennessee adopted as Tenn. Code Ann. § 47-9-609, a lender whose borrower has defaulted may take the collateral without judicial process, as long as it proceeds without breach of the peace. There’s no hearing and no knock. The legal limit is how the car is taken, and the law says nothing about how the lender found it.
That is why a stolen-car report and a repossession look the same from the shopper’s side. The lot is full, the space is empty, and the first call goes to mall security or police. If Siegelman’s numbers hold, a call to the lender would have answered most of those complaints faster.
Tennessee’s 90-day plate-data limit stops at government
Tennessee does regulate how long plate-reader data can be kept, but only by the government. Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-10-302 bars a governmental entity from holding captured plate data, defined to include the photo, plate number, GPS coordinates, and date and time, for more than 90 days unless it is part of an ongoing investigation. WSMV reported that the law doesn’t apply to private operators. A mall parking lot, on the reporting available, has no statutory clock on its plate reads.
WSMV also quoted Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell saying plate readers can help safety but are imperfect; he said a private parking operator’s reader had wrongly targeted him and that he reported the case to the state attorney general. Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the station that retention practices vary from days to years. Government readers sometimes get audited, as in the Georgia police Flock audit that ended in a sergeant’s arrest. No reporting describes an audit of who sees the mall’s feed.
Where this leaves drivers in Nashville
Repo fights aren’t new here. The Auto Wire has covered settlements with seven car lenders that included wrongful repossessions. Opry Mills adds a twist: by its own security chief’s account, the “stolen car” calls are repos, and the plate cameras let outside crews see who just parked. I found no commission vote or follow-up. Whether the mall volunteered the feed is still open at WKRN.
You walk out and your space is empty. Who do you call first? And does your answer change if the mall’s cameras may have already told the repo crew?