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…