Colusa Police | License plate readers

Nine officers and a pole

The Colusa Police Department has nine sworn officers. The city has about six thousand people. It is the smallest agency documented anywhere on this site, and in March 2026 the state received a notice that it was installing a licence plate reader.

The notice describes the whole project:

The project consists of the installation of a Flock Safety automated license plate reading (ALPR) camera to be installed on behalf of the Colusa Police Department. The installation consists of a 13’ X SQRD REDITORQUE pole with a camera and solar panel (to power the camera) mounted to the pole with minimal ground disturbance consisting of the 3” by 48” pole anchor.

A pole, a camera, and a solar panel to run it. That is the entire physical footprint, and it is enough to record every vehicle that passes it.

The department publishes its rulebook, properly

Give Colusa this: the department puts its whole policy manual on its website. All 736 pages, no request, no portal, no login. Policy 430 covers plate readers and it is a real policy.

It says the data “is not open to public review”. It sets retention at a minimum of one year. It requires that access run through “a login/password-protected system capable of documenting all access of information by name, date and time”, limits access to legitimate law enforcement purposes, and says audits “should be conducted on a regular basis”. It cites the sections of California’s Civil Code that govern plate readers.

It also says, as most of these policies do, that “Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required before using” the system.

And then there is the section on where the data lives:

The Administration Lieutenant is responsible for ensuring systems and processes are in place for the proper collection and retention of ALPR data. Data will be transferred from vehicles to the designated storage in accordance with department procedures.

Data transferred from vehicles.

The camera in the state’s record is bolted to a pole.

That is not a violation and this page does not call it one. The manual was released in March 2025 and the notice was filed a year later. Policies lag purchases in every agency in the country, and a Lexipol manual gets revised on the vendor’s schedule rather than the department’s. What it means is narrower and still worth knowing: the rulebook a Colusa resident would find, if they went looking for the rules about the camera on their street, describes a different kind of system.

One word

There is a second thing in Policy 430, and it only becomes visible when you have read the same section in another county.

Colusa’s release clause:

The ALPR data may be shared only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes or as otherwise permitted by law, using the following procedures:

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s manual has the same section, in the same family of manual, in the same position, with the same sentence structure. Its version restricts sharing to other California law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies.

One word, and it is the word that matters most in this whole subject. California law prohibits sharing plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies. It is the restriction Ventura’s sheriff relied on, switched a feature off to honour, and then discovered through an audit had failed anyway, after agencies outside the state queried its data hundreds of thousands of times in a month.

Santa Barbara’s manual writes that limit into the sentence. Colusa’s does not.

We are not saying Colusa shares data outside California. We have read a policy, not a log. These manuals are assembled from a vendor’s template with per-agency choices, and this difference might be nothing more than which optional clause somebody kept in 2025. A department of nine officers is not running an interstate data operation.

What is publishable is that the two sentences exist, that they differ by that word, and that the word is not decorative.

What nobody wrote down

The decision. The state has a record of the camera going up, and we could find no record of anyone deciding to put it there: not a cost, not a contract, not a vote, not a minute of public discussion.

That gap is ours rather than the city’s. We did not identify the city council’s agenda system during this sweep, so we never looked in the one place the answer would be. It is first on this county’s retrieval list, and for a city this size it is probably a single agenda item somebody could find in ten minutes.