Del Norte County Sheriff | License plate readers

Item 4

On 27 May 2025 the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors approved this:

Approve and authorize the Chair to sign the Master Service Agreement and Exhibit A for the Flock Group Inc. to assist in license plate reading to help improve outcomes of criminal cases and possibly assist victims as requested by the Sheriff Coroner.

The minutes record what happened next in two words: “Approved. DNCOAGREE #2025-089”.

It was consent item 4. The consent calendar is where routine business is approved in a block, and using it for a contract is ordinary. What the minutes also record is that item 3 was pulled for discussion that morning. Item 3 was a cooperative agreement with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Division of Measurement Standards, for petroleum. That is what the record says about both items, and this page draws no conclusion from the pairing.

The substance was not hidden. It was in the agenda packet, which for that meeting runs 370 pages, and which is published. Someone who opened it would have found the Sheriff’s staff report and the signed order form.

What the packet contained

Six cameras, “not to exceed $18,000 per year for 6 units”, funded from the General Fund, Sheriff’s Budget. The order form lists “Flock Safety LPR, fka Falcon” at quantity 6, a Year 1 subtotal of $18,000, a $3,900 discount and a contract total of $36,000. The agreement renews itself in one-year terms unless someone gives thirty days’ notice.

One sentence in the staff report describes something larger than six cameras:

Various community partners are also in talks to implement the same systems in their locations which the County law enforcement will have access to.

Other parties in the county were preparing to install the same cameras, and county law enforcement would be able to search them. The report does not say who they are, how many cameras that might mean, or what governs access to data collected by somebody else’s equipment. Nothing else in the packet returns to it.

Two documents, two retention periods

The signed order form carries a field that reads, in full:

Retention Period: 0 Days

The Sheriff’s published policy says:

All ALPR data downloaded to the server should be stored for a minimum of one year (Government Code § 34090.6) and in accordance with the established records retention schedule.

Those are different answers to the most consequential question anyone can ask about a plate reader: how long does the record of where your car was stay in the system.

We are not going to tell you which one governs, because we do not know. The order-form field may describe additional retention purchased on top of a platform default rather than the retention actually applied. That would be an ordinary reading and it may well be the right one.

What we can say is narrower and still worth knowing. Both documents were in front of the county on the same day, in the same packet. Nothing in those 370 pages explains the difference. A supervisor reading the packet, or a resident reading it afterwards, had no way to work out which number applied to them. It is first on this county’s records request.

The rulebook is older than the cameras

The policy manual the county publishes carries a Lexipol release line of 1 July 2020. The cameras were bought in May 2025.

Policies lag purchases everywhere, and a Lexipol manual is revised on the vendor’s schedule rather than the department’s, so a five-year-old policy is not by itself a finding about anyone. What it means is specific: the rules a Del Norte resident would find, if they went looking for the rules about the camera at their intersection, describe a different kind of system.

Policy 472.5 says data “will be transferred from vehicles to the designated storage in accordance with department procedures.” That is a patrol car. The cameras this county bought are fixed at intersections.

The gap between those two sentences is not academic. In August 2026, at a county budget workshop, a sitting supervisor said the office’s plate readers were mounted on vehicles, and a staff member corrected him. Reporting records the correction: they are stationary.

On sharing, Policy 472.7 says data may go “only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes or as otherwise permitted by law”. There is no definition of a public agency, and the words out-of-state and federal do not appear anywhere in the policy.

That short form is the common one. Most agencies documented on this site publish exactly this sentence, and only a few have the longer version that defines a public agency as California state or local and names the exclusion of out-of-state and federal agencies. Del Norte’s is the common one.

What the packet does not mention

A provable negative, and a narrow one. We extracted all 370 pages of the 27 May 2025 agenda packet to text and searched it. The string “1798.90” appears zero times. “SB 34” appears zero times. As a check that the search works, “Civil Code” appears ten times.

California’s plate reader statute requires an agency that operates or intends to operate a system to provide an opportunity for public comment at a regularly scheduled meeting before implementing it, and to publish a usage and privacy policy. The packet that approved this system cites neither requirement.

We are not saying the county broke the law, and this page will not say it. The item was on the published agenda of a regularly scheduled public meeting that takes comment from the floor, and whether that satisfies the statute is a legal question we are not qualified to settle and have no business settling here. What we have done is read the document and report what is in it.

A resident made the same point in public a year later. Reporting from a Crescent City Council meeting in early August 2026 describes a speaker citing Civil Code 1798.90.55 and asking for a moratorium until a proper meeting could be held.

The county started asking

Fourteen months after the vote, this became a live question in Del Norte, and the useful thing about that is who asked.

At a county budget workshop in early August 2026, according to Redwood Voice, the vice president of the county employees’ association asked the Sheriff whether federal immigration authorities have access to the cameras, or will. The District 3 supervisor, who had not been at the May 2025 meeting, said of it: “I’m not sure the Board deliberated as much as they should (have) at the time”. He asked the Sheriff to come back with data and statistics on what the cameras have actually done.

All of that is reporting, not our own finding, and we have not read the minutes of either meeting.

We are including it because of what it shows about the mechanism. Six cameras went up under a two-word entry in a set of minutes. The thing that opened the question afterwards was not litigation or a records request. It was a supervisor reading his constituents’ mail, a staff union asking a question at a budget hearing, and two residents at a microphone.