Inyo County

Two things happened in this county that are worth reading together.

The Sheriff’s Office publishes the most detailed equipment report this site has found anywhere in California. Four unmanned aircraft, two ground robots, and for the aircraft an itemised account of every deployment in a year: seven for crime scene documentation, six for special enforcement calls, fourteen for patrol calls, two for search and rescue. Twenty-nine flights. Maintenance costs to the dollar. No complaints, no findings of misuse.

Another county published here the same day reported eight drones, twice as many, and described a year of their use in one sentence. Same statute, same duty, two very different documents. Both are complying. The difference is how much someone chose to write down.

And the City of Bishop turned its licence plate cameras off.

In June 2026 the city council voted three to two to terminate a five-year contract with Flock Safety, immediately, after about two hours of public comment and discussion. The county newspaper reported that the council weighed community safety, the risk of vandalism as a park plan is implemented, the need for an AI policy the city did not have, and the privacy and data-sharing concerns residents raised.

Across every county documented on this site, that is the first time a body which already had these cameras installed voted to switch them off. Eureka’s council refused a proposal for twenty-one of them. Humboldt’s supervisors argued through five motions and added oversight. Bishop had a contract running and ended it.

Those are not the same decision. Refusing a purchase is a choice about the future. Ending a contract means overriding a department with a working system, accepting what was already spent, and being the council that switched something off. Three people out of five took that vote.

We have not read the minutes. The city publishes its council record on a host closed to automated readers and the newspaper is paywalled past its opening paragraphs, so what is on this site about Bishop rests on reporting and says so on the page.

One more thing is documented and one is not. The Sheriff’s Office publishes a plate reader policy, released in July 2025, with a one-year retention minimum and no geographic limit on who may receive data. Whether it operates any plate readers is not established anywhere in the record we read. A published policy is not a deployment, and this site does not treat one as the other.