Kings County

Hanford, the county seat, took up licence plate readers four times between September 2022 and August 2023, and the record of those four occasions is unusually complete for a city of 58,000.

It runs in an order worth seeing. The vendor presented to the council first, at a study session, on a proposal that did not exist yet. When the proposal arrived a month later, for twenty-five cameras, the council declined to fund it and put the project into a future capital programme instead. Five months after that a mid-cycle budget appropriated $34,200 for twelve. And in the summer a drink-driving enforcement grant paid for a message board that the department expected would include a camera.

Nobody hid anything. Every one of those was a public meeting. But only the second was an item about cameras, and it was the one that said no.

One page covers Hanford’s system. The most basic question about it has no answer in anything we have read: the Mayor asked about the retention period in October 2022, and the minutes record only that staff addressed the council’s questions.

The county government is missing from this research entirely — its website refused our requests. That matters here more than usual, because the Atlas of Surveillance records the District Attorney’s Office operating plate reader cameras, and a prosecutor’s office running its own cameras would be unusual enough to be worth confirming. We could not, and nothing about it appears above as a finding.