Mendocino County

Two agencies here run licence plate cameras, both publish something about it, and they are not operating under the same written rules.

The Sheriff’s Office got its readers from the federal government. Two applications to a US Department of Justice programme, each for $300,000, went to the Board of Supervisors on the consent calendar in July 2023 and June 2024. The second budgeted six cameras. The grant proposal behind it is the best argued document of its kind on this site: it cites the Department of Justice’s own guidebook, the police chiefs’ association guidance, and an independent multi-site evaluation, and it cites nothing from a vendor.

The policy that programme runs under is the loosest of the five versions of that clause this site has read. It permits sharing “only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies” and says nothing anywhere about out-of-state or federal ones. Retention is a minimum of one year.

The Ukiah Police Department, in the county seat, publishes its policy manual along with seventeen previous versions going back to 2013. No other agency documented here keeps its old ones. That archive makes this the one county on the site where a surveillance rule can be watched changing.

Between 29 October 2025 and 10 March 2026, Ukiah’s retention went from a one-year minimum to 30 days, and its sharing clause was rewritten to define a public agency as California state or local and to exclude out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies by name. Three days after that release date the city published a statement saying the department does not share camera data with federal agencies or agencies outside California.

So a driver crossing Ukiah’s city limits moves between two sets of written rules. Inside the city, a record of their car is kept for thirty days under a policy that names the federal exclusion. Outside it, on a county road, the same record is kept for at least a year under a policy that does not.

That is a comparison of documents, not of conduct. State law applies to both agencies whether or not their manuals repeat it, and neither policy tells us what either office actually does. What it shows is which rules a resident can point at, and how much difference there can be between two agencies whose offices are in the same town.

One last thing on the record is simply a fact about text. The Sheriff’s ALPR page and the city’s statement open with nearly the same sentence, about using the vendor’s technology to capture objective evidence without compromising individual privacy. A section inside the Humboldt County Sheriff’s policy manual, one county north, says it too. Three agencies, two counties, one construction. Where the wording came from is not something the record tells us, and we do not guess.