Plumas County

The Sheriff’s Office publishes its General Orders, 588 pages dated June 2021, and they can be read. They contain no policy on automated licence plate readers, none on unmanned aerial systems, and none on body-worn cameras.

That is a real negative rather than a failed search, and the difference matters. The canary terms all come back healthy: “Policy” appears 720 times, “Sheriff” 1,253, “Plumas” 846. A search that finds nothing in this document has actually looked.

The only apparent match for “ALPR” in all 588 pages turns out not to be one. It sits inside the word “criminalprosecution”, where the PDF’s text extraction dropped a space and left those four letters adjacent by accident. Reading the sentence is what caught it.

The manual predates AB 481, the state’s military equipment law, which took effect in January 2022. The county publishes a separate military equipment policy alongside it, and that document can also be read. It sets out the statutory scheme, defines the categories including unmanned aircraft, and says the annual report must state “The quantity possessed for each type of military equipment”.

It lists no equipment, because it is the policy rather than the report.

The report is published too, under the heading “Notification to Civilian Governing Body and Local Community”. It is one page, scanned on an office copier, with no text layer at all. Text extraction returns a single character.

So this county publishes its rules in a form anyone can read and search, and publishes the one document that would say what equipment it actually owns in a form that nothing can read. That is not a hidden document and nobody is at fault for it. It is the same pattern this site has now found in four counties: the difference between a document being available and a document being usable.

What sits behind all of it is the board’s own record, where any purchase would appear, and this project could not read that either. The county’s agenda pages build their listings in the browser rather than serving them, so there is nothing on the page for an automated reader to follow. A resident with a browser sees the whole archive.