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Shasta County Sheriff's Office | Security camera registry

SCRAM is a voluntary register of privately owned security cameras. Signing up does not give the Sheriff's Office a view through your camera. It gives the office a map of who owns one, so a deputy can knock and ask you to check your own recording.

At a glance

Program name
Security Camera Registry and Mapping (SCRAM) [1]
Participation
voluntary [1]
Does registering give live access to a camera?
no [1]
What the registration form collects
property address and hours, owner and alternate contact details, camera system brand and model, number of fixed and pan-tilt-zoom cameras, and how many days it stores [2]
Registered cameras
no count is published [1]
Adopting ordinance or board action
we could not find one in the searches we ran [1]
Retention and privacy terms for the register itself
the page states only that information gathered is for official use only [1]

How it happened

  1. Deployment

    The Sheriff's Office opens the register

    The office begins asking residents and businesses with security cameras to register the location and capabilities of their systems. We could not establish a launch date from the public record, and the page carries no adoption reference. [1]

  2. Context

    The published terms are recorded

    The program page states that registration is entirely voluntary and that all personal information gathered is for official use only. It describes the office using the geographic locations of registered cameras to contact citizens in an area where a crime occurred and ask them to check their own system for a specific date and time. We could not find an ordinance, board action, retention schedule or privacy policy for the register. [1] [2]

What it is, precisely

A camera register is easy to describe wrongly in either direction, so here is what the Sheriff’s Office says it does.

Registration is voluntary. The page says so twice.[1]

Registering does not connect your camera to anything. The office records that you have one, where it is, and what it can do. If a crime happens nearby, a deputy may contact you and ask you to check your own recording for a particular date and time. If you find something, you decide whether to hand it over.[1]

That is the least intrusive form this kind of program takes. Registers elsewhere have asked owners to grant direct access. This one, as published, does not.

What you hand over when you sign up

The form asks for the property address and its hours, your name and contact details, an alternate contact and their details, the brand and model of your camera system, the number of fixed cameras, the number of pan-tilt-zoom cameras, how many days the system stores recordings, and the file format.[2]

Read as a list, that is a working map of private surveillance coverage across the county: where the cameras are, how many, which way they can turn, and how far back each one remembers.

The register is not the footage. It is the index to it.

What is not published

No count of registered cameras.

No ordinance, resolution or board action establishing the program. We could not find one in the searches we ran, and the page carries no adoption reference.[1] That is a gap in what we looked at, not a finding that none exists.

No retention schedule for the register itself, and no privacy terms beyond the statement that information gathered is for official use only.

Those are ordinary questions to ask of any list of residents’ names, addresses and equipment held by a law enforcement agency, and the published page does not answer them.

Two programs, not one

Anderson Police runs a separate camera registration of its own, collecting similar details on its own form.[3] A resident of Anderson who wanted to take part in both would fill in two forms for two agencies.

Questions

Can the Sheriff's Office watch my camera if I register it?
No. The published description does not involve any connection to your camera. The office records that you have one and where it is. If a crime happens nearby, a deputy may contact you and ask you to check your own recording for a particular date and time. If you find something, you decide whether to arrange for the office to collect it. [1]
What does the form ask for?
Your property address and hours, your contact details and an alternate contact, the brand and model of your camera system, how many fixed and pan-tilt-zoom cameras you have, how many days it stores recordings, and the file format. [2]
Who approved this program?
We do not know. We could not find an ordinance, resolution or board action establishing it in the searches we ran, and the program page carries no adoption reference. That is a gap in what we have found rather than a finding that no such record exists. [1]
Is this the same as the Anderson program?
No. Anderson Police runs its own separate camera registration, collecting similar details. They are two programs with two forms, run by two agencies. [2] [3]

On the map

The community has mapped 4 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Shasta County.

What we have documented in Shasta County →

Protect yourself

Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.

Surveillance Self-Defense →

Sources

  1. 1.
    Shasta County Sheriff's Office, Security Camera Registry and Mapping (SCRAM) · Primary document · · accessed · archived copy
  2. 2.
    Shasta County Sheriff's Office, SCRAM Registration Form · Primary document · · accessed · archived copy
  3. 3.
    Anderson Police Department, Camera Registration · Primary document · · accessed · archived copy

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